Organized Worker Strikes against Chinese Government

 SZECHUAN PROVINCE STRIKES AGAINST CHINESE GOVERNMENT

Led by the anti-foreign-loan organization Tong Chi Huei (Patriot's Society), Chinese citizens living in Chengdu (成都市) walked off of their jobs in protest over the Imperial Government's agreement with foreign nations to build a railroad through the Sichuan (Szechuan) Province, after businesses there had raised $20,000,000 to build it themselves. "Few people in this country realized when the brief telegrams reported the occurrence of a strike," wrote an American author, Andrew Melville Pooley later,"that the beginning of the end of the Manchu Dynasty had arrived."^[1] The Xinhai Revolution would begin six weeks later.

The causes of the strike, was felt to be the result of granting perceived unlimited access to foreign business concerns to Chinese resources, in contradiction to a plan to return Chinese resources back to the Chinese

Chinese Cartoon

people (rights recovery movement), as well as an increased centralization of power and revenue in Peking, at the expense of the provinces. The Szechuan province was especially effected, because the people had organized to build their own railway, and had raised their own capital at the expense of great hardship, which ultimately resulted in embezzlement ^[2]of the raised funds. With neither the money raised, nor a railway, the exasperated citizens of the Province preceded to fight back, at first, with passive resistance in the form of a general strike.






1. A. M. Pooley, Japan's Foreign Policies (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920) p60
2. Frederick McCormick, The Flowery Republic (D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1913)