A Road Is Made (Chinese Worlds) by Steve Smith

Author:Steve Smith [Smith, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

The workers’ pickets

Following the failure of the first armed uprising, the CEC got down to making serious military preparations for a new uprising. In December Zhou Enlai came to Shanghai from the Huangpu Military Academy to join the CEC’s military commission, though according to Appen, the Soviet military adviser to the CEC, he and his fellow officers knew little about the city.105 Most of the energy of the commission went into improving the competence of the pickets, whose numbers had now grown to around 2,000, but who still had only 100 weapons at their disposal. On 30 January 1927 the Shanghai regional committee called for a strict separation of function between a new armed militia and the pickets. Condemning the pickets for tending to become a ‘standing armed force’ (Jingchang wuzhuang), it claimed that they had arrogated powers to arrest people, close down workplaces and levy union dues by force.106 It observed that the pickets contained too many unemployed, artisanal and shop workers. It reminded comrades that pickets were supposed to be temporary bodies for the maintenance of order during strikes, and complained that the proliferation of pickets was undermining the efforts to build the labour unions. It concluded that the functions of the pickets should be whittled back, and that a new armed militia should be set up alongside them.107 This should recruit only the most disciplined and politically reliable industrial workers, who were to be given thorough military and ideological training.108 It proved difficult to set up the proposed militia, not least because of lack of weapons. Appen said that the party had no money to buy revolvers, and that its plan to persuade domestic servants to steal weapons from their foreign masters was ludicrous.109 He also criticized the Communists for moving key people out of military work because of shortage of personnel.110 It is also likely that the labour unions resisted the attempt to limit the functions of the pickets under their control. Whatever the reason, a militia was not formed: the second armed uprising, like the first, was carried out by ramshackle pickets accountable to the unions.111

There is relatively little data on the social composition of the pickets. Skilled male workers, such as printers, iron workers, tram workers and railway workers, were relatively more active in forming pickets than cotton and tobacco workers; though because of their preponderance in the workforce, the latter’s pickets outnumbered those of the former. The Commercial Press had the largest and best organized picket in the city. Of seven members of the detachment who lost their lives in the battle for the Commercial Press during the third armed uprising, all were printers, including a 23-year-old woman. Their average age was 21.112 The most striking feature about the pickets, however, was the high proportion of unemployed workers in their ranks, most being militants who had lost their jobs because of activism in the labour movement. They also included many secret-society members. The North China Herald observed that the pickets consisted of ‘unemployed labourers, seamen, discharged workers and loafers [i.

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