Class Formation at the Periphery: Salt Workers and the May Thirtieth Movement in Republican China

Xianni Zhang, University of Michigan

How does working-class formation occur? Existing scholarship typically emphasizes either internal factors, such as workers’ cultural traditions and collective agency, or external organizing efforts led by political parties. This article advances a third pathway by showing how non-labor social movements can catalyze working-class formation. Drawing on the case of salt workers in Republican China, I examine how the May Thirtieth Movement, a nationwide anti-imperialist patriotic movement, accelerated the emergence of class consciousness and worker organization among a peripheral labor group. I show that the movement operated through two mechanisms. First, it introduced anti-imperialist nationalism as a new mobilizing ideology that drew salt workers into political struggle and opened space for the diffusion of radical labor ideas. Second, it expanded the capacity and willingness of political parties to organize workers, facilitating the rapid emergence of unions and worker associations. By highlighting the catalytic role of non-labor movements, this article broadens existing explanations of working-class formation and offers a new perspective on how peripheral workers become incorporated into class politics.

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 Presented in Session 167. Labor Coercion and Class Formation in Global and Colonial Contexts