Abstract EN:

Whereas between the 1925 may 30 movement and the 1927 April 12 coup Shanghai workers had been leading actors of the Chinese civil war, they kept in the background during the two following decades. The communist takeover of 1949 happened without their direct participation. The PCC spoke and acted for and on the behalf of the real working class. My plan has been, on the contrary, to hand over to shanghai workers their right to speak. I did it from a precise research on strikes and labour conflicts which take the place of the speech they seldom deliver. Thus I located labourers in their workshops, factories, lanes and popular neighborhoods. At the end of that long survey, it seemed to me that the Shanghai working class did not actually existed in the 30s. It was rather a medley made of men, women and children engaged by labour bosses and foremen on regional basis. Sects, secret societies, local associations and land brotherhoods divided that sociological set in numerous and often conflicting subsets. Meanwhile, a slow and decisive mutation was operating in factories, workplaces and popular neighbourhoods, partly under the effect of a modern strategy of strikes initiated by early communist, then used skilfully by GMDconnected shop-stewards and labour bosses. That mutation was accelerated during the Sino-Japanese war when the labour control by GMD and secret societies was destroyed.