Deng Zhongxia, a pioneer of the workers' movement

Author: Wang Xiaoman

Born in 1894 in Dengjiawan Village, Yizhang County, Hunan Province, Deng Zhongxia participated in and led the Changxindian Railway Workers Strike, the Kailuan Coal Miners Strike, the Beijing-Hankou Railway Workers Strike, and the Provincial-Hong Kong Strike, and was one of the outstanding leaders of the early workers' movement of the Communist Party of China. In 1933, Deng Zhongxia died at Yuhuatai in Nanjing.

The name was changed in order to integrate into the working masses. In 1917, Deng Zhongxia entered the Department of Chinese Literature of Peking University. In 1920, with the support of Li Dazhao, he participated in the organization of the Changxindian Labor Remedial School in Beijing. On New Year's Day 1921, the school officially opened, and Deng Zhongxia often went to give lectures. He paid special attention to combining the improvement of the workers' cultural level with the dissemination of revolutionary ideas; while teaching the workers to read, he told the workers in plain language Marx's materialist view of history, surplus value and other theories, helped the workers find the causes of their hardships, understood the reasons for who supported whom, and called on the workers to unite. He told the workers that if they wanted to be poor, they had to huddle together. United, five people are united as tigers, ten people are united into a dragon, and a hundred people are united like Taishan, and no one can move. As a highly qualified student in the Department of Chinese Literature of Peking University, Deng Zhongxia has profound literary skills, which makes his Marxist propaganda particularly attractive, vivid and concrete, easy to understand, good at grasping the ideas of workers, and very encouraging and infectious. Deng Zhongxia's name is Deng Longbo, and the character "Zhonglan". He felt that the name was so complicated and difficult to write, how could it be better to integrate into the masses of workers? So he abolished the name and stored the characters, and changed the "Zhonglan" to the harmonic pronunciation "Zhongxia", so that the workers would recognize and remember.

In practice, Deng Zhongxia explored an effective way to integrate Marxism with the workers' movement, that is, to establish workers' schools to enlighten consciousness, to instill revolutionary ideas among the workers, and on this basis to establish trade unions, organize workers, and lead workers in struggle. On May 1, 1921, more than 1,000 workers in Changxindian held a meeting to celebrate May Day International Labor Day and established the Changxindian Railway Workers' Association. The trade unions united a group of workers and successfully waged several small-scale economic struggles, growing in popularity. In order to facilitate the work and reduce friction, in October 1921, the Changxindian Railway Workers' Association was renamed the Relatively Political Changxindian Workers' Club, in the name of the club. In August 1922, Deng Zhongxia organized a strike of more than 3,000 workers in Changxindian, issued a strike declaration, put forward requirements such as increasing wages, 8-hour working hours, and participating in factory management affairs, insisted on winning victory two days later, and promoted the strike climax of northern railway workers. After that, Deng Zhongxia used the experience accumulated in Changxindian to guide and help the organization of railway workers in Tangshan, Kailuan and the northern railways, so that the northern workers' movement could flourish vigorously. Changxindian became an important cradle of the workers' movement in northern China. Mao Zedong commented: "The Chinese workers' movement still began with the Changxindian Railway Factory."

Strongly advocate the organization of industrial trade unions. In May 1922, deng Zhongxia attended the first national labor conference as a representative of the Changxindian Workers' Club and was elected as the director of the secretariat of the Chinese Labor Union. In August, deng Zhongxia took advantage of the opportunity to call on workers across the country to carry out a labor legislation campaign in the name of the Secretariat of the Labor Union, proposing the four principles of legislation to protect workers' political freedom, improve economic life, participate in labor management, and implement labor remedial education for workers, and draw up a 19-point labor legislation outline. Although it was unlikely that this outline would be adopted by Congress, it was enthusiastically supported by workers throughout the country and became a concrete program for guiding the workers' movement.

In 1925, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions was established, and Deng Zhongxia served as secretary general and propaganda minister, staying in Guangzhou to work. After the May Thirtieth Massacre, in order to support the anti-imperialist struggle of the people of Shanghai, Deng Zhongxia participated in organizing and leading the famous provincial and Hong Kong strikes. He served as general adviser to the strike committee and secretary of the caucus, and showed excellent organizational skills. He coordinated all parties to properly solve the problems of food and accommodation for the striking workers. He also formed a workers' picket team with more than 2,000 members and more than 200 guns, personally served as the chief of training, and conducted ideological and political education for the team members. The provincial and Hong Kong strikes lasted for one year and four months, and the number of strikers reached as many as 250,000, which is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese labor movement.

Deng Zhongxia is not only the leader and practical participant of the Chinese workers' movement, but also put forward many unique views on the Chinese workers' movement and made important contributions to the theoretical construction of the Chinese workers' movement. He is good at summing up lessons from practice and has his own views and thoughts on many issues of the Chinese workers' movement. For example, he combined Marxist trade union thinking with China's actual situation to form a trade union theory with Chinese characteristics. In May 1922, he wrote the Resolution on the Organizing Principles of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, stressing that China should try to organize industrial trade unions. He argues that trade unions are organized by workers in one profession and that the strike movement is isolated and prone to failure for workers in every trade. If it is a combination of industries, this problem can be avoided. The union of workers of various occupations in an industry in a trade union is extremely strong in the struggle. Based on this understanding, he proposed that trade union organizations should be based on the principle of industrial mix. If it is true that the industrial combination method cannot be adopted, it may be advisable to use the occupational combination. The Resolution on the Organizing Principles of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions was adopted at the First National Labor Congress and became a guiding document for the organization of trade unions.

A systematic summary of the workers' movement. In 1923, the Beijing-Hankou railway workers' strike was suppressed, and the Chinese workers' movement turned into a low tide. Deng Zhongxia wrote "The Situation of The Workers in China and the Principles of Our Movement", summed up the experience and lessons of the workers' movement since the founding of the Communist Party of China in a timely manner, stressed the need to be optimistic about the workers' movement in China, because the workers have received new education and training in the past two years, their knowledge and skills have increased, and at the same time, he proposed that the next step should be to make more efforts among seafarers, road workers, miners, dock workers, and municipal workers. In 1925, Deng Zhongxia also wrote an article entitled "Several Important Issues in the Revival of the Labor Movement - Before the Second National Labor Congress", emphasizing the establishment of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and proposing that the working class should have local and national combinations. "We must not be united, we must not have a narrow vision, thinking that we will be satisfied only by uniting with the co-workers of a certain industrial organ, but we must also expand it to a local unity, even more to the unity of the whole country, and to the unity of the whole world." He further raised the issue of the combination of workers and peasants, since farmers make up 80 per cent of the country's population and far outnumber other groups.

In 1928, Deng Zhongxia went to Moscow on behalf of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions to attend the Fourth Congress of the Red Workers' International and served as the representative of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions in the Red Workers' International. While in Moscow, Deng Zhongxia wrote articles such as "The Chinese Workers' Movement Under the White Terror" and "The Emerging Yellow Trade Union in Shanghai", which profoundly summarized the Chinese workers' movement. It should be pointed out in particular that Deng Zhongxia's "A Brief History of the Chinese Workers' Movement (1919-1926)", which Deng Zhongxia began to write, systematically summarized the historical development and experience of the Chinese workers' movement and became an important document of the early workers' movement in China. (Wang Xiaoman)

Source: Learning Times