This Week in China's History: The May 30 Massacre

May 30, 1925

Listen to Kaiser’s narration above!

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May 30, 1925, was a Saturday. In the center of Shanghai’s International Settlement, near the intersection of what is today Nanjing Road and People’s Square, Saturdays were race days. Enormous crowds packed Nanking Road and headed for the Shanghai Race Club, where they could spend the day watching the races and betting on the peculiarly small horses that captured the attention of Shanghai’s sporting set.

On this particular Saturday, Nanking Road was indeed crowded, but not with race fans. More than 1,000 people — mostly Chinese students — were gathered outside a police station, demanding the release of several students who were being detained by police, but also to protest foreign imperialism more generally, powerfully symbolized by the Race Club’s main grandstand just a stone’s throw away. Tensions escalated as the crowd grew larger and pressed toward the station’s gates.

The crowd was not violent but was certainly menacing to those inside the police station. The police force was itself an imperial institution: the Shanghai Municipal Police, a British-run organization charged with maintaining order and enforcing law in the International Settlement, a colony in all but its name at the heart of Shanghai. Much of the SMP’s force was Chinese or Sikh, though its leadership was mostly British. In charge of the station as the crowd edged closer was Inspector Edward Everson, who had been left in charge because his superiors were all — with irony that is a little too on-the-nose — at the races.

Shanghai in the 1920s was a city of extremes. The decadence and glamor of the Bund contrasted with China’s largest industrial workforce. A jigsaw of jurisdictions made both interpreting and enforcing the law a challenge. Above all else, Shanghai relied on a mix of Chinese and foreign to sustain itself. As Yinson Lee, an Australian-Chinese practicing law in the city wrote,  “The prosperity of Shanghai… cannot be maintained without the cooperation of foreign and Chinese interests and international friendship. One is entirely dependent on the other.”

Lee’s vision of Sino-foreign cooperation was one aspect of relations between Chinese and non-Chinese in Shanghai, but it was not the only one. The city, with its concentration of foreign concessions and extraterritorial privileges, operated as a colony in many ways, and tension was never far beneath the surface. The Bund’s decadent glamor and the massive, increasingly skilled labor force were tied to the foreign presence and a growing nationalism. The Republic of China had been founded — at least in part — on the promise of seeing China take its place in a family of nations and ending the system of imperialism that had kept China down during a “century of humiliation” beginning with the First Opium War. Nationalist sentiment grew more intense when Sun Yat-sen, leader of the KMT, took ill in January. Sun’s fight to survive — he would die in March of liver cancer — seemed to become a metaphor for the country’s struggle.

These twin forces of nationalism and economic unrest were powerfully illustrated in the factories of Shanghai, especially the Japanese-owned cotton mills that employed many thousands of workers, often in difficult conditions. Strikes and other labor actions were frequent occurrences, and in one mill — the #8 Cotton Mill — unrest had been ongoing for months. In February, workers attacked a group of Japanese managers as they left the factory, killing one man. Factory managers armed themselves in response, with predictable results. A pattern of strikes and lockouts went on through the spring, until May 15, when locked-out workers crashed through the factory’s gates and began destroying machinery. One foreman put his new weapon to deadly effect, shooting and killing one worker, Gù Zhènghóng 顾正红.

Outrage spread across Shanghai. Protests, arrests, and strikes sprang up in response to Gu’s killing. One such protest was a funeral parade that processed through the streets of the International Settlement on the way to Gu Zhenghong’s public funeral, about a week after the confrontation at the cotton mill. Mourners -cum-protesters carried banners as they walked, and Settlement police arrested a half-dozen student leaders for disturbing the peace. The students were held in the Louza Police Station, on Nanking Road, and their trial was set for May 30.

In response, students planned a mass protest for the day of the trial, adding the release of the student leaders to their demands. As the trial got started inside the station, police tried to short-circuit the protest, by arresting 15 more student organizers early that morning. Word of the further arrests inflamed the situation and the crowd swelled, approaching two thousand people by early afternoon. 

The situation was combustible by any measure, but confusion added to the trouble. Some protesters were motivated to disrupt the trial of the students arrested the week previous. Others were trying to secure the release of the students who had just been taken into custody. Still more saw the demonstration as more general opposition to the power of foreigners and the injustices of colonialism, while many more were responding to the economic inequities that had given rise to the initial violence at the cotton mills. With many competing agendas, the risks of violence grew..

Surrounded by thousands of angry protesters chanting slogans (some claimed they were shouting “kill the foreigners!” although others suggest they were patriotic shouts), Inspector Evanson ordered a detachment of Sikh and Chinese constables to take up arms to defend the station. Addressing the crowd in Shanghainese,  he ordered them to disperse. Just a few seconds elapsed before he fired his revolver into the crowd and ordered his men to open fire. In a flash, eleven protesters lay dead or dying, with 20 more wounded on the street.

The response was swift and widespread. The following day, students convened to demand the dissolution of the International Settlement and an end to extraterritoriality in China. A general strike enveloped Shanghai. On Monday, the International Settlement implemented martial law, calling foreign troops to maintain order and provide services. Public utilities were maintained by volunteers, and up to a third of the Chinese members of the Settlement police refused to work. Foreign goods and businesses were boycotted. The protests spread to at least 28 other cities.

Like many other tragic incidents, May 30 became both a date and symbol. The “May 30 Incident” or “massacre” refers to the events of that lethal day; the May 30 Movement it engendered was wide-ranging and powerful. Demands to dissolve the settlement and end extraterritoriality were not met — it would take the Second World War to accomplish those goals — but the movement fueled nationalism and anti-imperial sentiment at exactly the right moment to help the KMT unite China as it began its Northern Expedition, a march northward from its base in Guangdong that would — the party hoped — realize the dream of the Republic and help China become a unified and powerful state, no longer subject to the violence and humiliation of foreign imperialism

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