Thread by @Itmechr3

1. Today is the 96th anniversary of maybe the most important single day in the history of the Chinese workers movement: May 30th, 1925. Protests erupted in Shanghai in mid May after a Japanese factory foreman murdered a well known Chinese labor

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

2. organizer during a labor dispute. Several students had been arrested and on May 30th a group of protesters, mostly workers and students, marched on the jail where their comrades were being held and begged the police to arrest them, arguing that

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

3. they'd been unjustly arrested. The British colonial police opened fire into the crowd instead, killing men, women, and children alike. By the end of the massacre 10 protesters were dead in the streets and 50 others had been wounded.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

4. Led by the outraged Chinese working class the entire city of Shanghai immediately went into revolt against the colonial occupiers and the various warlord governments alike. Within days the Communists and Nationalists had organized the General

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

5. Labor Union (the GLU), which put together in Shanghai alone an 100,000 strong general strike backed by everyone from the working class to the Chinese bourgeoisie to Shanghai’s extremely powerful organized crime syndicates. And the movement was

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

6. by no means contained to Shanghai, it spread like wildfire across the entire country, from Beijing and Nanjing in the warlord controlled north to Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the Nationalist controlled south. In every city it touched the May the

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

7. 30th movement put hundreds of thousands into the streets, where they fought British, French, Japanese and warlord troops and police in the streets with little more than rocks, knives, and iron bars. General strikes envelopes the entire nation,

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

8. which for the first time saw its urban working class moving as one united force. The movement changed everything about Chinese society Historians, caught in their inevitable tendency to describe every moment in Chinese history as "The Birth of

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

9. Chinese Nationalism", tend to ascribe the movement to the emergence of nationalist sentiment in the face of some of the most blatant imperialist aggression since the Russo-Japanese War. But they forgot that this was, above all else, a

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

10. movement of the Chinese working class. It was imperialism that had welded it together, the guns of the police and the sight of a dead child in the streets of Shanghai that had turned (or at least began to turn) Shanghai’s incredibly diverse

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

11. immigrant working class into a single, unified class that would fight for itself. May the 30th became a class war as much as an anti-imperialist war and nationalism failed to hold the working class-capitalist-organized crime alliance together

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

12. in their fight against imperialism. The movement would be undone, at least in the short term, by the Chinese bourgeoisie and organized crime flipping sides as the working class continued to gain power. But when, 16 months later, the last

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

13. general strike in Hong Kong ended, the country had already been irreconcilably changed. Shanghai had become the most militant city in the world, with an enormous and radical working class wiling to go into revolt at a moments notice.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

14. The legitimacy of the government in Beijing and whatever legitimacy the various warlords had managed to accumulate vanished in an instant as government, imperialist, and warlord troops alike worked hand in hand to contain the uprising.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

15. The very language ordinary Chinese people used to talk about the warlords changed, the term junfa, a Western loan word previously used only by an obscure sect of Marxist intellectuals, entered the common Chinese vocabulary. People began to

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

16. describe the warlords as militarists (another term borrowed from Marxist academics) and absolutely everyone was talking about the warlords as pawns as the imperialist powers. This was all part of a broader cultural and political shift left

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

17. that would eventually see the warlord system destroyed and the emergence of the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles that would dominate Chinese politics for the rest of the 20th century.

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed