Wang Shouhua: The Union Chairman Who Fell Before Dawn

Basic facts

26 years old

The first number in this piece is 26.

Wang Shouhua was only 26 when he died. The reports of China Military Online, the Shanghai Party History website and Eastday all stress this: "the first Communist to die in the April 12 counter-revolutionary coup", "aged only 26 at his death".

And what did he hold in his hands at that moment? — the organised network of several hundred thousand Shanghai workers (according to the biographical sketch "Wang Shouhua": by the end of March the unions affiliated to the Shanghai General Trade Union had reached 502, with 820,000 members; the workers' pickets were reorganised into 14 battalions, 2,700 men, with more than 20 machine guns and more than 4,000 rifles).

A man of 26, in charge of 820,000 people.

From Zhuji to Shanghai: the road of a bookish man

A couplet and a note

Two small things from Wang Shouhua's boyhood say a great deal about what kind of person he was:

(1) A couplet. One year he went home on holiday. At that time the countryside lacked doctors and medicine, and several people had gone into partnership to open a Chinese medicine shop called "Great Earth Spring". He went to congratulate them and presented a couplet:

"The common people fall ill; Great Earth Spring saves their lives."

The villagers all clapped when they saw it.

(2) A note. He also wrote a reading note, "Thoughts on the New Year in a Poor Household", describing the wretched lot of poor peasants running everywhere to beg or borrow on New Year's Eve through heavy rain and snow, fathers and sons split apart, husbands and wives separated, and ending with the demand: whose crime is this?

That a man who could write, at 12, "the common people fall ill; Great Earth Spring saves their lives", should later become the chairman of 820,000 workers, is no accident.

1925–1927: what he did

From acting chairman to chairman

During the May Thirtieth Movement Wang Shouhua was head of the propaganda section of the Shanghai General Trade Union. After Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi were forced to leave Shanghai and Liu Hua was killed, he shouldered the heavy task of acting chairman of the Shanghai General Trade Union.

His party posts rose steadily too: member of the Shanghai Regional Committee of the CCP, member of the regional committee's presidium (that is, the standing committee), head of the regional committee's workers' and peasants' department, secretary of its workers' movement committee, and others.

A work rate that "didn't care about his life"

In this period his work was extremely hard; he worked ten-odd hours a day, and kept working even with a high fever; and often could not spare the time to eat, so that his health gradually declined.

His wife Zhao Lanhua urged him to eat on time and not to strain himself so. He said:

"Eating a little late doesn't matter; what matters is not to let eating hold up the work."

When Zhao Lanhua worried about his safety, he told her:

"Don't be afraid. Even if I am killed, I hope you will live by your needlework and look after Mother well. Whatever you do, don't weep; weeping would let the reactionaries gloat and dishearten the revolutionary masses."

The three armed uprisings

Wang Shouhua was a core commander in the three armed uprisings of the Shanghai workers.

The scale of the third uprising: at daybreak on 21 March, Wang Shouhua, on behalf of the Shanghai General Trade Union, gave the order for a city-wide general strike at noon that day. At the one word of command, 800,000 workers struck across the city. An hour into the strike it turned into armed uprising.

"If they won't come, we'll do it ourselves!"

At the start of the uprising Wang Shouhua sent men to Longhua to ask the Northern Expedition's eastern-route commander Bai Chongxi to co-operate.

But Bai Chongxi had received a secret order from Chiang Kai-shek to hold his troops still, hoping to let the warlords wipe out the workers' armed force for him. On hearing this, Wang Shouhua said in fury: "If they won't come, we'll do it ourselves!"

Throughout the uprising he and Zhou Enlai, Luo Yinong, Zhao Shiyan and others directed the fighting on all fronts, "their eyes red from lack of sleep".

After two days and one night of bloody fighting, the third armed uprising of the Shanghai workers won a great victory.

The highest point of his life

24 March was the summit of Wang Shouhua's life. He was the man standing at the gate of the Huzhou Guild Hall, and with him stood the most glorious passage in the history of the district of Zhabei.

The last 20 days

Chiang Kai-shek arrives

Chiang put on a show of sincerity: "the pickets ought properly to be armed, there can be no question of disarming them; if anyone means to disarm them, I can guarantee that not a single gun or weapon will be given up." On 6 April, at the flag-presentation ceremony of the Shanghai workers' pickets, Chiang even sent a silk banner reading "Struggle Together", to keep the workers lulled.

A small episode: he drove a man out

A fellow native of his, an accountant at the Shanghai General Trade Union, came to Wang Shouhua when he saw how tense the situation was:

"Jinliang, with things this tense, let's make a bit of money and be done!" Wang Shouhua asked sharply: "What did you say?" The man said: "Let's just carry off a few cases of silver dollars and go!" Wang Shouhua flew into a rage and told him at once: "Is that what you came to the revolution for? Leave the cases here and get out, now!"

With death before him, he was still driving out a man who wanted to embezzle.

9 April: an invitation card

On 9 April, the great gangster Du Yuesheng sent round an invitation card, inviting Wang Shouhua to a banquet on the evening of the 11th.

The party organisation met to discuss it, and opinions differed sharply:

Wang Shouhua did not agree. He said:

"I have often dealt with the gangsters of the Qing and Hong societies; to refuse now would only make me a laughing-stock. For the cause of the Party and the working class, I would rather sacrifice everything."

For safety the party organisation decided to send Li Bozhi to accompany him.

8 p.m., 11 April

On the evening of the 11th, Wang Shouhua set out for Du Yuesheng's house. He told Li Bozhi to wait for him on Huage'nie Road (today's Ninghai West Road), and that if he did not come out within two hours, something had gone wrong.

What happened after he went in is the coldest passage in this piece.

But no sooner had Wang Shouhua entered Du's house than he was beaten unconscious, stuffed into a sack, carried to Fenglin Bridge and buried alive!

From the various accounts:

• the thugs first tried to force him to hand over command of the workers' pickets, and he refused on the spot;
• the thugs beat him unconscious, stuffed him into a sack, carried him to Fenglin Bridge and buried him alive.

At 8 p.m. on 11 April 1927 he walked in through the gate of Du's mansion. In the small hours of the next day the April 12 coup broke out. He never came out again. He had just turned 26.

The next day: rain on Baoshan Road

In the small hours of 12 April, at Chiang Kai-shek's direction, a batch of armed thugs of the "China Progress Society" run by Huang Jinrong and Du Yuesheng attacked and provoked the workers' pickets at their posts; then the 26th Army, on the pretext of "a quarrel among workers", disarmed the pickets, occupied the premises of the Shanghai General Trade Union, and launched the April 12 counter-revolutionary coup that stunned China and the world.

On the morning of 13 April the Shanghai General Trade Union held a mass meeting on Qingyun Road Square in Zhabei, protesting against the disarming of the workers' pickets.

When the chair announced the news that "our chairman Wang Shouhua has also been murdered by the reactionaries", the crowd at once shouted, "Avenge the chairman!"

That afternoon the Shanghai General Trade Union issued a declaration, raising 7 demands, among them "to hunt down the murderer who assassinated our chairman, and avenge Wang Shouhua".

Then, as the 100,000-strong marching column reached the neighbourhood of Sandeli on Baoshan Road, the machine guns opened fire.

(For the full course of the Baoshan Road Massacre see Part One · chapter 5.)

Afterwards

Not long after Wang Shouhua's death, the first volume of Sacrifice, compiled and printed by the national headquarters of the Chinese Relief Society, published a "Short Life of Wang Shouhua" in his memory.

His family searched for him for 23 years

This is the longest passage in this piece. According to the recollections of Wang Shouhua's grandson He Lihua:

After my grandfather was killed, the organisation at first did not tell my grandmother the truth, only saying that Wang Shouhua had gone to work in the Soviet Union again. Afterwards the family searched everywhere, and only then found the place where he had been buried alive; in the dead of night the family dug up the remains, changed him with tears into burial clothes, laid him in a thin coffin they had got ready, and hastily re-buried him under a tree not far off, setting a mark for mourning or for finding him again later.

In 1950 the chairman of the Shanghai General Trade Union, Liu Changsheng, told Zhao Lanhua the truth about her husband's death, and in the organisation's name invited her to come and live in Shanghai.

After the founding of New China, the civil affairs bureau, guided by the family, found the martyr's remains at the waste ground on the south bank of Fenglin Bridge, where Wang Shouhua had been killed, and moved them to the earliest Dachang Martyrs' Cemetery, holding a simple but solemn burial ceremony.

From 1927 to 1950: 23 years.

1957: Premier Zhou's charge

He Lihua recalls:

One afternoon in the spring of 1957 I came home from school and did not see my grandmother or my little brother. A neighbour told me the trade union had sent a car to fetch them. "It was only after the clock struck twelve that I saw my grandmother come back. Radiant and full of life, she came up to me and told me that she had seen the beloved Premier Zhou."

My grandmother said: Premier Zhou told her that Wang Shouhua, Zhao Shiyan, Luo Yinong and other comrades were pathbreakers of the Chinese revolution, that we must commemorate them and remember them, carry forward their revolutionary spirit, and build New China well.

Premier Zhou charged the family of the martyr: carry forward the revolutionary tradition, and strive for greater glory.

A wooden case

In 2024 the Shanghai General Trade Union and the Shanghai Trade Union Management Vocational College began collecting historical material from the public. Wang Shouhua's grandson He Lihua donated to the Shanghai General Trade Union a wooden suitcase his grandfather had used.

Over the many years since, this suitcase was kept by Wang Shouhua's widow, He Zhao Lanhua, holding the family's boundless longing.

One wooden case, guarded by a family for nearly a hundred years.

How to go and see him today

• the site of the Huzhou Guild Hall (155–163 Huiwen Road): his last open place of work, and the place where "more than ten thousand workers spent that night in the open before its gate, guarding their own organisation";
• the site of Qingyun Road Square (corner of Qingyun Road and West Baoxing Road): the venue of the 13 April mass meeting, where the news of his death was announced;
• 220–300 Baoshan Road: the commemorative point of the Baoshan Road Massacre;
• among the short videos of the Shanghai Party History website's "Red Faith Casts Shanghai" series there is one devoted to Wang Shouhua.

A closing line

Wang Shouhua's life was only 26 years long, and the time he was truly active on the stage of history was less than two years.

But those two years (1925–1927) happened to be the years in which Zhabei shone brightest in modern history: the Shanghai General Trade Union was founded in Baoshan Lane, the central organs in Sanzeng Lane were still running, the three armed uprisings of the workers were won in Zhabei, and the banner "Shanghai General Trade Union" was hung up in the Huzhou Guild Hall.

Wang Shouhua was one of the most direct protagonists of those two years.

He once said to his wife: "Even if I am killed, I hope you will live by your needlework and look after Mother well. Whatever you do, don't weep; weeping would let the reactionaries gloat and dishearten the revolutionary masses."

That sentence is the reason this book writes this guild hall, and this 26-year-old man, in at all.

Sources: the life and deeds follow the biographical sketch "Wang Shouhua" on the China Martyrs website (the Association for the Promotion of the Commemoration of Chinese Martyrs / the Ministry of Veterans Affairs); the Shanghai Party History website's "He Studied under Chen Wangdao, and for the Cause of the Party and the Working Class Was Willing to Sacrifice Everything"; the Shanghai General Trade Union's "Tales from Labour History: Wang Shouhua's Grandson Tells His Ancestor's Story"; and Eastday's "Red Faith Casts Shanghai" series. The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.