The 1949-50 strike
The reasons for the strike were intensely debated, both publicly and privately. Most people in Hong Kong seem to have believed that the strike was originally a pretty straightforward wage dispute — wages were already quite low in 1945, thanks to the disruption of wartime and occupation, and then fell much further behind when prices soared in the late 1940s. Most people sympathetic to the workers stressed these relatively apolitical issues.
People on the other side stressed the role of the Communist Party in encouraging the strike – especially the role of communist activists who had been sent from the mainland to work in Hong Kong. Communists were heavily involved in the Hong Kong Teachers’ Welfare Association – a union organization based in the New Territories – and in the Education Advancement Society: a movement to establish new schools for workers’ children (including one for the children of tramway workers) which was a collaboration of unions and other social activists (including the Anglican archbishop). The Society worked cooperatively with the government from its founding in 1946 through about the middle of 1948.But with the increased success of CCP forces on the mainland in their civil war with the Nationalists (1946-49) and the general intensification of Cold War tensions, suspicions that the CCP was also trying to subvert the government in Hong Kong grew. The arrival of Alexander Grantham, a staunch anti-communist, as the new governor of Hong Kong in 1948 coincided with a crackdown on pro-communist schools, curricula, and teachers: Grantham urged that even singing and drama clubs which performed pro-communist material should be shut down. London hesitated to give Grantham’s government all the expanded powers that he asked for, but eventually did, and a number of schools were closed by the government for political reasons over the next few years. However, Grantham’s moves to close the schools for workers’ children in particular sparked a counter-movement to protect these schools, with considerable elite as well as labor support, and some of them survived.
Grantham was equally insistent that the labor movement was full of CCP influence that should be firmly resisted. When the tramway lockout and strike began in December, 1949, he insisted that the wage dispute was a mere pretext, and that the real purpose of this action was to disrupt essential public services, making Hong Kong vulnerable to a take-over from the mainland; he stuck to this point of view years later, when he published his memoirs. But British officials more generally were divided, with debate over the true nature of the strike reaching all the way up to the Cabinet in London, and also playing out daily in the Hong Kong press.
In retrospect, it is hard to doubt that the core of the dispute was the wage issue, rather than any political cause. But there were many CCP sympathizers in the labor movement, and they became increasingly important as the strike went on. Most workers were not being paid during the strike/lockout. Some also lost their eligibility for the subsidized rice rations that the government was providing to workers in key industries during this highly inflationary period – because, as the government’s Commissioner of Labour explained, they were not working. With many workers thus desperate for help with daily expenses, assistance from others became increasingly important (though the company did supply some rice to locked-out workers). Some help came from left-leaning groups within Hong Kong—both workers in other unions and better-off “progressives,” including many independent professionals. But there were also support campaigns organized in Guangdong that delivered food and other supplies to the Hong Kong strikers, and activists who came to assist their picketing and other activities. This, of course, further entrenched the belief among groups hostile to the strikers that they were – willingly or not – being used by the CCP for its political project.
In the last phase of the strike, the alignment of at least some of the workers with the CCP became more overt. Beijing made its first official public statement in support of the strikers on January 25 (roughly one month into the work stoppage). The next day, a South China Morning Post reporter announced that a large pro-union crowd (which he estimated at over 5,000), after successfully extracting a promise from the company that they would not hire a non-union job-seeker who had just left company headquarters, had celebrated by dancing the yangke, a North Chinese peasant song and dance that had been adapted by CCP propaganda troupes as a form of victory celebration. (Because this was not a dance form common in South China or Hong Kong, people who knew how to do it were presumed to have learned it from CCP-sponsored events.) The same reporter was then taken to visit the Tramway Workers’ Union headquarters, where he said he saw a large portrait of Mao Zedong on the wall and various other signs of pro-CCP sentiment. A few days later, after the January 30 clash between union supporters and police, a meeting of about 1,200 representatives of various Hong Kong unions decided not to call for a general strike, as some people had feared it would. But the meeting did ask the Federation of Trade Unions to formally request that Mao Zedong take (unspecified) action against the Hong Kong authorities and their “fascist” police tactics.
No action followed, and the strike ended on February 9-10. The increasingly radical tone of its last two weeks did, however, make it easier for the government to justify deporting 38 pro-union activists to the mainland, while the CCP quietly repatriated a number of its underground members from Hong Kong to the mainland. One of those repatriated was Li Xiaxiang, who had been head of the school for tramway workers’ children, and was married to a general in the Communist armed forces; she later headed various schools affiliated with the army in Heilongjiang.
