February Seventh Strike (1923)
2·7 대파업 (1923)
The line-wide general strike of the Beijing–Hankou railway workers in February 1923 against the Zhili warlord Wu Peifu’s ban on the founding congress of their general union, and its suppression on 7 February, when troops and police attacked the workers and killed dozens. The last great struggle of the first labour upsurge led by the Communist Party’s Labour Secretariat, it destroyed the party’s labour base in north China and taught that workers alone could not beat the warlords, part of the background to the united front with the Kuomintang.
In depth
Background: among the Beijing–Hankou railway workers, who worked ten to fourteen hours a day for 8 to 12 yuan a month, the Labour Secretariat set up after the party’s founding built organisation through night schools and clubs, with Changxindian, Zhengzhou and Jiang’an in Hankou as centres. After three preparatory meetings from 1922 it was decided to found the general union of the line at Zhengzhou on 1 February 1923.
Strike and suppression: when Wu Peifu, at the railway director’s request, banned the congress and troops and police wrecked the hall, the union moved its headquarters to Jiang’an and from 4 February called a line-wide strike with five demands; more than 20,000 workers downed tools. On 7 February the troops of Wu Peifu, Cao Kun and others attacked the workers at Jiang’an and elsewhere, killing Lin Xiangqian, chairman of the Jiang’an branch, and Shi Yang, the union’s legal adviser. The workers returned on the 9th and the strike ended in defeat.
Victims and meaning: Chinese records count 52 dead (the “fifty-two martyrs”) and English accounts of Wu’s suppression 35, with more than a hundred wounded and thousands dismissed or in flight. It ended the first labour upsurge, in which more than 300,000 people had joined over a hundred strikes in the thirteen months from January 1922. Afterwards Li Dazhao turned to the peasantry, and the party put its weight behind the alliance with the Kuomintang.