Xinhai Revolution: Seventh, the mass struggle is surging

Although some bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements are frustrated and shaken, the tide of the masses of the people resisting the struggle still pushes forward the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

From its inception, the Chinese working class has stood at the forefront of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle.

The Chinese working class took place in the 1840s. It came not only with the emergence and development of the Chinese national bourgeoisie, but also with the direct operation of enterprises by imperialism in China. Thus, a large part of the Chinese working class is older than the Chinese national bourgeoisie, and its social power and social base are also greater. With the initial development of national capitalism and the increase in foreign factories and mines in China, the ranks of the Chinese working class have gradually grown. Before the Xinhai Revolution, there were about 500,000 to 600,000 industrial workers in the country.

This figure is still small compared to the national population. But the working class, which represents the advanced productive forces, is concentrated in population, and is subject to the triple oppression of imperialism, feudalism and capitalism, is therefore full of revolutionary thoroughness and particularly strong in combat effectiveness.

In 1884, when the revolutionary ideas of Sun Yat-sen, the forerunner of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, were still brewing, the struggle of the Chinese working class against imperialist aggression had already left a deep impression on him. In September of that year, the French warship was wounded in the invasion of Taiwan and Fujian and sailed to Hong Kong for repairs. The Strike of Chinese Shipbuilders in Hong Kong refused. When a French merchant ship arrived in Hong Kong, water barge workers did not unload their cargo for it, and porters also went on strike in response. The British colonial authorities in Hong Kong sent troops to suppress it, arresting thirty strikers and killing one by one of the striking workers. The unarmed masses of workers immediately fought with them, and the British invaders were wounded by more than a dozen people. After the massacre, the Chinese workers in Hong Kong were furious and went on strike one after another, and even the Spring Rice workers took an automatic holiday, and the situation soon expanded to Kowloon, forcing the British invaders to release the captured Chinese workers. The French invaders were even more helpless, and could not even eat in Hong Kong, so they had to sail their boats to Saigon, Vietnam, to procure food. At that time, Sun Yat-sen was studying at Queen's College in Hong Kong, and he was greatly encouraged to see this situation.

With the evolution of history and the intensification of social contradictions in modern China, the spontaneous struggles of the working class have become more frequent. From 1895 to 1913, in Shanghai alone, there were more than ninety strike struggles. In 1897, in the "concession" of Shanghai, there was a strike struggle of 5,000 car workers against donations. At one time, the anti-donation masses formed a riot, using sticks, flat burdens, bricks, tiles, stones as weapons, and fighting with the patrols that suppressed them. Although this uprising was suppressed by British and American imperialist sailors, it showed the will to fight of the first generation of traffic workers in Shanghai. As the workers of Shanghai waged their struggle, another industrial center, Wuhan, also boiled over. In 1905, more than 3,000 copper workers in Hankou went on strike against the capitalists' withholding of wages.

In 1907, the workers of the Hankou Copper Coin Bureau went on strike against the reduction of wage quotas. In 1909, in the brick tea factory run by foreign capitalists in Hankou, the League of Eight or Nine Thousand Workers went on strike against the foreman's stabbing and demanded an increase in wages. The factory refused unreasonably, and the workers "gathered thousands of people" and beat the workers to the headache, almost forming a riot. In January 1911, the Detective of the Hankou Ying "Concession" patrol house unjustifiably kicked Chinese lili car workers to death, causing public outrage. The next day, more than a thousand rickshaw workers gathered in front of the British patrol house to demand that the murderer be punished. The British consul went so far as to order the British to shoot and kill more than a dozen Chinese workers. Zhang Biao, the commander of the Qing army in Hankou and Qi Yaoshan at Jianghaiguan, led 5,000 Qing troops to the scene and ordered the masses to retreat. The angry crowd couldn't bear it anymore and injured Qi Yaoshan's left eye on the spot. Subsequently, tens of thousands of people from all walks of life in Wuhan gathered unanimously to protest the barbaric atrocities of the British invaders and angrily denounced the traitorous crimes of the Qing government. In order to protect the safety of foreign masters, Zhang Biao personally stationed himself in the British "concession" and sent troops to patrol the "concession" every day, and all the "Yangjie" and the churches in the Chinese border sent troops to protect and suppress the trend. The more openly the Rulers of the Qing Dynasty sided with imperialism, the more they cut themselves off from the people. The atmosphere of revolution in the three towns of Wuhan has become even stronger.

Of course, before the Xinhai Revolution, the Chinese working class had not yet entered the political arena as an awakened and independent class force, and the struggle of the working masses was spontaneously dispersed, and they were still participating in the revolution as followers of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The main force in the revolution, which has always struggled hard, is the poor and lower-middle peasants in the countryside. In the late nineteenth century, with the deepening of imperialist aggression, the broad masses of peasants spontaneously raised the banner of the struggle against foreign religions after the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Revolutionary War struck a blow at feudal rule. This struggle later developed into a Boxer Rebellion against the imperialist conspiracy to divide China, forming another revolutionary upsurge in China's modern history with the peasants as the mainstay.

After the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion, the democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie sprang up vigorously, and the anti-foreign struggle was retired to the secondary post, but from 1901 to 1908, the incident of "burning churches and killing priests" continued one after another.

In the spring of 1901, Jing Tingbin, a person directly subordinate to Guangzong, gathered two protests to protest against the foreign clergy's claim for "losses" under the pretext of compensating the church and the clergy. In February 1902, the Qing Dynasty government sent troops to suppress it, Jing Tingbin called himself the "Grand Marshal of the Dragon Regiment", put up the banner of "officials forcing the people to rebel" and "sweeping away the yangs", set off a great uprising of more than 200,000 peasants in the 24 prefectures and counties of the Hebei, Lu, and Yu plains, attacked the imperialist churches, priests, and corrupt officials of the Qing Dynasty government, and once attacked Wei County and Guangzong County, and surrounded Jizhou, Nangong, Zaoqiang, Longping, Ningjin, Baixiang and other counties.

Before and after this, the Sichuan hui party took the banner of "destroying the Qing Dynasty and suppressing the Yangxinghan" as the banner, and was active in the eastern Sichuan area, and He Jinsheng, a native of Shaoyang, Hunan, also organized the "Great Han Annihilation of the Foreign Army" and announced an uprising. Thereafter, between 1904 and 1908, the Oriental magazine alone reported thirty-five similar incidents.

It is worth noting that the anti-foreign religious struggle during this period either openly put forward slogans such as "anti-Qing and exterminate the foreign", or engaged in activities that the Qing government called "hating religious officials". This shows that the broad masses of the people have learned from the failure of the Boxer Rebellion and have spontaneously linked the two major tasks of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism. The peasants' resistance to the feudal rulers was in the form of resistance to donations and taxes. The anti-donation and anti-secret movement, which was originally a traditional form of peasant resistance to oppression, once again showed a climax in the early twentieth century, and riots of the masses in Xiangfu, Henan, Taizhou, Jiangsu, Wuzhou, Guangxi, and Yuncheng, Shandong, all successively caused by the masses to destroy the yamen and tax cards. In 1904, the people of Leping, Jiangxi Province, rebelled against the extraction of "indigo donations", insisted on half a year, once occupied the county seat, seized guns, and exposed the lack of county offices, salt cards, likas, the unified donation bureau, and foreign churches. The rulers of the anti-industrial dynasties also gave the foreign invaders their due punishment.

In 1910, the disturbance movement in Laiyang, Shandong Province, was even larger, and 50,000 to 60,000 rebellious masses, under the leadership of Qu Zhiwen, the leader of the Lianzhuang Association, were arrested and punished by the local tycoons who had always run rampant in the name of the "New Deal". The Inspector of Shandong received the news and mobilized heavy troops to suppress it, killing many of the rebel masses and burning more than a thousand houses. The Qing government's policy of brutal massacres could only provoke greater resistance among the masses of the people and hasten their own demise.

The anger of the people of Laiyang's rebellion soon spread to several nearby counties. At the same time as the struggle against donations and taxes, the rice snatching incident in the Yangtze River City has sprung up again. Between 1907 and 1900, many prefectures and counties in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and other provinces had starvation riots, with a total of more than 90 cases. The biggest impact was the rice grabbing trend in Changsha in 191. In 1909, Hunan suffered floods, grain harvest failures, and more than 100,000 starving people in the province, but officials, wealthy merchants, and foreign foreign companies took the opportunity to hoard and collect high grain prices, and many peasants, handicraft workers, railway workers, and urban residents on the outskirts of the city could not live. In April 1910, a water worker in Changsha City could not buy more than a liter of rice with a day's income, and his family committed suicide by throwing water, arousing the anger of the masses. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets, destroyed the mansions, rice shops, money houses, tax cards, foreign consulates, foreign firms, churches, etc., set fire to the patrol gates, and formed a revolutionary storm that shook the whole country and directly threatened the rule of the Qing government.

Driven by the struggle of the workers and peasants, urban residents and some national capitalists also joined the ranks of the struggle. In 1905, for example, there were more than eighty mass revolts and struggles, and there were more than twenty strikes by citizens and merchants. Among them, the boycott of American goods has formed a patriotic movement on a national scale, which has dealt a powerful blow to US imperialism.

The United States is a late-rising capitalist country. Many mines, railroads, and urban buildings in the western United States were built with the blood and sweat of Chinese workers. When American capitalists needed labor, they did not hesitate to use such despicable means as deception, abduction, and kidnapping to get a large number of Chinese workers to the United States. When the crisis of American capitalism broke out, in order to divert the goal of the struggle of American workers, they viciously publicized that Chinese workers had taken the jobs of American workers, and instigated Chinese exclusion incidents everywhere and created tragic cases. In one mine, the American ruling class slaughtered more than 20,000 Chinese workers who had rebelled in one fell swoop. This atrocious act of the United States Government has aroused great hatred among the Chinese people.

In December 1904, when the U.S. government coerced the Qing dynasty government into signing a treaty of mistreatment of Chinese workers, people and overseas Chinese compatriots throughout China demanded that the treaty be abrogated and revised. The U.S. government ignored it. In May 1905, a part of the national bourgeoisie in Shanghai, which was squeezed out by American goods, took the opportunity to electrify the whole country and call for a boycott of American goods, which was quickly echoed by towns and cities throughout the country and some overseas Chinese business groups, forming an anti-American movement of unprecedented scale in China's modern history. This movement, at the insistence of the masses of workers and peasants, dealt a fairly heavy blow to US imperialism, and from 1905 to 1907 the export of goods from the United States to China decreased significantly.

Stirred by the anti-American patriotic movement, the struggle to reclaim railway and mining rights in various localities has also developed further. For example, the struggle of the people of Shanxi to reclaim the sovereignty of the coal and iron ore occupied by the British merchants began as early as 1898, and after many twists and turns in the middle, they finally drove out the British invaders in 1907 and established the Shanxi Baojin Mining Company to mine on their own. Two years later, the people of Anhui also took back the coal mines in Tongguanshan from the British. The people reclaimed the right of mining and the right of way, but the Qing government continued to sell it, so this struggle must form an integral part of the revolution.