May Thirtieth Movement
5·30 운동
The nationwide anti-imperialist movement that began when the Shanghai International Settlement police fired on demonstrators on Nanjing Road on 30 May 1925. It spread to a general strike, shop closures and school strikes in Shanghai and protests in cities across China, and led on to the Canton–Hong Kong strike. The first large struggle in which the Communists led the labour movement under the first united front, it brought a sharp rise in party membership and union organisation.
In depth
Its background lay in Shanghai's Japanese-owned cotton mills. A layoff dispute at the Naigai Wata Kaisha No. 8 Mill in February 1925 gave rise to a cotton workers' union, and on 15 May a Japanese guard shot dead the worker Gu Zhenghong. When students mourning him were arrested in the International Settlement and put on trial on 30 May, thousands of Shanghai University students and workers marched on Nanjing Road. Outside the Louza police station the British inspector Everson ordered his men to fire; at least eleven died on the spot and five more later. Counts that include the repression of later protests vary from 30 to 200 dead.
That night the CCP Central Committee called a general strike, and the Shanghai General Labour Union under Li Lisan led the struggle with student and merchant bodies. By 10 June some 130,000 workers at 107 foreign establishments were on strike, and the Settlement declared martial law and called in foreign marines and warships. An international inquiry found the shooting justified by two votes to one, and the resignation of the police commissioner and of Everson was the only official result. The movement ebbed over the summer, but in July alone seventy new unions joined the Communist-led General Labour Union.
May Thirtieth made anti-imperialism the language of the urban masses. The Shakee massacre of 23 June, when British and French troops fired on a solidarity march in Guangzhou, set off the sixteen-month Canton–Hong Kong strike, and Communist membership grew from 994 in January 1925 to more than 50,000 by spring 1927. The same growth sharpened the alarm of the Kuomintang right and the merchants, adding to the strains on the alliance.