A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (61 page)

Yet the very militancy of the protests worried the leaders of the nationalist movement, of whom the most influential figure was Mahatma Gandhi. He was the son of a government minister in a small princely state, who had studied to be a barrister in London. But he found that dressing in peasant clothes and stressing Hindu religious themes enabled him to bridge the linguistic and cultural gap between the English speaking professional classes and the great mass of Indians in the villages—in a way that the young Jawaharlal Nehru, Harrow-educated and with a poor grasp of Hindi, could not. At the same time Gandhi was close to a group of Indian capitalists who looked to the Indian Congress to push their case for protected markets.

Holding together such a coalition of different interests meant discouraging agitation which might spill over from conflict with British capitalists to conflict with Indian capitalists. Gandhi’s answer was to stress peaceful, disciplined, non-cooperation with the authorities. The man who had urged support for British imperialism in its war with Germany only four years earlier now made non-violence (
ahimsa
) a matter of principle. And there were tight limits even to this peaceful non-cooperation, in case it turned into class struggle. Gandhi refused to call for non-payment of general taxes, because it could lead to peasants not paying rent to
zamindars
.

But a movement like that which swept India in 1918-21 could not be disciplined in the way Gandhi wanted. The level of repression meted out by the British police and military on the one hand, and the level of bitterness among the mass of peasants, workers and the urban poor on the other, ensured that peaceful protest would repeatedly escalate into violent confrontation—as it did in Ahmedabad, Viramgam, Kheda, Amritsar and Bombay. In February 1922 it was the turn of Chauri Chaura, a village in Bihar. Police opened fire after scuffles with a demonstration, people responded by burning down the police station, killing 22 constables, and 172 peasants were killed in retaliation.
¹³³
Without consultation with anyone else in the Congress leadership, Gandhi immediately called off the whole protest movement and gave the British authorities the breathing space they desperately needed. The governor of Bombay, Lord Lloyd, later admitted that the campaign ‘gave us a scare’ and ‘came within an inch of succeeding’.
¹³⁴
Now they had a free hand to clamp down on the movement and arrest Gandhi. The movement was set back ten years. Worse, religious divisions came to the fore now each group was left to look after itself in the face of British power. There were bitter clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups across the subcontinent in the mid-and late 1920s.

The first Chinese revolution

The upsurge in the national movement was even greater in China than in India, with the newly formed industrial working class playing a greater role—and suffering, in the end, a greater defeat.

On 4 May 1919 news reached China that the victorious powers meeting at Versailles had granted the former German concessions in the country to Japan, despite US president Woodrow Wilson’s promise of ‘the right of nations to self determination’. Japanese, British and French interests already controlled the railways, ports, rivers and waterways, and took a first share of taxes and customs revenues, while police and soldiers of the foreign powers maintained ‘order’ in the key ‘concession’ areas of the major cities. Notoriously signs in a Shanghai park proclaimed, ‘No dogs or Chinese allowed.’ Meanwhile, backed by the different powers, rival Chinese generals, acting as warlords, divided up the rest of the country. Many of the intelligentsia had put their faith in US liberalism to end this state of affairs. Now they felt abandoned.

Student demonstrations became the catalyst for unleashing the feelings of millions of people. They passed resolutions, flocked to meetings and demonstrations, boycotted Japanese goods and backed a student-led general strike in Shanghai. Students, the professional middle classes and growing numbers of industrial workers were convinced that something had to be done to end the carve-up of the country between the imperialist powers and the economic decay of the countryside.

There was already a ‘renaissance movement’ among groups of students and intellectuals. It believed there had been moments in China’s past when ideas comparable to those of the Western Enlightenment had begun to emerge, only to be strangled by the forces of Confucian orthodoxy. It set out to build on these alternative traditions, in the words of one of its leading figures Hu Shih, to ‘instil into the people a new outlook on life which shall free them from the shackles of tradition and make them feel at home in the new world and its new civilisation’.
¹³⁵
This mood swept through the hundreds of thousands of students and teachers in China’s ‘new style’ educational establishments.
¹³⁶
They received some encouragement from Chinese capitalists and often identified with Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang. But at the same time, the Russian Revolution was having a major impact on some intellectuals and students, who began to ask whether Marxism could make sense of what was happening in their country. The interest in Marxism grew as China’s nascent working class was increasingly involved in strikes and boycotts which grew in intensity, ‘affecting all regions and all branches of industry’.
¹³⁷

A series of strikes in 1922 showed the potential of the new movement. A strike by 2,000 seamen in Hong Kong spread, despite a proclamation of martial law, until a general strike by 120,000 forced the employers to capitulate. A strike by 50,000 miners in the British owned KMAS in northern China was not as successful. The mine’s private police, British marines and warlord armies attacked the miners and arrested their union leaders. Nevertheless, support for the strike from workers, intellectuals and even some bourgeois groups enabled the strikers to hold out long enough to win a wage rise. Chinese police broke up the first big strike by women workers—20,000 employees in silk-reeling factories—and brought the leaders before a military tribunal. Clashes between British police and workers in British-owned factories in Hankou culminated in a warlord shooting down 35 striking rail workers and executing a union branch secretary who refused to call for a return to work. Such defeats halted the advance of the workers’ movement, but did not destroy the spirit of resistance. Rather they led to a hardening of class consciousness and an increased determination to take up the struggle when the opportunity arose.

This happened in the years 1924-27. Canton in the south had become the focus of the nationalist intellectuals. Sun Yat-sen had established a constitutional government there, but its hold on power was precarious, and he was looking for wider support. He asked Soviet Russia to help reorganise his Kuomintang and invited members of China’s recently formed Communist Party to join. The value of this support showed when ‘comprador’ capitalists connected with British interests tried to use their own armed force, the 100,000 strong Merchant Volunteers, against him. The Communist-led Workers’ Delegate Conference came to his rescue. Its Labour Organisations Army helped break the power of the Merchant Volunteers, while print workers prevented newspapers supporting them.

The power of combining workers’ protests and national demands was shown again later in 1925 outside Canton. A general strike shut down Shanghai after police fired on a demonstration in support of a strike in Japanese-owned cotton mills. For a month union pickets armed with clubs controlled the movement of goods and held strikebreakers as prisoners, while there were solidarity strikes and demonstrations in more than a dozen other cities. Another great strike paralysed Hong Kong for 13 months, raising nationalist demands (such as equal treatment for Chinese people and Europeans) as well as economic demands. Tens of thousands of Hong Kong strikers were given food and accommodation in Canton, where:

The strike helped to create an atmosphere in which the nationalist forces in Canton began to feel they were powerful enough to march northwards against the warlords who controlled the rest of the country. The march, known as ‘the Northern Expedition’, began in the early summer of 1926. Commanded by General Chiang Kai Shek, its organising core was a group of army officers straight out of the Russian-run Whampoa training academy. Members of the workers’ army created around the Hong Kong strike rushed to volunteer for it.

The march north was a triumph in military terms. The warlord armies, held together only by short term mercenary gain, could not stand against its revolutionary enthusiasm. Workers in the cities controlled by the warlords went on strike as the Northern Expedition approached. In Hubei and Hunan the unions armed themselves and became ‘workers’ governments’ to an even greater extent than those in Canton during the Hong Kong strike.
¹³⁹
By March 1927 the expedition was approaching Shanghai. A general strike erupted involving 600,000 workers, and an uprising by union militias took control of the city before Chiang Kai Shek arrived.
¹⁴⁰
Power in the city passed into the hands of a government controlled by the workers’ leaders, although it included nationalist members of the big bourgeoisie. For a few days it seemed as if nothing could stop the advance of revolutionary nationalism to destroy the power of the warlords, break the hold of the foreign powers and end the fragmentation, corruption and impoverishment of the country.

But these hopes were to be dashed, just as the similar hopes in Ireland and India, and for similar reasons. The victories of the Northern Expedition depended on the revolutionary mood encouraged by its advance. But the officers of the army were drawn from a social layer which was terrified by that mood. They came from merchant and landowning families who profited from the exploitation of workers and, even more, from the miserable conditions of the peasants. They had been prepared to use the workers’ movement as a pawn in their manoeuvres for power—and, like a chess piece, they were prepared to sacrifice it. Chiang Kai Shek had already cracked down on the workers’ movement in Canton by arresting a number of Communist militants and harassing the unions.
¹⁴¹
Now he prepared for much more drastic measures in Shanghai. He allowed the victorious insurrectionary forces to hand him the city and then met with wealthy Chinese merchants and bankers, the representatives of the foreign powers and the city’s criminal gangs. He arranged for the gangs to stage a predawn attack on the offices of the main left wing unions. The workers’ pickets were disarmed and their leaders arrested. Demonstrations were fired on with machine-guns, and thousands of activists died in a reign of terror. The working class organisations which had controlled the city only days earlier were destroyed.
¹⁴²

Chiang Kai Shek was victorious over the left, but only at the price of abandoning any possibility of eliminating foreign domination or warlord control. Without the revolutionary élan which characterised the march from Canton to Shanghai the only way he could establish himself as nominal ruler of the whole country was by making concessions to those who opposed Chinese national aspirations. Over the next 18 years his government became infamous for its corruption, gangsterism and inability to stand up to foreign invaders.

The episode was tragic proof that middle class nationalist leaders would betray their own movement if that was the price of keeping workers and peasants in their place. It was also a sign of something else—an abandonment of revolutionary principles by those who now ran Russia, for they had advised Chinese workers to trust Chiang even after his actions against them in Canton.

The experience of the nationalist revolution in Egypt was, in its essentials, the same as that in China, India and Ireland. There was the same massive ferment in the aftermath of the war, and a
de facto
alliance in 1919 between the nationalist middle class and groups of strikers in industries such as the tramways and railways. Repeated upsurges in struggle forced a limited concession from Britain—a monarchic government which left key decisions in British hands. Yet the main nationalist Wafd party turned its back on workers’ struggles and formed a government within the terms of this compromise, only to be driven from office by British collaborators because it did not have sufficient forces to defend itself.

Mexico’s revolution

Across the Atlantic, Mexico had experienced a similar upheaval as the world war erupted in Europe. It had enjoyed nominal independence since the end of Spanish rule in 1820. But a narrow elite of
criollos,
settler families, continued to dominate the great mass of Indians and mixed-race
mestizos
, and the 33 year, increasingly dictatorial presidency of Porfirio Diaz saw growing domination of the economy by foreign capital, mostly from the US. The rate of economic growth was high enough by the first years of the 20th century to make some people talk of a Mexican ‘miracle’,
¹⁴³
even though great numbers of Indians were driven off their traditional communal lands and workers (who numbered 800,000 in 1910, out of a total workforce of 5.2 million
¹⁴⁴
) suffered a deterioration in living standards.
¹⁴⁵
Mexican capitalists prospered in these years as junior, and sometimes resentful, partners of the foreigners. But then world financial crisis hit Mexico in 1907 and devastated its dreams of joining the club of advanced countries.

Francisco Madero, the son of a wealthy family of plantation, textile mill and mine owners, was able to gather middle class support for a campaign to oust the dictator and provide a focus for mass discontent. Armed revolts broke out, led in the north of the country by former cattle-rustler Francisco Villa, and in the south by a small farmer, Emiliano Zapata. The dictator went into exile and Madero was elected president.