LaborFest

6 days ago

Review: WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime Troupe
www.broadwayworld.com/san-francisco/article/Review-WRECKAGE-A-MUSICAL-TRAGICOMEDY-at-San-Francisc…
Review: WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime TroupeWhat did our critic think of WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime Troupe?
By: Steve Murray
Jul. 16 2026M
Could it possibly be that events have finally confirmed just what the San Francisco Mime Troupe has been howling at the wind for 67 years! The troupe whose shows have been called whacko conspiratorial commie and alarmist now find themselves leading the pack when it comes to shining a bright light on social injustice. Wreckage is a tongue-in-cheek satire that hits a bullseye on pray for pay evangelism the dangers of AI in the wrong hands and the disillusionment of a patriotic immigrant when he realizes he’s being used to destroy the liberty he came here for. Mime Troupe Image(L – R) 5. Keiko Shimosato Carreiro Chloris Li Michael Gene Sullivan Jed Parsario.With musical direction by Daniel Savio and Will Durkee four actors (veteran SF Mime Troupe collective members: Michael Gene Sullivan (Security, Nestor, Bobby, Paul); Jed Parsario (Gideon, Businessman, Bertrand, Karl, Lance); Keiko Shimosato Carreiro (Stage Manager, Mari, Jeribeth); Chloris Li (Felicity, Businesswoman, Fredericka, Claudine, Sergeant Nicola, Mari’s Mother) present the good and the very bad with little nuance or subtlety. The divisions couldn’t be more stark- and the alarm presented here is now ominously palpable, and very real.
This new show premieres amongst the backdrop of new ICE murders, a nebulous Iran war, the savaging of voting rights and a bold kleptocracy that had no limits is preaching to a growing audience that is not just a usual choir. The Tony-Award winning SFMT recently received The Prize of Hope 2026 from Åsen Theatre in Denmark for a body of theatrical work created over years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Michael Gene Sullivan received the Charles Dean Award for Outstanding achievement in acting and dedication to Bay Area Theatre – deserved recognition for their bold and critical role as harbingers of the truth.
Review: WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime Troupe Image
Jed Parsario.
Wreckage runs July 3 – Sept. 7, 2026.
All shows are FREE and open to the public unless otherwise listed. Paid Ticketed performance: Z Space’s Steindler Stage: Wed., Aug. 19, 2026 – 7:00 pm (Indoors).
Three (3) shows will require RSVPs:
For a complete schedule and more information, visit sfmt.org or call 415-285-1717. … See MoreSee Less

Review: WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime Troupe

www.broadwayworld.com

Could it possibly be that events have finally confirmed just what the San Francisco Mime Troupe has been howling at the wind for 67 years! The troupe whose shows have been called whacko, conspiratoria…

LaborFest

1 week ago

Data center co. wants 100-year lease on WWII internment site. Tulare residents say no
www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article316646530.html#storylink=cpy
By Leqi Zhong Updated July 24, 2026 1:36 PM Gift Article Fairgoers crowd the midway at the opening of the Tulare County Fair. MARK CROSSE/THE FRESNO FILE PHOTO MARK CROSSE/THE FRESNO BEE Fresno Bee Staff Photo

A proposal to build a data center on the site where over 5,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II sparked public outrage in the San Joaquin Valley. Hundreds of Tulare County residents flooded a board meeting at the county fairgrounds this week, urging the board to reject a company’s proposal for a 100-year lease of the site to build a data center, citing harm to the environment, public health, and historical value of the fairgrounds. TOP VIDEOS “This would not only be deeply disrespectful, but also blatantly erase the history of concentration camps in California only a century ago,” said Nashili Morales, a 17-year-old high school student. “This would be an erasure of the unjust treatment of Japanese people. A data center would be built for better technology or advancement, but at all these costs.” Said Mikayla Ortiz, born and raised in Tulare: “No, it’s not going to be built here. This is detrimental to the historic land where a Japanese incarceration camp was held, and we don’t even have a monument to address that historic base.” Opened on April 20, 1942, the Tulare Temporary Detention Facility operated for four and a half months and held more than 5,000 Japanese Americans. Of the 15 WWII detention centers in California, Tulare was the only one with no plaque, marker, or memorial of any kind, according to archaeologist Koji Lau-Ozawa, whose grandparents and great-grandparents were detained at the Tulare concentration camp. For decades, the traces of history were lost as it turned into fairgrounds. Since 2016, some local alumni and students from Mission Oak High School have been raising awareness in the community and working to establish a memorial at the site. On Tuesday evening, temperatures in Tulare exceeded 102 degrees and the air conditioning at the fairgrounds was out of service. The meeting attendees who packed the room had to stand or sit on the floor and use paper to fan themselves, but many stayed till the end of the four-hour-long public comment session. Residents said inviting data centers into the community would exacerbate the water shortages, air pollution, and severe heat conditions in the valley, putting impoverished families and the agricultural industry at risk. “Whenever I leave the valley, I’m astounded by how much better the air is,” said Ethan Magill. “We are at such a disadvantage just because of where we are born. As a teacher, I had days where my students couldn’t play outside because of the bad air quality, an externality that affects everyone who lives here.” Deseree Arroyo, whose grandfather worked in agriculture since the 1960s and migrated the family to Tulare, said she and her children grew up near the fairgrounds. She said it’s disappointing to see her grandparents’ home possibly disrupted by the data center. “Our food feeds the people across the nation,” Arroyo said. “Money is buying communities, destroying communities. You’re destroying the community. You’re destroying the nation.” Data center on fairgrounds statewide The proposal presented to the Tulare County Fairgrounds Board was put forward by Global Stack USA, a company founded in March with an ambitious plan to establish data centers on 70 fairgrounds across California by 2030. It’s aiming to help fairgrounds that are struggling with seasonal income and aging infrastructure, according to the company’s website. In the proposal, the company said that the edge computing infrastructure it’s looking to build is different from a massive data center. Approximately the size of a standard shipping container, the facility can process critical information locally, providing computing capabilities to the community during emergency operations such as wildfires, earthquakes, and other disasters when traditional infrastructure may be compromised. Global Stack USA did not respond to The Fresno Bee’s request asking how many proposals they have sent out and how many fairgrounds have agreed on the partnership. The company has reached out to eight fairgrounds in the Bay Area, including a proposal that features a data center, a massive parking garage, and a helicopter landing pad at Cow Palace in Daly City, which was originally the California State Livestock Pavilion since 1941 and is known for hosting rodeo and livestock shows, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Two sites in the San Joaquin Valley, Tulare and Kings counties’ Fairgrounds from the California District Agricultural Associations, have received the proposal, according to a press release from Dena Rizzardo, the district’s CEO. Both fairgrounds are considering the partnership but have not made a final decision, Rizzardo said. … See MoreSee Less

Data center co. wants 100-year lease on WWII internment site. Tulare residents say no

www.fresnobee.com

The company proposes a 100-year lease and is aiming to build data centers on 70 fairgrounds across the state.

LaborFest

1 week ago

Luis Valdez speaks out after César Chavez allegations forced changes to Sundance-winning documentary
www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/movies-tv/article/luis-valdez-american-pachuco-documentary-2233…

By G. Allen Johnson,
Staff Writer
July 24, 2026

Filmmaker Luis Valdez at the San Rafael Film Center in San Rafael on May 1. Valdez is the subject of “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.”
Filmmaker Luis Valdez at the San Rafael Film Center in San Rafael on May 1. Valdez is the subject of “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.”
Yalonda M. James/S.F. Chronicle

Luis Valdez remembers the day in San Francisco when he first got paid for being creative.
It was the early 1960s, and the young man who had worked in the fields picking crops since age 6 had just graduated from San Jose State University and was finding his calling with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
More Information
“American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” (not rated) opens Friday, July 31, at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., S.F. www.roxie.com; Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. www.cafilm.org; Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College Ave., Berkeley. www.rialtocinemas.com/elmwood; Alamo Drafthouse Mountain View, 2575 California St. Suite 99, Mountain View. www.drafthouse.com/sf

Special screenings: 2 p.m. Sunday, July 26 and Aug. 2, 9; 7 p.m. Aug. 8. $24-$44. San Jose Stage Company, 490 South First St., San Jose. www.thestage.org

Special Q&A screenings: Luis Valdez and filmmaker David Alvarado in conversation. 6:10 p.m. Friday, July 31, Roxie; filmmakers only at 4 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, at Rialto Cinemas Elmwood; 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1 at Smith Rafael Film Center; 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 2, Rialto Cinemas Elmwood.

“The money was almost a joke,” Valdez recalled in a recent interview with the Chronicle. “We got paid $5 per performance, which was not enough to live on, but it was a gesture. To get five bucks to perform seemed to me, ‘Well, that’s amazing!’ I used to make five bucks picking tomatoes, you know? It was a very different kind of five bucks.”

Now Valdez is being immortalized as the long-overdue subject of a documentary, “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.” The film, directed by Stanford University alum David Alvarado, won the Audience Award for U.S. documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in January and opens in select theaters on Friday, July 31.
It’s a fitting tribute to an artist often called the father of modern Chicano theater and film.
Director David Alvarado’s documentary “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” profiles the Bay Area-raised director of “La Bamba” (1987) and founder of El Teatro Campesino, a theatrical troupe made up of farmworkers.
Director David Alvarado’s documentary “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” profiles the Bay Area-raised director of “La Bamba” (1987) and founder of El Teatro Campesino, a theatrical troupe made up of farmworkers.
Elizabeth Sunflower/Retro Photo Archive/Insignia Films
Valdez would go on to have one of the most influential artistic careers in American theater and film, helping transform the way Latino culture was perceived in American society. As the creator of the groundbreaking theatrical troupe El Teatro Campesino, he was part of the United Farm Workers quest for fair labor laws alongside César Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

He later became the first Chicano director to have a play on Broadway with the 1979 production of “Zoot Suit,” and directed the mainstream box-office hit “La Bamba” (1987), starring a young Lou Diamond Phillips in his breakthrough role. The film, a biopic of Chicano rocker Ritchie Valens, who died tragically alongside Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper in the 1959 plane crash that became known as the Day the Music Died, was added to the U.S. National Film Registry in 2017.

The “American Pachuco” documentary includes interviews with Huerta, Edward James Olmos, Cheech Marin, Phillips, Linda Ronstadt and Valdez’s wife of 56 years, Lupe Trujillo-Valdez.
“‘La Bamba’ made a huge impression on me,” Alvarado told the Chronicle. “My dad comes from Mexico. He came to this country when he was 21 years old (and) didn’t speak any English. My mom, she’s Caucasian, and they started a family. So my sister and I grew up in this world where we were part Mexican, part American. It was hard to find other examples of people that we’re supposed to look up to that looked like us. When we saw ‘La Bamba’ it was just so meaningful. There’s a Latino story about a Latino family, and yet it’s broadly interesting to non-Latino audiences as well.”
Filmmakers Luis Valdez, left, and David Alvarado in San Rafael on May 1. Valdez is featured in Alvarado’s film “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.”
Filmmakers Luis Valdez, left, and David Alvarado in San Rafael on May 1. Valdez is featured in Alvarado’s film “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.”
Yalonda M. James/S.F. Chronicle
But “American Pachuco” faced an early crisis. Barely six weeks after its win at Sundance, a New York Times investigation found evidence of a history of sexual abuse and rape by Chavez, who died in 1993 at age 66. The allegations were confirmed by Huerta, now 96, who said she was raped by the labor leader but did not speak out until now because she did not want to distract from the important work of the union.
Valdez had known Chavez when the two were young boys, and they were close when Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino in 1965. The troupe performed at United Farm Workers rallies. As detailed in “American Pachuco,” the two had a falling out, with Chavez urging Valdez to focus on the work of the union and to disband the theatrical troupe.
Valdez refused, eventually moving El Teatro Campesino to San Juan Bautista, where he has been based since 1971.
The revelations about Valdez’s childhood friend forced Alvarado to reedit an early portion of the documentary, reducing Chavez’s presence and placing greater emphasis on Valdez’s close working relationship with Huerta.
“As a filmmaker, I’ve just never been in this position where history has changed underneath our feet in the middle of releasing the film,” Alvarado said. “The way that we expressed Caesar’s involvement in the story was already a little bit antagonizing, because of his iron-fisted leadership style.”
For his part, Valdez said he had no inkling of Chavez’s dark side, even though he was one of the many people who acted as a pallbearer at the labor leader’s funeral. (The dozens of pallbearers, who included civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and former California Gov. Jerry Brown, rotated.)
A scene from “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez,” a documentary about Valdez, second from the right, the Bay Area-raised founder of El Teatro Campesino, a theatrical troupe made up of farmworkers, and the director of “La Bamba” (1987).
A scene from “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez,” a documentary about Valdez, second from the right, the Bay Area-raised founder of El Teatro Campesino, a theatrical troupe made up of farmworkers, and the director of “La Bamba” (1987).
Courtesy of Houston Latino Film Festival
But Valdez is upset at the way the revelations have landed at a critical time for Latinos in America during the second Trump administration, and while evidence of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is being suppressed by the Department of Justice.
He believes the political right is using Chavez’s past transgressions as a way to minimize the Chicano movement.
“I would say the scandals of the present are part of the effort to try to erase César Chavez and the United Farm Workers and Dolores Huerta, and also the whole Chicano movement,” Valdez said. “Most of César’s life was spent fighting for human rights. He was not there fooling around. He had his life on the line. I don’t believe that we should erase history, and I think that that’s the evil that’s really at the base of this.
“People would love to destroy any union, would love to destroy any movement of people of color that stands up for human rights and to make it the sins of everybody seems to me massively unjust and also suspiciously political at the same time,” Valdez continued. “Certainly since Trump came in, they live in fear. ICE has been around a lot, hovering like a buzzard. And, actually, I don’t want to denigrate buzzards.”
Filmmaker David Alvarado, a Stanford University alum, reedited his documentary “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” after allegations of sexual abuse came out about the late United Farm Workers co-founder César Chavez.
Filmmaker David Alvarado, a Stanford University alum, reedited his documentary “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” after allegations of sexual abuse came out about the late United Farm Workers co-founder César Chavez.
Yalonda M. James/S.F. Chronicle
Ultimately, “American Pachuco” stands as an uplifting celebration of Latino culture and its progress in America. In addition to “La Bamba,” two other Valdez films — his 1969 short “I Am Joaquín” and the 1981 adaptation of “Zoot Suit” — have been selected for the U.S. National Film Registry for preservation by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Zack Fox is set to perform in San Francisco in August.
MUSIC
‘Abbott Elementary’ star Zack Fox is DJing this Bay Area venue
Kim Gordon, formerly of Sonic Youth, plans to perform at the Castro Theatre in support of her solo album “Play Me.”
MUSIC
Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti as the best friend and lover of a missing woman who find themselves attracted to each other in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’avventura” (1960).
MOVIES & TV
See Monica Vitti’s greatest Antonioni films at BAMPFA
Valdez also was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2015.
But for Valdez, his biggest professional accomplishment is El Teatro Campesino, which to this day continues to provide opportunities to pursue the arts for people in farmworking communities in Central California.
“Part of our mission is to keep the doors open to people who wouldn’t ordinarily have an opportunity to do the arts, in rural areas,” Valdez said. “I consider myself to be more of a community organizer to this day.” … See MoreSee Less

Movies & showtimes · San Francisco Bay Area | Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

www.drafthouse.com

See what is playing at Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco Bay Area and buy tickets.

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

The Roller Skater Trying to Reframe the History of Farmworker Rights
Johnny Itliong says Cesar Chavez stole credit from his father, the farmworker activist Larry Itliong. For years, he has been trying to correct the record.
www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/us/larry-itliong-farmworker-rights-activist-chavez.html

“I have been fighting to get the story of my father out for decades and have been waiting for the U.F.W. to step up and honor Larry as they do Cesar,” said Johnny Itliong, at a mural commemorating his father.Credit…

By Jill CowanVisuals by Mark Abramson for The New York Times
Jill Cowan interviewed Johnny Itliong over several months in Venice Beach in Los Angeles and in Santa Monica and Delano, Calif.
July 24, 2026
Updated 9:30 a.m. ET
It was Magic Monday, the weekly convocation of roller skaters on Venice Beach in Los Angeles, and a nearly sacred observance for Johnny Itliong. As usual, he was helping out his entrepreneurial friends on the boardwalk by sporting their merch — a “Skate Famous” branded hat from one, stickers on his gear from others.

The music was bumping and the sun had come out. On most Magic Mondays, that and a little weed would have been all Itliong needed. But on this afternoon, as he felt his way through the steps of a line dance and passed a vape to a buddy, he had more on his mind.

Days before, the news that Cesar Chavez had been accused of sexually abusing girls landed like a bomb, forcing a reckoning over one of the nation’s few Latino civil rights icons.

Those girls were the daughters of farmworker organizers whose movement Chavez had famously led. Itliong, 61, felt sorrow for the victims, who included the sister of a close friend. But the revelation also brought something like vindication — and opportunity.

From the top, California's Central Valley, near Grapevine; United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, left, with Larry Itliong in front of union headquarters in Delano, Calif. in 1967; a mural in Delano depicting leaders of the farmworker movement.Credit…Harold Filan/Associated Press
Itliong’s father was Larry Itliong, the Filipino American farmworker leader who was perennially overshadowed by the younger and more telegenic Chavez. While Chavez’s name was reverently bestowed on schools, streets and libraries, the Itliong name remained largely unknown even in Delano, the agricultural town in California’s Central Valley where Johnny was born and Larry died.

For decades, the son has made it his life’s work to change this. He has traveled California, attending United Farm Workers events and ceremonies honoring the farm labor movement to proclaim what he sees as the truth: After his father spent decades toiling in the fields, learning multiple languages to communicate better with workers and making grueling treks to find them, he said, Chavez and his followers muscled in on their work and took the credit.

“I have been fighting to get the story of my father out for decades and have been waiting for the U.F.W. to step up and honor Larry as they do Cesar,” he said at one such event.

His efforts, he said, have cost him money, untold time, three marriages and his relationships with his three children.

But now the world could find out what Itliong had believed for as long as he could remember.

“He was a narcissist,” Itliong told me, jabbing his two middle fingers into the air whenever he said Chavez’s name. He paused to nod at friends passing by on their skates.

“They’re writing about my dad!” he told them.

He was confident and breezy, joking and laughing as he glided around the rink. But later, he reflected on a life in which he has often felt thwarted — punished, even — for trying to carry forward his family’s legacy.

“I want this for my children,” he said. “I may be a piece of shit, but I want them to be proud of their grandfather.”
Video

In the weeks since the Chavez news had broken, he had given about two dozen interviews reminding journalists that the movement Chavez had come to embody was actually about much more than a single person. He told The Los Angeles Times that his father’s purpose “was to raise everybody up.”

Members of a loosely organized group of Asian American civil rights advocates had read the coverage. Seeing an opportunity to highlight the work of Filipino American leaders, they asked Itliong to help them strategize.

“This is a very critical moment with this openness,” said Eric Chen, a pastor. He began working as an activist after a mass shooting at a ballroom that left 11 mostly older Asian Americans dead and devastated the Asian American enclave in Los Angeles County that he calls home. “We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot.”

The question was how. Chen and Itliong had identified a turning point, but they had a harder time figuring out a mission. All they knew was that they wanted to bring more attention to Larry Itliong’s contributions without deifying him or anyone else. In the end, they decided that they would host a kind of informational “round table” and news conference, both aimed at moving the celebration of the farmworker movement from Chavez’s birthday to some other day and elevating the stories of others in the movement.

Chen offered a benediction.

“I pray that as we embark on this journey to rewrite history, that it would be a journey of healing as well, a journey of redemption,” he said as the others nodded solemnly in their little boxes on the screen. “Because, Lord, we know that it was not about one man. It was a movement.”

Larry Itliong married six times, and Johnny’s mother was mostly absent from his childhood. He was cared for by a large, shifting group of aunts and uncles, related by blood and not, who were animated by the common goal of building a farmworker movement.

In his first memories, he is a toddler watching Mickey Mouse cartoons on a jet to the Philippines with one such couple — a Filipino American doctor and his wife. They took him to visit the rice paddies his father left behind when he came to the United States in 1929.

Larry Itliong had begun rallying agricultural workers up and down the West Coast in the 1930s, from the canneries of Alaska to the vegetable fields of the Coachella Valley. He spent decades pushing for higher pay and safer working conditions for farmworkers who were then, as now, nearly all immigrants.

As the leader of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, he helped orchestrate the Delano, Calif., grape strike and boycott of 1965.

Historians say it was only after Larry Itliong helped persuade the predominantly Mexican and Mexican American leaders of the nascent National Farm Workers Association to join the Filipinos’ strike that the modern farm labor movement was born.

Growing up in Delano in the 1960s and ’70s, Johnny sometimes rose in the early hours of the morning to follow older relatives into the grapevines, where they did the backbreaking work it took to feed the nation.

Even as a child, he had a sense that his family was at the center of something important. After dinner, he and the other children would stay outside while the adults talked inside Delano’s Filipino Hall, their voices often erupting into shouts. In conversation, Itliong routinely rattles off names of other leaders who he says were harmed by the cult of personality surrounding Chavez. Many of these organizers, like his father, understood the sacrifices that it took to make it as a farm laborer. Itliong said he could relate to this struggle in a way that Chavez’s children could not.

But during those years, forces beyond Larry’s control were conspiring to change the course of history.

From the top, Johnny Itliong’s cousins Priscilla Bacus, left, and Jean Munn, in Delano; Itliong leading the unity clap at a meeting of activists in Los Angeles; Itliong’s half sister, Patricia Itliong Serda, who worked for years to get funding for the Delano mural.
One of the founders of the National Farm Workers Association was Chavez. At the time, he was a young man amassing followers as he sought to transform the long effort to unionize migrant farmworkers into a broader civil rights movement.

Born on an Arizona farm just two years before Larry Itliong arrived on the West Coast, Chavez was a sharp strategist and strong-willed Mexican American leader who galvanized Latinos, a fast-growing demographic in search of their own Martin Luther King Jr.

In Itliong’s telling, Chavez’s growing fame created an opening for his ambitious cohort to elbow his father and other longtime organizers out of the way. The tension between Chavez’s mostly Latino followers and the Filipino Americans close to Itliong lingers even now.

Itliong remembered his father’s anger when Chavez moved the United Farm Workers’ headquarters from Delano to an isolated community in the Tehachapi Mountains, farther from farmworkers’ homes. He remembered how journalists and documentarians focused on Chavez and did not widen the frame to include Larry or other Filipinos.

“Their passion is a product of their frustration,” said Matt Garcia, a historian at Dartmouth College and a Chavez biographer who has written critically about the way Chavez wielded his power. “And that frustration is legit.”

While Professor Garcia said there was no evidence of a conspiracy by Chavez and his allies to exclude Larry Itliong or other Filipinos from the history books, he said that Itliong and Chavez represented clashing visions of the farmworker movement.

Larry was a strident “meat and potatoes” union organizer, eager to flex the untapped power of farmworkers like himself. Chavez, as a Mexican American, was a member of a demographic majority of farmworkers, and he saw the movement as a broader social one. Collective bargaining and the fine points of contracts, Professor Garcia said, didn’t interest him.

Chavez also had “a will to power,” Professor Garcia said, and it was fulfilled by society’s impulse to venerate individuals instead of the messy collectives who make change. And so Chavez became the face of the movement.

The United Farm Workers union he left behind had been grappling with his legacy since long before the revelations of abuse. In response to questions from The New York Times, the group acknowledged that there were “many, many names who don’t have enough recognition,” including but not limited to Itliong.

“The best way the modern U.F.W. can honor Larry Itliong’s legacy is to continue what he spent his incredible life doing,” the statement said: “organizing workers to win the dignity and protections of a union contract.”

The Chavez family declined to comment for this article.

Much of the maneuvering that ultimately sidelined Larry Itliong took place when his son Johnny was too young to understand what was happening. In 1971, Larry resigned from the union that became the United Farm Workers. His children helped care for him as he suffered from A.L.S., the harrowing degenerative disease, until his death in 1977.

“I just remember the doctor sitting in the white chair we had, or yellow leather, or something,” Itliong told me, wiping away tears. “And then the preacher came.”

At age 14, he left home, where life had become turbulent, and stayed with friends or in a car. With the help of an empathetic teacher, he graduated from high school in Delano and moved to the nearest big city, Bakersfield.

He said he worked as a contractor overseas in roles he maintains he can’t talk about. He worked as a chef. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Nevada, where the last of his marriages dissolved in acrimony.

He is estranged from his children — not by his choice, he said, though according to divorce court records, he has not taken opportunities to see them.

In 2004 he was convicted of domestic violence, after an incident in which his wife at the time, Kelly Cornell, said he slapped her and assaulted her while she was on the toilet. Itliong maintains he was not violent and said Cornell lied. More than two decades later, Cornell said she harbors no “hard feelings.” But after going for years without child support for their son, now an adult and also named Larry, she said, “I just wish his dad would step up a little bit.”

Reached by text message, the younger Larry, 25, said he didn’t want to talk about his father. He didn’t reply when asked if he felt any connection to his grandfather’s legacy.

On and off for about three decades, Itliong has lived in Los Angeles, mostly hanging around the beach. For money, he said, he helps mount televisions for wealthy customers. A skateboarder for decades, he has also taken up roller skating, joining an enthusiastic community that blasts music and wears glowing lights. He describes his living situation as mobile; he has eschewed many of his possessions to live “the way the manongs lived,” referring to Filipino immigrants like his father.

But when anyone — the office of an elected official, a Filipino American nonprofit, a reporter — calls asking to talk about his dad, he picks up. And after the accusations of sexual abuse by Chavez emerged, there were lots of calls.

In Delano as in other communities in the Central Valley, suburban neighborhoods have replaced some of the fields. Still, small reminders of Larry Itliong’s legacy are tucked throughout the town. On Memorial Day weekend, a crowd of siblings, cousins and in-laws held an impromptu gathering at Larry Itliong Unity Park, which was dedicated two years ago. Johnny Itliong had come to spend time with his sister, Sandra Itliong Bowman, who had driven down from the Seattle area.

Sandra’s adult children say that they remember being dismissed by classmates and teachers, even in Delano, when they talked about their grandfather as a historic figure of note. Sandra said she was grateful that her brother had continued to publicize their father’s accomplishments. She wants her seven grandchildren to know where they came from.

“I’m not here to judge anybody,” she said, reluctant to blame anyone for overlooking Larry. “I can only build on the future for the ones who will carry on the legacy.”

The next stop was an elementary school where Itliong’s half sister, Patricia Itliong Serda, worked for decades as a librarian. On the exterior wall of the library, a colorful mural depicts Larry’s journey from the Philippines, the Delano grape strike and symbols of his legacy. Johnny stopped to point out details, including an image of Patricia as a child standing at Larry’s knee as he reads from an open book. Patricia said she worked for years to secure a nonprofit grant to commission the piece.

Most of the students at the school are Filipino American, Latino or a combination of the two, and she said she had poured her energy into teaching them about their heritage. The mural has invited discussion.

“Coming from our little town, it means a lot,” she said. “This is where I can make the most impact.”

Later, Itliong stopped by the cemetery where his father was buried beneath a simple headstone. Itliong once worked there, helping to maintain the grounds.

“I’ve come here at times throughout the years, you know?” he said, almost to himself, as he plucked stray weeds and bits of trash from the grass. Not for the first time in our conversations, Itliong alluded to a sense that his own life hadn’t worked out entirely as he might have hoped.

“Struggling, because my life — you know, I get great satisfaction from helping people, right? But you know the old saying: No good deeds ever go unpunished.”

He said he talked to his father when he visited the grave but never told him about the work he was doing on his behalf. Accolades wouldn’t have interested Larry, Itliong said. He said he used to skip ceremonies and events himself until one day a friend helped him think of things another way.

“‘You’re the connection to him,’” Itliong recalled her saying. “All this weight on the shoulder? It increased a hundredfold. I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

From the top, a banner at a meeting of activists in Los Angeles honored Larry Itliong; Bacus during a visit to the Filipino Community Hall in Delano; Johnny Itliong at the grave of his father.

Soon Itliong was back in Los Angeles, hosting a panel with other Asian American activists. He took his place at the center of a table facing a group of nonprofit workers and labor rights advocates at the Pilipino Workers Center, a nonprofit in Historic Filipinotown.

Itliong was joined on the panel by his longtime friend Desirée Rojas, a daughter of Al Rojas, a farmworker and labor organizer. Rojas’s sister Debra was among the women who upended Chavez’s legacy when they described how he had abused them as young teenage girls.

Itliong seemed nervous, getting up briefly to fiddle with the audiovisual setup. But as others on the makeshift dais spoke about his father’s work, he relaxed into his role as a kind of magnanimous convener.

“It’s always been an honor to be the son of Larry Itliong. Those are very, very hard shoes to step into,” he told the room. “But I’m here now. I’ve been here my whole life, doing exactly what he did, standing up for those who needed to be heard.”

Aquilina Soriano, the director of the Pilipino Workers Center, urged the audience not to let their stories or perspectives remain in that room.

Tell your leaders, she said, that it’s important to pick a different day to celebrate the farm workers’ movement, that it’s important not to simply swap in the name of another imperfect person on every street sign or school that now reads “Cesar Chavez.”

“This is a call to action,” she said. “We still have a lot of work to do.”

To end the day, Itliong invited the audience to join him in what has become known as the unity clap, which begins with a slow clap and builds to the cacophony of loud applause. The Filipino version is punctuated with a cry of “isang baksak,” which roughly translates from Tagalog to “one down” — another day completed, another task done.

“Yeah! Isang baksak!” Itliong yelled, pumping his fists as the applause rang out.

Another task done, many more left. In the days after, Itliong would meet with the others to discuss strategy as Los Angeles County officials debated how to rename things named after Cesar Chavez.

But first, he went skating.

Jill Cowan
Reporter
I met Johnny while reporting on the aftermath of our Cesar Chavez investigation. His story really got me thinking about how family, trauma, and human messiness ultimately shape history.
Reply
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state. … See MoreSee Less

After the Cesar Chavez Scandal, Can Johnny Itliong Restore His Father’s Activist Legacy?

www.nytimes.com

Johnny Itliong says Cesar Chavez stole credit from his father, the farmworker activist Larry Itliong. For years, he has been trying to correct the record.

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

7/31 US Premier Screening of “When ICE Melts – Testimonies from The Front Lines”
laborfest.net/2026/event/us-premier-screening-of-when-ice-melts-testimonies-from-the-front-lines/
July 31 @ 5:00 pm pst/7:00 pm cst/8pm est
Zoom event
5:00PM (PST)/7:00 PM (CST)/8:00 PM (EST)
Film showing of “When ICE Melts – Testimonies from The front Lines”
119 minutes (2026) by Kipp Hedges
Joining the panel after the film will be videographer Kipp Hedges and St. Paul labor historian Peter Rachleff
In this US premier screening of “When ICE Melts, Testimonies From The Frontlines” by videographer Kipp Hedges, we hear of the voices of trade unionists, historians and members of the community in Minneapolis and St. Paul about what happened in the fightback against ICE, the plan of the Fascist Trump government to crush the people of the City. They talk about why Minneapolis was targeted, how people organized to defend the immigrant community and why the unions and trade unionists became involved in fighting back against the ICE terror tactics.
Minneapolis which held a Teamster general strike in 1934 is connected to the fight today not only in Minneapolis but throughout the US. They also discuss the lessons of the San Francisco 1934 general strike and why this tactic of unions and working people is a critical tool to defend workers and fight the growing threats to working people and all democratic rights.
This is the first labor documentary to break the information blockade of the lessons of this historic struggle for working people in the US. … See MoreSee Less

Events for July 2026 – LaborFest 2026

laborfest.net

In this film by videographer Kipp Hedges, they talk about why Minneapolis was targeted, how people organized to defend the immigrant community and why the unions and trade unionists became involved in…

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Book Presentation – “Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism” By Professor Brian Kwoba
laborfest.net/2026/event/book-presentation-hubert-harrison-forbidden-genius-of-black-radicalism-b…
July 23 @ 10:00 am pst/7:00 pm Nigeria
723-Hubert-Harrisonx600.jpg
Zoom event
Book Presentation of “Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism” By Professor Brian Kwoba – Associate Professor | Director of African and African American Studies (AAAS)
The fight against racism in the US has been historically tied to the fight of the of the working class for power. Hubert Harrison is one of the most important theoreticians and political activists in the Black working class movement and in solidarity with socialists like Eugene Debs who led the Socialist Party.
In an important book “Herbert Harrison Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism” Brian Kwoba looks at his life and the political development of Hubert Harrison and his political and theoretical contributions. He was a supporter of the Socialist Party and was influenced by the Russian revolution in 1917 which shook the world. The radical changes brought by the revolution encouraged workers and the oppressed in the US to look at what a radical transformation would mean particularly for women and the Black people of the United States.
Harrison understood that imperialism leads to world war and he educated workers in the United States that these wars were a direct result of the capitalist system and it’s crisis. Kwoba’s work is an important contribution to his life and understanding the issues we face today as another world war is in front of us. … See MoreSee Less

Events for July 2026 – LaborFest 2026

laborfest.net

Book Presentation of “Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism” By Professor Brian Kwoba

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Silicon Valley prides itself on looking to the future. This play shows how an ancient bias still shapes it
www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/theater/article/caste-system-tech-indian-22316021.php
By Zara Irshad,
Staff Writer
Updated July 11, 2026 9:53 a.m.

Actors Kunal Dudheker, from left, Kapil Talwalkar and Megan Suri react to Ranjita Chakravarty’s monologue during rehearsal for “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Actors Kunal Dudheker, from left, Kapil Talwalkar and Megan Suri react to Ranjita Chakravarty’s monologue during rehearsal for “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle

Beneath Silicon Valley’s image of innovation lies an ancient system of division that still determines who succeeds and who doesn’t.
In “The Employee Dharma Handbook,” directed by Snehal Desai in its world premiere at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley on Saturday, July 11, playwright Geetha Reddy examines how the Indian caste system quietly shapes power dynamics in the workplace.
More Information
“The Employee Dharma Handbook”: 2 and 7:30 p.m Saturdays and Wednesdays; 1 and 6 p.m. Sundays; 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays-Fridays. Through Aug. 2. $54-$104. Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. 877-662-8978. theatreworks.org

Set at a Silicon Valley aerospace firm, the play follows HR executive Val (Kathryn Smith-McGlynn) as she investigates lead engineers who she suspects overlooked young female engineer Leela (Megan Suri) for a promotion due to sexism. While investigating mission manager Krish (Kapil Talwalkar) and recently promoted engineer Baasu (Kunal Dudheker), she instead uncovers deep-rooted caste tensions among the company’s Indian immigrant employees that are complicating their relationships.

“No one has done this. No American playwright has ventured into this topic,” Talwalkar, a Cupertino native, said. “Caste for most people has sort of been this archaic, abstract concept — especially if you’re not Indian.”
Review: ‘The Employee Dharma Handbook’ is too good to end with its world premiere
Kapil Talwalkar plays Krish, an employee in a Silicon Valley aerospace firm, in “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Kapil Talwalkar plays Krish, an employee in a Silicon Valley aerospace firm, in “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle
Caste refers to the social group into which a person is born, often tied to traditional occupations and social status. While most Americans learn about the caste system as an archaic practice through history books, its influence persists for many Indians today, shaping social interactions and opportunities — whether consciously acknowledged or not. Even now, a person’s surname can sometimes signal their caste background.

Reddy drew inspiration for “The Employee Dharma Handbook” from a 2020 lawsuitoriginally filed in the San Jose Federal Court against Cisco and two of its engineers by the California Civil Rights Department, which alleged caste discrimination. After learning about other instances of such harassment in the workplace and the discourse that the case sparked within the Indian community, she decided to delve deeper.

“You have the caste system at work, and you have the capitalist system of work. They’re both systems of worker exploitation,” she explained. “It was really interesting to me to see how these corporate cultures and an actual culture intersect.”
Playwright Geetha Reddy examines how the Indian caste system quietly shapes power dynamics in the workplace in “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Playwright Geetha Reddy examines how the Indian caste system quietly shapes power dynamics in the workplace in “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle
The show’s opening in the heart of Silicon Valley, home to one of the Bay Area’s largest populations of Indian Americans, was no coincidence. One-quarter of the region’s tech employees were born in India, second only to U.S.-born employees, according to the 2026 Silicon Valley Index. A recent Chronicle study also found that the Bay Area had 488,000 residents who identify as Indian in 2024, a figure more than three times the region’s Indian population in 2000.
“I think it’s brave,” Smith-McGlynn said of the play. “It’s going to land in a lot of different ways to a lot of people in the valley, and I think that that is going to spark conversation.”
Reddy admitted taking on the subject was daunting, given the complications of caste tensions and how often South Asian characters are reduced to flat stereotypes in popular culture — such as STEM nerds like Raj from “The Big Bang Theory” and comic-relief roles like Apu from “The Simpsons.” But she hopes as the play “keeps unraveling the complexity of it,” the community will reflect on its own subconscious behaviors and biases.
“Consciously, everyone thinks that they’re really great. It’s these subconscious (biases and behaviors) that are going on in the background that are hard for us to accept,” Talwalkar said. “If we do it right, so many people will see themselves in every character.”
July 10, 2026|Updated July 11, 2026 9:53 a.m.
of Zara Irshad … See MoreSee Less

Silicon Valley prides itself on looking to the future. This play shows how an ancient bias still shapes it

www.sfchronicle.com

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s world premiere of Geetha Reddy’s “The Employee Dharma Handbook” examines caste discrimination in a modern tech workplace.

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Notes on the Formation of the Chinese Working Class, 1840–1989
crpnews.com/asia/notes-on-the-formation-of-the-chinese-working-class-1840-1989/
The history of the Chinese labor movement intertwines with the history of the country’s industrial development, stemming from clashes against foreign oppression in China and military conflagration among imperialist powers. Already in the early stages of its confrontation with the ruling class, we observe two essential traits: first, Chinese workers can hardly be classified, at any point in their history, as mere objects of exploitation; second, their class struggle became accustomed to unfolding simultaneously against the native ruling class and foreign oppression. Below, we outline in brief strokes some decisive moments of proletarian struggle in China over the last century and a half.

André Barbieri
INDEPENDENT
Current for Permanent Revolution (FI)
Jul 17, 2026

The history of the Chinese labor movement intertwines with the history of the country’s industrial development, stemming from clashes against foreign oppression in China and military conflagration among imperialist powers. Already in the early stages of its confrontation with the ruling class, we observe two essential traits: first, Chinese workers can hardly be classified, at any point in their history, as mere objects of exploitation; second, their class struggle became accustomed to unfolding simultaneously against the native ruling class and foreign oppression. Below, we outline in brief strokes some decisive moments of proletarian struggle in China over the last century and a half.

The properly national formation of China, with the very long process of territorial unification still underway during the Qing dynasty, and later its fall until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, was intertwined with increasingly significant cycles of workers’ struggles. According to historian Elizabeth Perry, in Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor:

“Workers’ protests played a central role in the political transformations that traversed China in the twentieth century. The 1911 Revolution that overthrew the imperial system, the May Fourth Movement that inaugurated a new political culture, the rise and fall of the nationalist regime, the victory of the communists, and even the post-1949 political design—all these events were profoundly affected by the Chinese labor movement” (Perry, 1993, p. 2).
In the nineteenth century, only the outline of the Chinese proletariat was present, emerging from the powerful combination of migrant rural workers heading to port cities and dispersed urban artisans. In the twentieth century, with the proletariat fully forming in the “forge of Hephaestus” of the nascent industry, the history of the Chinese labor movement had multiple explosive points. Most notable was the “cataclysmic eruption,” in the words of Mark Selden in Labor Unrest in China (1995), in the mid-1920s, as a consequence of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. This period, considered by many analysts (Chan 1995; Perry 1993; Selden 1995) as the most convulsive in the history of the Chinese labor movement, is located between 1922 and 1927, encompassing the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and the great workers’ uprising of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27.

A second explosion of vitality in the Chinese labor movement, though of lesser intensity than the first, occurred during the Civil War (1946–49), which culminated in the Revolution that brought Mao Zedong to power, giving rise to the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Three other relevant moments in which the labor movement played a major role occurred within the PRC itself: in 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution; in 1979, during the turbulent transition from the Mao era to the Deng era; and in 1989, with the events related to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. All these periods of workers’ struggle reveal the intimate relationship of the Chinese proletariat with global events, in sharp contrast to the imperial Chinese tradition of isolationism and hostility toward foreigners (a characteristic later adopted by the CCP bureaucracy as part of its strategy to block the expansion of international revolution).

Anti-Colonial Struggles in Nineteenth-Century China

In the early stages of workers’ activity in China, still in the first half of the nineteenth century, disturbances aimed to oppose national oppression by European powers, particularly England. Sparse and immersed in a sea of peasants, the working class had little numerical weight at the time of the First Opium War (1839–1842), concentrated in guilds that animated artisanal production in coastal cities such as Shanghai and Canton. Even under these conditions, port workers played an important role as vanguard fighters against foreign military intervention.

Before the Sino-British conflict, there are records of disturbances by textile workers in Nanhai and Panyu, near Canton, against the entry of British yarn into Chinese ports, as a way to defend native spinning manufacture. During the Opium War, textile workers also acted in militias that attacked British invaders in the Sanyuanli Incident of 1841 (Selden, 1995, p. 71). After Emperor Daoguang announced the suspension of British trade rights and the forced seizure of Crown merchants’ opium, dockworkers played a prominent role in military resistance—though with little chance of success—against the British fleet commanded by plenipotentiary Henry Pottinger (later the first governor of Hong Kong).

Before the Treaty of Nanking sealed Britain’s victory, Chinese workers had already taken advantage of contact with enemy military technology to absorb it into their own arms industry. This curious aptitude for appropriating foreign technology, which would later mark China’s industrial life in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, was already visible in embryo by the mid-nineteenth century. British China specialist Jonathan Spence recounts:

“In Xiamen, for example, they found an almost completed replica of a double-deck English warship with thirty cannons; it was nearly ready to be launched, and work on several similar ships was well advanced. In Wusong, they found five paddle-wheel boats ready, armed with newly cast bronze cannons. In Shanghai, they captured eighteen eighteen-pounder naval cannons, new and well executed, perfect in every detail, such as the sights cast into the body and the flintlock ears. All were mounted on sturdy wooden carriages with iron axles” (Spence, 1996, p. 169).
Similarly, dockworkers in the Sino-French War of 1885 resisted colonialism by refusing to unload enemy warships—despite the clear military disadvantage given France’s naval superiority. In 1894, during the conflict against Japan that also ended in foreign victory, native workers labored under the command of the Zongli Yamen (a kind of Qing “Foreign Ministry”) to build a military apparatus minimally compatible with the challenges posed by Japan. Numerous examples exist of these small skirmishes by Chinese militias against European and Asian colonialism, in which the labor force of major port cities, crushed under Qing rule, served as material strength against invaders.

British bombardment during the First Opium War (1839–1842). Duncan, Edward; ‘Nemesis’, East India Iron Armed Steamship; Williamson Art Gallery & Museum; www.artuk.org/artworks/nemesis-east-india-iron-armed-steamship-67222
Composition of the Chinese Working Class

It is crucial to note the degree of confrontation against foreign oppression as a defining mark of the nascent Chinese proletariat. The incidents that triggered the great waves of insurrectionary strikes in the early twentieth century began with abuses by the British and Japanese, who between 1860 and 1895 imposed harsh survival conditions on the Chinese empire after military victories over the Qing.

With the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), Britain opened Chinese territory to the opium trade. With the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), Japan secured the right to build factories in all of China’s open ports, especially in the cotton industry—a bastion of major workers’ revolts prior to the 1925 Revolution and a stronghold of Communist Party influence.

Another notable point was the composition of the Chinese working class: differences in worker qualifications were often decisive in industrial cities for the level and type of organization achieved. Elizabeth Perry notes that in Shanghai, while specialized artisans from southern China held better jobs and enjoyed guild protection (regulating wages and working hours), northern peasants usually could not attain these positions and had to settle for more precarious work. These rural workers, lacking specialization, could not join guilds and were forced to organize into different gangs (such as the “Green Gang” after the 1911 Revolution), whose hierarchical control over precarious workers placed them in supervisory roles.

This division into “two souls” of the Chinese working class would later reappear in renewed form in the split between the old state-sector working class and the new rural proletariat that filled export factories during Deng Xiaoping’s pro-capitalist reforms.

Divisions and Workers’ Solidarity

These divisions were encouraged by manufacturing managers and foreign administrators operating in China (the gangs had material ties of interest with the bosses). Foremen, who held influence over workers through the hierarchy of gangs or guilds, used this power to extract monetary benefits from owners, under threat of facilitating controlled strikes. However, these divisions did not necessarily predispose workers against common action. On the contrary, Emily Honig (1986; 1989), Gail Hershatter (1986), and Elizabeth Perry (1993) describe processes of workers’ solidarity that integrated—into the incipient traits of class consciousness emerging at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century—lines of gender and place of origin as factors of collective organization and action, for example, in the segment of women workers in the cotton industry, long dominated by the Japanese.

Except for certain excesses in characterizing the identity motives of protests, which permeated Chinese workers’ consciousness, these were not obstacles but rather factors that encouraged a new kind of collective consciousness, often class consciousness, among urban workers. These reasons help illuminate the creative combination of epochal transformations in imperialist capitalism, especially at the turn of the twentieth century, and the influence of revolutionary ideas after the Russian Revolution of 1905, which began to take root in small circles of Chinese industrial cities. Thus, propelled by the defense of class conditions at work, strikes or disturbances against employer arbitrariness were not scarce:

“In 1868, workers at the Shanghai Dock and Engineering Company went on strike to prevent a wage cut. In 1879, blacksmiths at Pudong Engineering Works stopped work to protest physical abuse from a foreign supervisor. In 1883, workers at the Jiangnan Arsenal mutinied when a factory foreman tried to extend the workday. Two years later, they staged a walkout demanding higher wages. In 1890, a new administrator provoked a strike by announcing an increase in the workday from 8 to 9 hours. These early protests were largely defensive in nature. Wage cuts, physical abuse, and longer workdays precipitated conflicts. With industrial expansion after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, however, the pattern of artisan strikes changed notably. The greater demand for skilled workers encouraged more aggressive forms of protest by this more favored sector of the workforce” (Perry, 1993, p. 38).

The workers’ strikes that emerged, especially among skilled artisans (carpentry, masonry, printing, painting), acquired a character not only defensive but also offensive, demanding new concessions during the period leading to the 1911 Revolution, directed by bourgeois nationalist Sun Yat-sen. With the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the last emperor, Xuantong, the freedom of action of the Chinese labor movement, already in full course of industrial concentration, increased, since the penal code that stipulated severe punishments for strikers lost effect. The general politicization of urban discourse at the beginning of the republic encouraged workers, especially skilled artisans, to formulate more ambitious demands in their labor conflicts.

Industrialization and the Formation of the Chinese Proletariat

But nineteenth-century China saw only the outlines of a still fragmented, sparse, and small proletariat, rooted in urban crafts and small-scale textile manufacture. Submerged in the vast peasantry, the Chinese working class began to concentrate in urban centers connected to the slow and gradual expansion of foreign maritime trade. The period from 1895 to 1918—spanning from the beginning of reform movements against Qing political oppression to the end of World War I—represents the transitional and maturing phase of the incipient urban working class, which would undergo an intense period of industrialization beginning in 1914, spurred by the war.

The center of the nascent labor movement in China was Shanghai, the country’s largest city and beneficiary of maritime trade development in the second half of the nineteenth century. Other coastal cities, such as Canton and Tianjin, also saw their industries flourish through foreign trade and developed proletariats tied to these activities.

“Examining the early decades of the Chinese labor movement, Jean Chesneaux identified four strike peaks: 1898–99 (10 strikes), 1904–06 (15 strikes), 1909–13 (38 strikes), 1917–19 (46 strikes). Each peak was longer than the previous one. The first coincided with the Reform Movement of 1898, the second with the anti-U.S. boycott of 1905, the third with the 1911 Revolution, and the fourth drew energy from nationalist stimulus during World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, culminating in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. While Chesneaux’s reconstruction of national dates is useful, Elizabeth Perry’s detailed study of Shanghai suggests an important modification. Contrary to Chesneaux, Perry found a sharp increase in strikes in Shanghai: from 30 strikes between 1909 and 1913 to 86 strikes between 1914 and 1918. World War I was the “golden age” of Chinese industry, a moment when China benefited both from high demand for manufactured goods and from the weakening of foreign capital’s control, occupied with the war—a favorable situation for the flourishing of labor militancy” (Selden, 1995, p. 72).

The major events that strengthened Chinese industry and, consequently, increased the weight of the working class were World War I and the Russian Revolution, which enabled the connection of the labor vanguard with the best of Marxist strategic experience developed by Lenin and Trotsky in the Third International (despite the many difficulties arising from linguistic differences and China’s particular political traditions). The stimulus of these international events, along with relentless Japanese aggression in Chinese territory and the growth of the urban proletariat in central economic regions, paved the way for the most intense cycle of labor activism in Chinese history, between 1919 and 1927.

Shanghai was the center of this dynamic emerging proletariat. In 1933, nearly half of the Chinese working class was located there; between 1918 and 1940, 2,291 strikes were staged in the city, with 65% achieving partial or total success.

Proportionally, the number of urban workers paled in comparison to the numerical strength of the peasantry. In 1919, China had 2 million urban industrial workers, compared to hundreds of millions of peasants and tens of millions of rural laborers, in a predominantly agrarian society (as was also the case in neighboring Russia). However, as in Russia, the issue was not merely about absolute numbers of these relative populations, but rather their role in production and their concentration in the nerve centers that defined the course of the national economy. In Shanghai, Canton, Tianjin, and Beijing, the importance of the Chinese proletariat was magnified by its concentration in the most strategic positions of the economy and in urban zones most sensitive from the standpoint of national politics.

A process similar to what Trotsky described in Russia was occurring in China, under the law of combined development: a few million workers, concentrated in the strategic centers of the economy, led a hundred million peasants:

“The law of combined development manifests itself at every step, in the economic domain, both in simple and complex phenomena. Almost without national routes, Russia was obliged to build railways. Without having passed through European handicrafts and manufacture, Russia leapt directly into mechanized production. While peasant economy often remained at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry was at the same level as advanced countries and sometimes surpassed them in many respects […] A numerically weak Russian bourgeoisie, which had no national roots, thus confronted a relatively strong proletariat with deep and solid roots in the people.”
Nationalism and Communism

In this social formation of the Chinese working class, as noted earlier, the tradition of resistance against foreign aggression marked the consciousness of its political activity. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the May 30th Movement of 1925 (not to mention the clashes from 1840 to 1895 against Euro-Asian colonialism) were carried out in the name of resistance to English and Japanese imperialism. National liberation struggles influenced the development of the subjectivity of the Chinese labor movement, and it is no surprise that, politically, this subjectivity expressed itself in heterogeneous ways. Bourgeois nationalism, embodied in Sun Yat-sen’s and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, had as much interest as the communists in winning the working-class base to their ranks in the 1920s. This was one of the reasons that led Chen Duxiu, future founder of the Chinese Communist Party, to seek to create Marxist workers’ associations in Shanghai.

Whether demonstrating loyalty to Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People or to Marxism, leaders of both the CCP and the Kuomintang felt compelled to assign high priority to the working class:

“Believing that industrialization was the hope of the future, both nationalists and communists made great efforts to enlist the labor movement under their political banners […] Deep divisions persisted within the working class, opening the way to a fragmented base for both parties” (Perry, 1993, p. 68).
This political dispute between nationalism and communism would become central throughout the cycle of revolutions and wars spanning 1922 to 1949. It is therefore important not to examine the results of cycles of strikes and workers’ disturbances as leading to a homogeneous ideological affiliation. As history has often shown, and China was no exception, class struggle shapes political loyalties in contradictory ways, depending heavily on the balance of forces at the national and international level.

hk-seamens-strike.jpg
Hong Kong Seamen’s Strike and the Canton-Hong Kong Strike, May-June 1926

In Shanghai itself, which saw the birth of the CCP in June 1921, communists and nationalists competed to organize the working class through rival unions. Kuomintang politicians, aided by factory foremen and the same gangsters who controlled precarious labor, sought to channel workers’ activism toward their own ends. The Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions, controlled by the Kuomintang’s conservative nationalist ideology, persecuted and attacked members of the Shanghai General Federation of Trade Unions, created after the May 30th Movement in 1925 and influenced by the CCP. This communist federation gained considerable prestige between 1923–1926, bringing together 117 unions, including the Shanghai Graphic Workers’ Union and unions representing workers in Japanese-owned cotton factories. This strength, however, rested on fragile foundations, as the CCP abandoned political independence in favor of integration into the Kuomintang, following the orientation of the majority faction of the Communist International at the time, led by Stalin and Bukharin.

We will see later that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party itself, under the auspices of the Communist International, decided to dissolve itself within the Kuomintang and hand over to Chiang Kai-shek the power of life and death over thousands of workers. Few intellectuals manage to untangle this knot, which belongs to the field of strategy. To understand the political disputes between these two currents, the history of internal factional struggles within the parties is conditio sine qua non, so as not to fall into superficial examinations.

From the participation of Shanghai workers in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, with 60,000 strikers protesting against the Chinese government’s passivity in the face of Japan’s imperialist intentions under the Treaty of Versailles; through the strike of Hong Kong and Canton sailors in 1922, which virtually paralyzed regional trade for months; to the May 30th Movement in 1925, which began in Shanghai factories and spread throughout the country to give rise to the Chinese Revolution—the labor movement was at the center of national political life as never before. Once again, the Chinese working class, now far stronger than during the British Crown’s incursions in the Opium War, positioned itself as a vanguard against imperialist aggression, especially from Japan and England. To do so, it had to confront obstacles imposed by the Chinese national bourgeoisie (organized in the Kuomintang), which, although not accepting all foreign impositions, harbored a much deeper hatred of the dangers posed by the Chinese working class than of Euro-Asian capital.

1925-05-30-may-thirtieth-movement-shootings-600-1e0e4.jpg
Shootout during the May 30th Movement, 1925

The May 30th Movement of 1925 was sparked by one of the brutal arbitrariness committed by Japanese imperialism and its capital in China. The high point of a great wave of strikes, it began with the murder in Shanghai of a Chinese worker, Gu Zhenghong, a member of the cotton workers’ union, during a three-month strike in a Japanese-owned cotton factory. His funeral, attended by more than 10,000 workers, awakened the sympathy of the city’s proletariat and became a major event. When ten other Chinese workers were shot dead by the British police operating in Shanghai, 160,000 workers went on strike (50,000 students boycotted classes in support). When dockworkers blocked Shanghai’s port, Japanese ships entered the Whangpoo River to reopen it, killing another 60 workers. The continuation of the massacre increased workers’ anger, igniting the Chinese Revolution. Strikes and mass assemblies spread across coastal industrial cities. In 1925, the consequences of the May 30th Movement led to 130 strikes involving 400,000 workers. That year, another foreign power followed closely behind Japan’s crimes: England, which had actively participated in exploiting and militarily devastating Chinese ports in the nineteenth century, also demanded rights over native labor. When British troops killed 52 demonstrators on June 23, 1925, 300,000 Chinese workers took to the streets, once again fueling one of the most significant strike cycles in national history.

The Revolutionary Peak of 1925–27

This was the most concentrated period of strike activity in the history of the Chinese working class. To defeat Anglo-Japanese oppression and carry out an agrarian revolution, workers—hundreds of thousands organized in the Communist Party—had the strength to overcome the national bourgeoisie itself, a condition for eliminating the remnants of China’s social backwardness inherited from feudal “warlords.” But there was something rotten in the kingdom of Denmark (in this case, in the “Middle Kingdom”).

Since 1923, the CCP leadership had been acting in close alignment with the nationalist bourgeoisie, reducing the battle for proletarian hegemony in favor of collaboration in an “anti-imperialist united front,” whose essence was the abandonment of class independence—to the point that this “front” included the triumvirate Huang Jinrong, Du Yuesheng, and Zhang Xiaolin, the leading opium traffickers in Shanghai, who later became Chiang Kai-shek’s intimate allies in the anti-communist offensive of 1927.

In 1925, a series of strikes began following Gu Zhenghong’s assassination. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops were advancing in their “Northern Expedition” in 1926 against the warlords, aiming at national unification. The peasant revolt, which followed the expeditionary forces by occupying estates and killing landlords, and the agitation in the cities, deeply disturbed the Kuomintang, which awaited the moment to violently end the disturbances—and the Communist Party. Despite this, all strike activity, which unfolded into a series of insurrectionary calls, was conducted by the CCP with the tactical objective of collaborating in the rear with Chiang’s troops.

This was because, following the line of the Fifth Congress of 1924—in which Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev began organizing the campaign against Trotsky and Lenin’s legacy—the Communist International defined that the CCP should incorporate itself into the Kuomintang (something Trotsky had opposed since 1923). This definition was based on a selective reading of the “General Theses on the Eastern Question,” one of the results of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922. The “Theses” clearly stated that the national bourgeoisies of colonies and semi-colonies were incapable of achieving national independence and resolving the agrarian question; however, they did not generalize the Russian experience of 1917, failing to assert that the working class must lead the revolution to achieve these goals.

Despite the semi-staged character of the “Theses”—which would be fully surpassed by Trotsky’s global conception of the theory of permanent revolution in 1930—their strategic aim was the development of communist parties in the East, with class independence as a fundamental principle. Ignoring this principle, Stalin elaborated a rigid “theoretical” division between “mature and immature” countries for revolution—China fell fatally into the latter category—restoring the old formula of the “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” for backward capitalist countries, a conception already marked as outdated by Lenin himself, to cover his open policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, he revived the idea of “workers’ and peasants’ parties” for these countries, a way of renouncing the construction of independent revolutionary parties, which objectively led to the subordination of the CCP to the Kuomintang and its gangsters. Nothing could be further removed from the theoretical foundations that had originally given rise to the “Eastern Theses.”

In 1926, already under Stalin’s direct orders, this orientation deepened, and the CCP was commanded to dissolve organizationally and submit to Chiang’s orders, who was elevated by Stalin to “honorary member of the Comintern.” Against the formation of soviet-type organs of Chinese workers and peasants, and even demanding that the CCP hand over its weapons to nationalist troops, Stalin prepared the catastrophe of the Chinese Revolution. With such a strategy, the enemy needed no great strategic thought to defeat the workers. The issue becomes even more astonishing in light of the successes the Chinese proletariat had achieved in Shanghai in March and April 1927—successes handed over, under Stalin’s orders, to the executioners.

The real test of class struggle did not take long. On March 21, 1927, a general strike was launched in Shanghai, with undeniable success, founded on the railway strike that paralyzed government functions. The CCP unleashed the insurrectional plan, disarming the police and multiplying workers’ armament. From the standpoint of military preparation and tactical development, the Shanghai insurrection appeared triumphant. But strategically, this partial success was not used to defeat the enemy. Instead of promoting soviets—or self-organization bodies adapted to Chinese tradition—on the night of March 22 the CCP opened Shanghai’s gates to Bai Chongxi’s Kuomintang expeditionary troops. The awaited moment for Chiang Kai-shek had arrived, and in alliance with opium magnates and the British embassy (eager to eliminate communists from factories), repression was unleashed under General Bai’s command against Shanghai’s workers. On April 12, thousands of workers were executed, having previously surrendered their weapons to the Kuomintang under Comintern orders. Strikes and union organization were banned—the gangsters Du Yuesheng and Zhang Xiaolin raised the “Society of Mutual Advancement,” a shock troop for exterminating communists—while Chiang negotiated with warlords for a pact-based national unification, without land for peasants. Not satisfied with this defeat, the Comintern leadership instructed the CCP to subordinate itself to a supposed “left wing” of the Kuomintang, personified in Wang Jingwei (an occasional adversary of Chiang on the issue of “alliances”), who led the nationalists in Wuhan. The experience led to another massacre of workers, with Wang and Chiang’s rapprochement in 1927.

shanghaimassacre-75933.jpeg
Chinese poster on the Shanghai Massacre of April 1927

Alarmed by the results of its policy, the Stalinist Kremlin suggested a 180º turn and launched an insurrectional offensive in Canton. Isolated and weakened by the Shanghai Massacre, Canton’s communists took up arms and seized political and economic control of the city. Under Li Lisan’s leadership, the CCP launched the insurrection on December 11, 1927; within hours, government services and the arsenal were in insurgents’ hands. Unlike in Shanghai, soviets were immediately erected in Canton to organize the economy: a series of decrees instituted land nationalization, confiscation of the city’s great fortunes, nationalization of major industry, banks, and railways.

Canton proved that it was possible for the Chinese working class to take power in Shanghai independently of the bourgeoisie and to lead the democratic-structural tasks of the oppressed nation, combined with socialist tasks of expropriating capitalists. The workers’ vanguard, supported by millions, was willing to resolve national emancipation and land distribution to peasants with its own independent program, against the bourgeoisie and warlords. However, the situation had changed after April’s events in Shanghai: Kuomintang troops entered Canton and militarily defeated the insurrection. The defeat was “splendidly” organized by Stalin and the new Comintern leadership.

From 1927 to 1949: Brief Lines

After the defeat of the 1925–27 Chinese Revolution, the labor movement fell into a state of catatonia. Under the dictatorial domination of the Kuomintang and warlords in the countryside, as well as Japanese repression, the Chinese working class endured years of setback and did not lead major conflicts until the end of World War II in 1945. Betrayed by the CCP and the Comintern under Stalin and Bukharin’s leadership, Chinese workers were atomized in the cities, disorganized and terrorized by Chiang Kai-shek’s repression and constant surveillance. The economic depression experienced in the country also discouraged any revival, even of defensive resistance.

In this nearly 20-year interim of workers’ quietism, some exceptions showed the vigor of anti-imperialist combat that had been part of the Chinese working class’s formation, especially in the late 1930s, when Japan prepared a new war against China. Centered in Shanghai, workers, in reduced expression, left their mark in resisting Japanese oppression between 1935–36—years of national protests against the Mikado’s interference—as well as between 1939–40, when Shanghai had already recovered from Japan’s military attacks of 1937.

The second major cycle of workers’ activism in China came with the end of World War II and the beginning of the civil war (1946–49) between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, after Japan’s defeat. Just as the first cycle emerged from revolutionary processes after World War I, this new workers’ uprising arose in tune with revolutionary processes spreading worldwide after World War II (decolonization in Africa and Asia, revolutionary waves in Greece, Italy, and France, anti-bureaucratic processes in countries under Soviet control). However, unlike the impulse given by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which under Lenin and Trotsky sought to expand revolution internationally and strategically aid the construction of new communist leaderships globally, in the post–World War II period Stalin’s bureaucratic leadership—responsible for the defeat of the Chinese Revolution—emerged with greater prestige. The Red Army, with tens of millions dead and the old revolutionary guard murdered in Stalin’s Moscow Trials, was the only force capable of defeating the Nazi German army, which gave the Soviet Union international respect within the workers’ movement.

For the Soviet Union, this scenario meant strengthening bureaucratic control over Russian workers and over one-third of the globe, where capitalists were expropriated by the Red Army (without workers’ protagonism), through the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. For China, it meant strengthening the Stalinist bureaucracy of the CCP, headed by Mao Zedong.

Mao, who argued that the revolution in China was directed “against imperialism and feudalism, not against capitalism” [4], defended that its driving forces included not only workers and peasants but also national bourgeois sectors and even landlords who “sensibly” opposed the Japanese. With Mao, we see Stalin’s earlier strategy of class collaboration with the national bourgeoisie under the idea that it would play a revolutionary role. This meant that, for Mao, the political front with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang was the central political-strategic piece, subordinating to it his conception of protracted people’s war for victory against the Japanese. Thus, Mao largely defended the policy that had led to the failure of the 1925–27 revolution, though unlike Stalin, he did not accept dissolving the CCP—an organizational detail compared to the open renunciation of workers’ political independence. For Mao, the CCP’s role was to guarantee unity with the national bourgeoisie at all costs and therefore protect it from the masses, strictly limiting workers’ and bourgeois struggles as a strategic condition for maintaining the protracted fight against Japanese imperialism. National liberation war was to impose limits on revolution.

Thus, based on a peasant party-army, Mao’s strategy of “protracted people’s war” did not aim to revive mass self-organization bodies of workers and peasants, but rather to suppress any soviet-type tendencies, like those in Russia in 1917 (which Stalinist bureaucracy had also suppressed). The CCP’s break with the Kuomintang only occurred by Chiang Kai-shek’s imposition, who, after Japan’s defeat and with U.S. support, rejected Mao’s policy of cooperation with the bourgeoisie and sought to eliminate the CCP. With no choice of alliance with bourgeois nationalism and rejecting the revival of democratic-soviet bases for the still atomized urban proletariat, Mao seized power after militarily defeating the Kuomintang. At the end of the civil war, the People’s Republic of China was born already bureaucratized, without Chinese workers having any freedom to decide the country’s political course, much less rational economic planning based on social ownership of the means of production.

Even with the obstacles imposed by Maoist bureaucracy, the second cycle of workers’ activism in China in the late 1940s was stronger than the passivity and resignation of the previous 20 years after 1927. However, the bureaucratic obstacle was strong enough that workers’ activity leading to the PRC’s constitution was substantially weaker than during the 1922–27 cycle.

The results of World War II were decisive for shaping the new cycle of workers’ activism, located on social terrain where Japanese imperialist aggression had practically receded after its defeat. After Japan’s surrender, the Kuomintang returned to China’s coastal regions. Japanese capital was expropriated, and its former Chinese workers placed under state administration. From 1946 onward, workers’ disturbances in China no longer occurred in the terrain of private capital but in the state arena. The combination of civil war, high unemployment, and rampant inflation after the war spurred major workers’ protests in Kuomintang-controlled cities (the CCP remained in rural areas surrounding major urban regions). In 1946, one in five people in Canton (228,000) were unemployed, and 30% (200,000 people) of Nanjing’s population were jobless. This panorama of poverty imposed by war’s consequences led to 1,716 strikes recorded in Shanghai in 1946, rising to 2,538 strikes in 1947. Behind workers’ revolt, the CCP fanned the flames in Kuomintang-controlled cities, without encouraging any soviet-type self-organization in the cities, over which it sought to exert control. After victory in 1949, the CCP dismantled, by coercion or repression, the labor unrest that had allowed it to defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s followers.

From the People’s Republic to the Tiananmen Square Massacre

This was a moment of growth in the material forces of the Chinese working class concentrated in urban regions. Between 1949 and 1956, the Chinese proletariat completed its transition from private property bases to state property. The industrial working class reached 25 million in 1952, increased to 54 million in 1966, and reached 148 million in 1988; of this total by the late 1980s, 100 million workers were employed in state-owned enterprises, while only 8 million were in private industry (Fairbank, 1986).

The situation of the working class in China, with the expropriation of Japanese imperialism and the socialization of strategic sectors of the economy, improved substantially. In fact, conditions improved for part of the working class—excluding rural workers and peasants. Workers in large state-owned enterprises, such as heavy industry (metallurgy and steel), gained multiple social rights: social security, lifetime employment, retirement, free healthcare, and wage increases. In exchange, the country’s military apparatus blocked all pores of political expression for the masses. The right to strike was virtually abolished, and People’s Liberation Army committees suffocated intellectual life in workplaces, whose administration was ossified by various levels of central and local bureaucracy. Except for scattered protests in the 1950s and 1960s, such as during the Hundred Flowers Movement led by intellectuals in 1957, there are no records of significant workers’ unrest between 1949 and the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

In 1967–68, with the major internal split in the CCP and the PLA, resulting from the economic catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese working class appeared as one of the important actors in the Cultural Revolution. Mao needed to restore his prestige, shaken by the economic adventure that starved millions of peasants by accelerating disordered collectivization of the countryside (in the style of Stalin and Bukharin in 1928), beginning in 1958. Peasants who failed to meet extraordinary production targets (with outdated means of production) were accused of sabotage. Against Mao, a faction within the CCP emerged, encouraging an orientation opposite to his regarding reforms. At the head of this opposition were Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The dispute between factions unfolded in Shanghai’s streets, involving millions. In this contradictory movement, a window opened to strike at a sector of Beijing’s bureaucracy, for which the Red Guards were organized, composed mainly of students and, to a lesser extent, workers. Political turbulence could have escaped Mao’s control; it was not impossible that, under certain conditions, a generalized repudiation of the entire state bureaucracy might develop—a specter haunting the Politburo during the Shanghai Commune. Mao decided to violently end the experiment once the rival faction was weakened; the PLA reestablished control, first in factories. The iron discipline imposed on Chinese workers stabilized the country politically through the provisional reunification of CCP leadership. One result was the transfer of the vanguard of these struggles in Shanghai and cities like Canton, Nanjing, and Tianjin to forced labor in the countryside: seventeen million young urban workers were sent to rural zones to rebuild food production between 1964 and 1978.

The other two landmark events of the Chinese proletariat in national life occurred in 1979 and 1989. In the first case, Mao Zedong’s death and the succession process revived factional disputes within the CCP between 1977–78. Deng Xiaoping, after returning from exile, sought to seize party machinery against Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. Fighting for a faster orientation toward pro-capitalist reforms than his internal adversaries, Deng resorted to a kind of second Hundred Flowers Movement, encouraging questioning of Guofeng’s faction. If we recall the observations of nineteenth-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, we realize that small objectives can mobilize only limited moral forces. Subsequent workers’ activities were thus modest, though the most relevant since 1966, given central government repression.

By 1989, however, workers’ protests were more robust—led by students—against rampant inflation, and inspired by questioning of Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland (which, lacking a political force simultaneously anti-bureaucratic and anti-imperialist, allowed Lech Walesa and Solidarność, with support from Pope John Paul II and Washington, to restore Polish capitalism). Workers took to the streets to improve living conditions. They were mercilessly repressed, in what became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

By Way of (In)Conclusion

From this brief overview of workers’ activity in twentieth-century China, we see that the Chinese proletariat was always involved in the ebbs and flows of the international situation, acting on the diverse terrain that class struggle produced—whether under foreign private property or under state property commanded by the Communist Party bureaucracy. Having most of its social rights restricted during the twentieth century, with trade union freedom and the right to strike reduced to zero, the Chinese proletariat was forged in the “heroic” mold, to use Giovanni Arrighi’s terms.

Workers’ movements in China tended to reach their peaks at decisive moments of national political conflict, and were both product and cause of political outcomes and economic crises. But in contrast to the 1922–27 period, when workers were at the center of conflict, in earlier and later insurgencies the dominant actors were students, intellectuals, peasants, or the political and military elites of the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army. In sum, we find one epochal moment (1925–27), a second important uprising (1947–49), and five smaller disturbances of the Chinese working class (1935–36, 1940, 1957, 1979, 1989) in its modern history. The most powerful manifestation of working-class strength came in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution; the second, as a consequence of World War II, coincided with the final stage of the civil war that culminated in communist victory. In China’s case, we observe social conflicts in which workers’ insurgencies were part of a broader revolutionary pattern. During the People’s Republic, workers’ protests arose in the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957, in 1967 at the height of the Cultural Revolution, in 1979 during the Democracy Wall Movement and Deng Xiaoping’s rise, and in the 1989 movement. In all these moments, deep internal political divisions, usually intensified by international crises, opened the way for large-scale workers’ struggles in China’s major cities.

This is important when considering China’s rise in the world system of states and its place as a power. Chinese workers today must act under conditions of bureaucratic chauvinism encouraged by the CCP, and with contradictions that combine major traits of dependency and backwardness with significant technological-scientific developments that allow it to challenge imperialist powers such as the United States in certain areas. Within this, China seems to constitute itself as a dependent capitalist state with imperialist traits. This descriptive formula has the advantage of better showing what China is today, highlighting its contradictory characteristics, its dependency, and its imperialist tendencies. It is against this internal enemy—the bourgeoisie organized in the CCP, engaged in a structural dispute as a rising power against the world’s greatest imperialist power—that Chinese workers must carve a path toward a policy independent of the post-Maoist bureaucracy and global imperialism.

More than the comprehensive organization of their struggles, the history of the Chinese proletariat is imbued with heroism in combat, and especially with the possibility of victory. Not only victory internally against the national bourgeoisie, but also the expansion of revolutionary triumph internationally, with the Chinese working class carrying forward a great communist strategy worthy of the name, as Trotsky defended. This has not yet happened. In the twentieth century, this perspective was blocked first by Stalinism, and then by its successor, Maoism, from 1949 onward—a brutal tradition to which current plenipotentiary Xi Jinping is heir. But the last word has not yet been spoken for the Chinese giant, and it does not seem that the turbulence will be limited to renewed skirmishes of Chinese nationalism along its Asian borders.

References

Perry, Elizabeth. Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor. California: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Selden, Mark. Labor Unrest in China, 1831–1990. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 18, No. 1, Labor Unrest in the World-Economy, 1870–1990 (Winter, 1995), pp. 69–86.
Honig, Emily. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1911–1949. Stanford: California, 1986.
———. The Politics of Prejudice: Subei People in Republican Shanghai. Modern China 15, no. 3, 1989, pp. 259–62.
Hershatter, Gail. The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949. California: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Maspero, Henri. Histoire et institutions de la Chine ancienne. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2025 (réédition).
Gernet, Jacques. Le monde chinois. Paris: Armand Colin, 1972. 2 tomes.
Grousset, René. Histoire de la Chine: des origines à la seconde révolution. Paris: Payot, 1942.
Elisseeff, Danielle. Histoire de la Chine. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997.
Cheng, Anne. Histoire de la pensée chinoise. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997. … See MoreSee Less

Notes on the Formation of the Chinese Working Class, 1840–1989 – Permanent Revolution – Fourth International (Asia)

crpnews.com

The history of the Chinese labor movement intertwines with the history of the country’s industrial development, stemming from clashes against foreign oppression in China and military conflagration a…

LaborFest

2 weeks ago

Melbourne Symphony Wins Discrimination Case Over Gaza Comments
The pianist Jayson Gillham had sued the orchestra after it canceled his performance in the wake of comments he made against Israel’s war with Hamas.
www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/arts/music/jayson-gillham-melbourne-symphony-orchestra-gaza.html?searc…

Jayson Gillham, wearing suit and tie, walks in a plaza outside a concrete building.
The classical pianist Jayson Gillham outside federal court in Melbourne, Australia, in May.Credit…Jay Kogler/AAP Image, via Reuters
Derrick Bryson Taylor.png
By Derrick Bryson Taylor
Published July 12, 2026
A concert pianist who sued the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for abruptly canceling one of his performances in 2024 after he had spoken out against Israeli forces’ killing journalists in Gaza was not discriminated against, a judge in Australia ruled.

The pianist, Jayson Gillham, claimed in a lawsuit that the orchestra had violated the country’s Fair Work Act and his right not to be treated unfavorably in the workplace because of his political beliefs.

But the judge, Graeme Hill of the Federal Court of Australia, ruled on Friday that because Mr. Gillham was an independent contractor he was not protected under the workplace rights law. The orchestra, Justice Hill determined, had acted to protect its business and reputation when it canceled the performance by Mr. Gillham and issued statements to its patrons about the matter.

“The court finds that the M.S.O. would have taken the same actions if Mr. Gillham had expressed a political belief in support of Israel, or if Mr. Gillham had made statements on any other topic that had the same impact or anticipated impact on the M.S.O.’s business and reputation that Mr. Gillham’s actual remarks had,” a summary of the judgment said.

In a statement on Instagram on Friday, Mr. Gillham, who is British and Australian, said he was “very disappointed” by the court’s decision. “I believe artists should be free to speak with integrity,” he said. “This case was never just about me. My principles remain unchanged.”

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Australia and Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
A spokeswoman for the orchestra said in a statement that it welcomed the judgment and that Mr. Gillham “should have sought the authorization of the M.S.O. before making the statements he made” from the stage.

The decision concludes an episode that began in August 2024, when Mr. Gillham announced during a solo recital in Melbourne that he would perform an unscheduled piece called “Witness.”

The piece, he said, was dedicated to journalists killed in Gaza, and had been composed by his friend Connor D’Netto.

Mr. Gillham told the audience that Israel was responsible for the deaths of more than 100 Palestinian journalists in the previous 10 months. “The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world,” he said.

The war in Gaza began after Hamas-led terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 207 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war. Tens of thousands of other Palestinian civilians have also been killed.

The day after Mr. Gillham made his comments, the orchestra informed him that it was removing him from the lineup of a concert that was scheduled for a few days later.

In a letter to people who had attended Mr. Gillham’s recital, the organization said the pianist had made “unauthorized statements” that represented an “intrusion of personal political views.”

At the time, Mr. Gillham told The New York Times that the orchestra’s response had caught him by surprise, adding, “It felt like an overreaction.”

In the aftermath, artists, journalists and music fans in Australia denounced the orchestra for canceling Mr. Gillham’s performance and defended his right to free speech.

The orchestra later said it had erred in judgment.

“The M.S.O. acknowledges that an error was made in asking Jayson to step back from his performance,” it said in a statement, adding that it was working to reschedule his appearance. “While the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra maintains that a concert platform is not an appropriate stage for political comment, we acknowledge Jayson’s concerns for those in the Middle East and elsewhere.”

It is unclear if another performance was ever rescheduled.

After the cancellation, the orchestra’s musicians passed a vote of no confidence in the administration, and the organization announced that its managing director was departing.
Corrected on July 13, 2026: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a journalism organization. It is the Committee to Protect Journalists, not the Committee to Project Journalists.
We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more.
Derrick Bryson Taylor is a Times reporter covering breaking news in culture and the arts. … See MoreSee Less

Melbourne Symphony Wins Discrimination Case Over Gaza Comments

www.nytimes.com

The pianist Jayson Gillham had sued the orchestra after it canceled his performance in the wake of comments he made against Israel’s war with Hamas.