The History of the General Strike: Shanghai 1925, A Chinese Minneapolis

Summary

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It Could Happen Here: The History of the General Strike – Shanghai 1925, A Chinese Minneapolis

Host: Mia Wong
Podcast Network: Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts
Date: February 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode, hosted by Mia Wong, explores the dramatic and formative 1925 Shanghai general strike—known as the May 30 Movement. Against the backdrop of recent labor activism in Minneapolis and changing perceptions of general strikes in the US, Mia draws historical parallels between the 1925 Shanghai uprising and today’s labor struggles. The episode dives into the context, catalysts, dynamics, and consequences of the strike, examining how ordinary people rose against oppression, why the movement ultimately faded, and the vital lessons for organizing and resistance today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: Why Shanghai 1925?

• Modern Resonance: The episode begins by connecting the current re-emergence of general strike talk in the US to “a strike that most of you have never heard of”: the 1925 general strike in Shanghai (03:12).
• Emotional Parallels: Mia emphasizes that while many may not know the facts, the emotional tenor—rage, grief, and resolve—strikes a chord with today’s protest movements:

  “Intellectually most of you have never heard of it. Emotionally, you already know everything about it.” (04:51, Mia Wong)

Historical Context: China in Turmoil

• The Warlord Period: Mia and a co-host explain how, after the 1911 Chinese Revolution, the country fragmented into warlord territories.
• Foreign Occupation: Major foreign powers like Japan, the UK, France, and Russia literally owned chunks of Shanghai—down to individual rail lines and neighborhoods policed and controlled by armed occupation forces (06:09–07:41).
• Daily Oppression: Police from occupying powers not only enforced foreign rule but routinely killed or brutalized Chinese civilians.

  “This is a strike that starts when an occupying army has taken over a city and starts fucking killing people.” (06:11, Mia Wong)

The Spark: The May 30 Incident

• Contract Talks Turn Deadly: What began as a labor negotiation devolved into a brawl; a Japanese foreman killed a well-known Chinese union leader (08:21–08:41).
• Escalation: Police arrested several workers and refused to release them, prompting a mass protest outside a British-run police station on May 30.
• Massacre: British police opened fire, killing ten and wounding fifty (08:51).
• A Witness’s Anguish: Mia quotes a moving passage from Ba Jian, a student on the scene, who captures the trauma and resolve such violence produces (09:13):

  “Reality proved they were bloodthirsty beasts. On the most crowded street of the city, they deliberately slaughtered unarmed people.... The time for patience was over.” (09:13, quoting Ba Jian)

• Modern Comparison: Mia links this historic violence to more recent events:

  “When I first quoted this passage in 2021, it was about George Floyd. Now it’s about Renee Goode and Alex Pretty. You understand... the overwhelming fire to do something.” (11:34, Mia Wong)

The General Strike Explodes (15:04)

• Immediate Impact:

  “What followed was the largest to that point general strike in the history of Shanghai. 200,000 people walked off the job almost immediately in the first wave of strikes.” (15:04, Mia Wong)

• Wider Unrest: The strike and protests spread across China. In Hong Kong, 250,000 people went on strike.
• Unity: Diverse groups—students, workers, business owners, and even gangsters—united against the occupying forces.

Challenges and Unique Features of 1925 Shanghai

• Gangster-Run City:

  “American cities are not... run by networks of organized crime who control every facet of political life... If you’re a union organizer in 1920s Shanghai, you are effectively a mob organizer.... The labor population... are migrant workers... brought in from other parts of the country by organized crime.” (16:16–17:20, Co-host)

• Violence as Politics: Mob violence, “dog beating brigades” (union enforcers with hatchets), and gangster dominance were part of daily life and labor organizing (29:56).

Why Did the General Strike Fail? (18:07–32:25)

Three Interlocking Factors:

1. Material Needs:

   • “People being able to eat, and the pressure that that put on the unions...” (18:47, Co-host)
   • The strike was sustained initially by union funds and sympathetic business elites, but as resources dried up, feeding the movement became impossible (27:30, Mia Wong).

2. Business Elites’ Betrayal:

   • Early on, patriotic business owners joined out of outrage, but when their profits suffered, they switched sides, prioritizing business as usual over solidarity.

     “Given the choice between imperialist occupation and me losing money and my workers gaining power, I will choose imperialist occupation.” (26:09, Co-host)

   • This pattern of cross-class alliance and inevitable betrayal is highlighted as a recurring theme.

3. State Repression:

   • Although brutal, it wasn't the immediate death knell.
   • Executions of leaders (“heads on pikes”), extrajudicial killings, and widespread terror followed, but:

     “...the repression isn’t what killed the strike. It was the problem of how do people eat...” (18:47, Co-host)

Organization Lessons for Today:

• The hosts point out that present-day activists have better logistics for sustaining strikes, citing recent mutual aid and food distribution efforts in Minneapolis (30:13).
• Lasting strikes must plan for food, housing, and resource redistribution—“you have to take control of the places where you're working and, you know, have them provide the food...” (30:26, Co-host).

The Uprisings that Followed: Lasting Legacy (32:08–33:53)

• Persistence Despite Defeat:
  • The initial strike’s suppression didn’t end the movement: subsequent years saw even larger general strikes and uprisings in Shanghai.
  • Brutal crackdowns followed uprisings in 1926 and 1927, but eventually, workers briefly took control of the city.
• Betrayal and Consequences:
  • Coalition with the Nationalist Party (under Chiang Kai Shek) and the USSR led to betrayal and mass slaughter of workers.
  • The episode underscores how these events politicized a generation and transformed Chinese history, shifting politics from warlord domination to popular mass movements.

Closing Reflections: Lessons and Hope (33:53–34:33)

• History Repeats and Instructs:

  “We are used to thinking that the times that we live in are unprecedented and in some ways they are. But people have fought our struggles before. People have fought and died and won to stop the reign of men with guns over our cities. And if we learn the lessons of both their time and ours... we can win.” (33:49–34:13, Mia Wong)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Emotional Parallels:

  “You understand that they are like us and you understand why they fought.” (11:46, Mia Wong)

• On Business Betrayal:

  “Given the choice between imperialist occupation and me losing money and my workers gaining power, I will choose imperialist occupation.” (26:09, Co-host)

• On Organizing and Survival:

  “If you want to keep this thing going, you have to take control of the places where you're working and… provide the food for people and have them provide the resources that people need.” (30:26, Co-host)

• On Legacy and Hope:

  “We have a world to win and nothing to lose but our chains.” (34:23, Mia Wong)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Background and Series Introduction: 03:12–06:09
• Shanghai’s Colonial and Warlord Context: 06:09–08:41
• The May 30 Massacre and Ba Jian’s Testimony: 08:41–11:46
• General Strike Ignites Across China: 15:04–16:14
• Gangster Politics and Migrant Labor: 16:14–18:05
• Movement Collapse: Food, Betrayal, and Repression: 18:07–27:49
• Tension with Business Owners, Logistics, and Worker Solidarity: 27:49–32:04
• Lasting Consequences and Lessons for Modern Movements: 32:04–34:33
• Closing Thoughts and Call to Action: 33:53–34:33

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Final Thoughts

Mia Wong’s retelling of the Shanghai 1925 general strike sets historical facts against a backdrop of present-day movements, underscoring that the challenges of mass resistance—material survival, elite betrayal, and state violence—are perennial but not insurmountable. The episode offers hope that by learning from the past and organizing effectively, new generations can seize their moment, build solidarity, and transform the world.

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Transcript

[Mia Wong]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Mia Wong]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Over the course of about a month, the general strike went from a pipe dream that even the most optimistic organizers didn't think could happen until potentially maybe 2028, to something that happened here. We saw a one day general strike in Minneapolis and everything is different now. People from SEIU are calling for general strikes. It's become a demand, it's become a tactic, and it's become a term that is on the tongues of people who never would dare speak of it before. And on this show, we are going to talk about the history of general strikes, how they happen, how they're organized, how they succeed, how they fail, and what the contemporary history of the tactic looks like now. When I originally planned this first episode.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

I was going to do an overview.

[Mia Wong]

Of about a hundred years of history.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Of general strikes to try to get.

[Mia Wong]

Us roughly to the modern era.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And then as soon as I, well.

[Mia Wong]

Not as soon as I started writing.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

That, deeper into the process than it should have been, I realized there was absolutely no way I could cover a hundred years of general strikes in one episode.

[Mia Wong]

What I kept coming back to was one specific strike, a strike that most of you have never heard of. So the general strike in Shanghai in 1925, what became known as the May 30 Movement. I want to begin here because intellectually most of you have never heard of it. Emotionally, you already know everything about it. Now, I have written about this strike before. It was in fact the first thing I ever wrote about for behind the Bastards, an episode about a Chinese warlord named Zhong Zongchong. But about a quarter of those episodes were about what became the May 30th movement. And so I am going to Recap a little bit of what I talked about in that episode and talk about some different stuff. And yeah, we're going to get you introduced to how you get a general strike. And you know how the course of.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

These things can go with a strike that will look shockingly familiar to anyone.

[Mia Wong]

Who has lived through this year, which.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Is to say this is a strike.

[Mia Wong]

That starts when an occupying army has taken over a city and starts fucking killing people. So a little bit of background about what is going on in China in the 1920s, 1925 is in the middle of what is called the warlord period.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

In China, which is a period where.

[Mia Wong]

Go listen to the bastards episodes.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

The short version of this is that after the 1911 revolution that had overthrown the Chinese imperial system, China became split between a bunch of warlords composed out of different sort of parts of the armies.

[Mia Wong]

Now, also in this period, large parts of China are under the direct control of foreign occupiers. These are countries like Japan, the uk, France, Russia.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

I think there's an American concession sort.

[Mia Wong]

Of in there somewhere. And these countries just own parts of China. And for our purposes, they also own parts of Shanghai and these things.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Both the territories they occupy and sometimes.

[Mia Wong]

Literally, you know, the occupation is they own a rail line.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

When I say they own a rail line, it's not just a company or even the country owning the rail line. They physically own the territory, so it's theirs. Like this rail line belongs to Japan, and so the land around the rail line belongs to Japan. And they can enforce their laws in it.

[Mia Wong]

And this is how it works. Also in Shanghai, inside of these concessions, there is an armed occupation. And in Shanghai there are British or French or Japanese police and military personnel.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

There who do law enforcement and will just kill you.

[Mia Wong]

Where, my dear listener, have we seen this before? I leave that as an exercise to the reader. Listener, I guess you're the listener. Now, this state of affairs came to a head in May 1925 when a Japanese foreman was meeting with Chinese union organizers at what was basically supposed to.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Be a contract negotiation session.

[Mia Wong]

There's a team of Japanese foremen and business people there and a group of Chinese union organizers.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And the details of what exactly happened are very, very sketchy. But a brawl broke out and the conclusion of the brawl was that a.

[Mia Wong]

Japanese foreman killed a fairly well known local union leader.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Now, the police had also arrested several.

[Mia Wong]

Of the workers who had been in the negotiations and continued to hold them even after a massive demonstration for the Chinese union organizer who'd been killed's funeral. So on May 30, protesters gathered outside of a police station run by the British to demand the release of their comrades. This set off a climactic confrontation that changed the face of Chinese history forever. The British opened fire on the crowd, killed 10 people and wounded 50 more. Now, half a decade ago, when I first wrote about this for Cool Zone, I read a quote from the great Chinese author and anarchist Ba Jian. This is quoted from Arthur Waldron's book From War to China's turning point, 1924 to 1925. And I want to return to it now for reasons that I think will immediately become apparent. This is about a student who witnessed the killings at the entrance to Yunnan Road. He saw the child who had been killed a short while before. He thought. About half an hour ago, the crowd was marching peacefully towards the police station to ask the police to set free students who had been unjustly arrested. They thought the police were human beings endowed with reason and human sympathy, that human blood flowed in their veins. They thought that uniforms and weapons could not have destroyed their human nature. But reality proved they were bloodthirsty beasts. On the most crowded street of the city, they deliberately slaughtered unarmed people. For this, there was no precedent in Chinese history. The imperialist oppression that had endured for so many years ached like a deep wound in his heart. He struggled inwardly. He felt the time for patience was over. He felt he wanted to spill his blood, to sacrifice his young life, that he might show that not all among his people were lambs that allowed themselves to be led without resistance to slaughter. He looked again at the corpse of the murdered child. His eyes shone with fire. His whole body began to burn as though on fire. His heart beat violently. You, dear listener, understand this. When I first quoted this passage in 2021, it was about George Floyd. Now it's about Renee Goode and Alex Pretty. You understand the horror, the suffering, the rage, the overwhelming fire to do something. You understand that they are like us and you understand why they fought.

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[Mia Wong]

What followed was the largest to that point general strike in the history of Shanghai. 200,000 people walked off the job almost immediately in the first wave of strikes. The strikes spread to almost every major city in China in some form or another. Massive student protests began. Entire cities rose as 1:250,000 people went on strike in Hong Kong. Students, workers, business owners and gangsters stood precariously as one to drive out the armed men occupying their cities. In an instant, the world changed. Things that were impossible the day before suddenly became commonplace. People flooded the streets, they were attacked by cops, they fought back, and for three months, they held on. Now, this was a much rougher time than even contemporary 2026America.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

We are in a little bit going.

[Mia Wong]

To get to the part where a bunch of people's heads get put on spikes by the government.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And you know, unlike 1925 Shanghai, for example, American cities are not contrary to the beliefs of a significant portion of the American conservative population, run by networks of organized crime who control every facet of political life and also economic life and also social life. To the extent that if you're a Union organizer in 1920s Shanghai, you are effectively a mob organizer, both in the sense that you probably have to belong to one of the organizations and to the extent that the people you are actually organizing at this time are like you're organizing the mob guys who bring in workers to serve as the migrant worker population. This is also actually an important aspect of the strikes in 1925, which is that much of the labor population in.

[Mia Wong]

Shanghai are migrant workers have been brought in from other parts of the country by organized crime.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Now, obviously, that's not. That is not really how migrant labor works in the United States. But you know, to some extent, the.

[Mia Wong]

Pressures of the labor discipline are very similar in that.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

The threat that is held over the heads of migrant workers is that armed men will come in the night for you. And right now, what we are witnessing is the armed men coming into the night.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

But, you know, as much as I.

[Mia Wong]

Talk about sort of the differences between these movements, I think the immediate question for our purposes is are there things that we can learn from this movement? And I think the answer is yes.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

But in order to get to the.

[Mia Wong]

What can we learn from this, we have to talk a bit about how the movement collapsed.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

So I said that the movement Held.

[Mia Wong]

On for about three months.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

That was in Shanghai. The history of some of the other cities is different and we kind of don't have time to, for example, divert, talk about general strike in Hong Kong, where the primary method that people used was they simply left the city and went back home.

[Mia Wong]

Which.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Solves some of the problems that we're going to be talking about in a little bit. But okay, in Shanghai, what happened to.

[Mia Wong]

This movement and why did it fall apart?

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

So I think there are roughly three factors and I think the first two are actually more important than the third one, which might be surprising when we get to them. But the first two factors were people being able to eat and the pressure that that put on the unions and secondarily betrayal from the business elites that they had allied with to get the strikes to work. And the third is peer repression. And the scale of the peer repression here is astonishing. I mean, some of the, like one of the guys who runs this strike is just executed by the state. Again, we're, I'm promising we're going to get to the heads on pikes in a bit. But the repression isn't what killed the strike. It was the, the problem of how do people eat?

[Mia Wong]

And it was the pressure from the business elite.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

So we're going to talk about the business elite first. Now when I say the business elite here in the early days of the movement, and this is a tension that's.

[Mia Wong]

Going to sort of haunt the Chinese.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Nationalist Party for its entire existence until.

[Mia Wong]

It splits from the Communist completely.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And even later than that, they're in a very, very uneasy alliance with left wing students, workers who are rapidly becoming left wing because this is also a city that was not enormously politicized until now and suddenly becomes politicized in ways that seemed imposs like a few years before. But there's like, there's a tension between them because initially these sort of patriotic business owners are really, really pissed off.

[Mia Wong]

That the foreign occupiers are murdering people in their city.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And sort of Nationalist and communist leaders are able to sort of broker alliances with them and they're able to broker alliances with organized crime, which is less important for our purposes. I cannot emphasize enough how important the organized crime people are in the history of, to the extent that like Chiang Kai Shek, who you, you may know as like the leader of the Nationalist Party and the guy who's eventually going to run Taiwan after losing the civil war. Chiang Kai Shek was an organized crime guy. Like he was in the Green Gang. So like, you know, very important to their story, less important to our story. But they, they act in a very similar way to the business owners, which is that in the beginning, and this.

[Mia Wong]

Is something that we saw in Minneapolis.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Too during their one day general strike, which is that a lot of business owners, either out of, you know, just actual genuine rage and grief over just the raw fucking horror of these monsters grabbing people from their homes and shooting people in the streets, cooperated it shut.

[Mia Wong]

Their businesses down for the day.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Now obviously there are other business owners who do this because they are producers. Am I allowed to say that they looked outside and were like, it doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the winds are blowing, going right. You know, they saw what was going on and we're like, okay, maybe my workers aren't going to show up. Or if I don't publicly support this, it's gonna get real fucked for me because everyone else around us. And that meant that there was a.

[Mia Wong]

Lot of cooperation from businesses.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

But we also saw very quickly after like a kind of a whole bunch of businesses and like sports organizations too, like signed a thing that was like, ah, we need to restore order. Do do do do do. Maybe end the occupation. But also please stop causing disruptions. Protesters.

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[Tara Davis Woodhull and Hunter Woodhull]

This is US Olympic gold medalist Tara Davis Woodhull and I'm US Paralympic gold medalist Hunter Woodhull. As athletes, our lives are about having a clear path and a team that you can absolutely trust. So when it came to getting the best mortgage, we chose PennyMac. PennyMac is proud to be the official mortgage provider of Team USA and you.

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[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Now in the Chinese case, what we see as the strike goes on is that the business elites began to see.

[Mia Wong]

The the strikes themselves and the marches.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And the fighting with the police and particularly the fact that they were also not making money and they were also putting their own money into keeping the strikes going as a problem because they are business people and the only thing that they really care about fundamentally is making money. There's a Marx line I wish I had here about like what the national character of Britain was. And it turned out that its only fundamental principle was land rent. And that that's like this, right? Like at some point these people are like, okay, well, given the choice between imperialist occupation and me losing money and my workers gaining power, I will choose imperialist occupation. And this is something that in cross class movements like this specifically, if you are trying to do a general strike, you're eventually going to have to deal with this, which is that a lot of particularly large businesses, and you know, some small business owners will fall in.

[Mia Wong]

Line with this too, right?

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Will eventually get to a point where they're like, I would rather keep making.

[Mia Wong]

Money than, you know, not have my neighbors taken away.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And that is unbelievably fucking bleak.

[Mia Wong]

But that's, you know, like that's one of the things that killed this general strike in China. And eventually in the face of this, right, we come to the second problem, which is that people needed to eat.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

So the union federation that set up had been just sort of giving people money so that they could eat. But they eventually start to run out of money and they don't really have a way to organize the sort of.

[Mia Wong]

Production movement and logistics of providing everyone with food without relying on the bankrolling of those business owners.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

You know, this becomes a problem because it means that they're suddenly getting attacked.

[Mia Wong]

By portions of the workers who aren't.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Supposed to be their base because they don't have food. And those people also just start like walking up the Chamber of Commerce meetings and walking in and beating up the Chamber of Commerce people for not paying them. And then like eating the banquet food for the Chamber of Commerce is a great story in the book called Shanghai on Strike by Elizabeth Ferry, who's a renowned scholar of Chinese labor history, about this. Very funny. There's lots of absolutely wild stories from this strike. One of the sort of recurring themes of this period of union organizing. And again, this is a really rough time, right? Imagine like gangster movies, 19, like 20s New York and like that Shanghai, but like the gangs are way, way, way, way stronger. So like the way politics works to a large extent is that people beat the shit out of each other and like call hits on each other. And the city is, technically speaking, it's run by like, what is a warlord army. And Then beneath the warlord army, there are all of these organized criminal organizations. But like, you know, the unions have this thing called dog beating brigades, where dog beating brigades, like, if you like publicly started scabbing or you very publicly were standing against a strike, like the dog beating brigade would show up in the middle of the night and it was just like a bunch of guys with hatchets and they would just like beat the shit out of you. And this was just like a normal thing that was happening during these strikes. So this whole period of Chinese history is nuts. It's wild. There's so much shit going on that's just. I don't know, they had. They had the dog beating brigade. I guess in the American context we'd call them like, like the scabby beating brigades or whatever. But, you know, it's a rough time for everyone. But what they kind of don't have without sort of business owners, they're never really able to sort of seize control of production and repurpose it towards, you know, keeping everyone fed. And I will say this is something that actually I think we are better at than they were in the sense of we are better at running the logistics of getting a bunch of people food and the stuff that they need to survive. This is something we can look at in Minneapolis where, and this is obviously.

[Mia Wong]

Coming from people's money, but a lot.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Of the organizing in Minneapolis is about.

[Mia Wong]

Getting people who can't leave their homes food. We've also seen in the last day.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Or so, tenant and labor union leaders.

[Mia Wong]

Are talking about a rent strike in.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Minneapolis which can help people, you know, not get evicted because they can't go to work. But it's also something that if you're going to do a general strike, yeah, you probably also have to do a wrench strike. But if you want to keep a general strike going. And this is something that we're going to get to a lot more in later episodes. The Seattle general strike is a very large example of this. If you want to keep this thing going, you have to take control of the places where you're working and, you know, have them provide the food for people and have them provide the resources that people need. But in this sort of context, almost everyone who's involved in this, this is their first general strike. What really happens here, right, is that the unions are forced to call off the strike. They get minor concessions in exchange from the foreign bosses. But what it does is politicize the.

[Mia Wong]

Entire city and it politicizes all of.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

China in a way that is going to shape all of the politics in the country forever. I guess, like, it's the thing that creates modern China is the politicization that comes out of this period. You know, it's what sort of transforms Chinese politics or something that was purely the almost purely domain of warlords into something that's now the domain of the Nationalist and the Communists. And obviously, you know, the military conflict.

[Mia Wong]

Is a large thing in this that we don't really have time to get into.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

But, you know, this period transforms the entire politics of China, right? People who had never thought about politics before, people who had never, you know, who had never like heard the words.

[Mia Wong]

Imperialism or like heard the words like militarism, right, are suddenly in the streets talking about it.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And they're talking about General Shrikes and they're talking about how can we run.

[Mia Wong]

These occupying armies out.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And I want to sort of mention.

[Mia Wong]

How this whole thing ends, right, which.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

The people keep organizing and they keep fighting. And one year later, in 1926, the first of the uprisings begins now, the first uprising. And these three uprisings are all sort.

[Mia Wong]

Of like called by the Chinese Communist Party and their unions.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

The first one fails horribly and the warlords put the heads of workers they'd killed on pikes. They have these squads where there's two guys with broadswords and a guy with like a sheriff's badge, effectively, who go door to door.

[Mia Wong]

And if they find someone who they think had like handed out leaflets, they would execute them on the spot. This, this is the kind of repression that they're dealing with.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

And they, they did it again. They tried again in, in 1927 and that one failed. And the second time, by the way it's worth mentioning, was supposed to be a general strike coordinated with an uprising. And they fucked up the coordination of it, but it did also. The second one was a 300,000 strong general strike. And the third strike was an 800,000 strong general strike. And they staged the interaction and they run the warlord armies out of the city. And for a sort of brief, glorious moment, Shanghai is in the hands of its workers and their subsequent betrayal and slaughter by the USSR and Chiang Kai Shek, mostly Chiang Kai Shek. The USSR is also at fault here for telling them to keep allying with Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists. That's a story for another time, but I think to close, we are used to thinking that the times that we.

[Mia Wong]

Live in are unprecedented and in some ways they are.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

But people have fought our struggles before.

[Mia Wong]

People have fought and died and won to stop the reign of men with guns over our cities. And if we learn the lessons of both their time and ours, if we use that knowledge to act in the moment of crisis, we can win. Conscience, history, and the cries of the suffering demand it. So let's go win the war. We have a world to win and nothing to lose but our chains. It Could Happen Here is a production.

[Redfin Advertiser]

Of Cool Zone Media.

[Mia Wong]

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.

[Redfin Advertiser]

Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us.

[Co-host or Guest Historian]

Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

[Mia Wong]

Or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Redfin Advertiser]

You can now find sources for It.

[Mia Wong]

Could Happen here, listed directly in Episode Descriptions.

[Redfin Advertiser]

Thanks for listening.

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[Mia Wong]

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.