May Thirtieth and the three Chinese seats: the Council's own account, 1925–1930

The short answer. On the afternoon of 30 May 1925, police of the Louza station fired into a crowd on Nanking Road and killed, by the Council’s own lowest count, nine people; Chinese accounts count thirteen on the spot. The strike and boycott that followed shut the Settlement’s mills and cut its power, and the Council’s Chinese advisers resigned in protest. Within a year the foreign ratepayers had voted to give Chinese residents seats on the Council that had governed them since 1854. Three Chinese members took their seats in April 1928; the number rose to five in 1930. This is the story as the Council’s own annual report and its weekly Gazette tell it, with the demands of the other side as the Council printed them and the places where other accounts differ marked.

A Council that could not make a quorum

The spring of 1925 had already gone badly for the Council. Its annual ratepayers’ meeting on 15 April was attended by 399 ratepayers holding 622 votes, “which fell short by 302 of the full number of votes required to form a quorum”, so nothing could be put: not the child-labour bye-law that had been “actively canvassed for several months”, nor the new bye-law to register printers, nor the increase in wharfage dues, nor the licensing of stock and produce exchanges. Seventy-six ratepayers asked for a special meeting, and the Council called one for five o’clock on 2 June at the Town Hall, with the same agenda, and told the electorate it “attaches the greatest importance to the passing of the Resolutions”. Those three measures, the printers’ bye-law, the wharfage dues and the exchange licences, were already being opposed by Chinese organisations in the city as taxes on Chinese business and a censorship of the Chinese press. They would reappear, in June, as demands.

The Council’s account of 30 May

The report for 1925 begins the story at the Japanese-owned Naigai Wata cotton mills, where a dispute with workers ended on 14 May in a clash in which a worker died. The Gazette’s police report names him “Koo Tsung Hung”, honoured at a memorial meeting on 24 May; Chinese histories know him as Gu Zhenghong (顾正红, Gù Zhènghóng). Students organised the memorial, and on 27 May representatives of twenty schools met to plan demonstrations in the Settlement. The police report printed by the Council then follows the afternoon of Saturday 30 May minute by minute. Louza station, on Nanking Road near Zhejiang Road, heard of the students at about 1.55 p.m. The first violence, as the police saw it, was on Thibet Road at 2.45, where a crowd attacked a foreign constable. Three men were arrested; a crowd followed them into the station’s charge room and demanded to be locked up too. About a hundred yards east of the station gate, the report says, the crowd set upon two foreign constables and tried to take their revolvers, and the police used batons. At about 3.15 Inspector Everson ordered Sikh and Chinese constables at the gate to fire.

The dead are counted three ways in the same volume. The police narrative says four were killed outright and that five of nine wounded taken to the Shantung Road Hospital died. The police summary at the front of the report says twelve killed and seventeen wounded. The hospital reported twenty admitted that afternoon, of whom nine died. The Council’s own manifesto to the Chinese public, dated 1 June, said the police “were compelled to fire upon these disturbers of the peace thereby killing four of the Students outright”. Its police report for June, written when the month was over, put the toll of all the riots at “twenty-two Chinese killed and thirty-six wounded”, including Nanking Road. Hawks Pott’s total for the whole affair, including a second shooting at the corner of Chekiang and Nanking Roads on 1 June, is 24 killed and 36 wounded. Chinese accounts give thirteen dead on the spot on 30 May and some forty wounded, and they have names: He Bingyi (何秉彝, Hé Bǐngyí), a student of Shanghai University from Sichuan; Yin Jingyi (尹景伊, Yǐn Jǐngyī) of Tongji; Chen Yuqin (陈虞钦, Chén Yúqīn), a middle-school boy; and ten working men, a telephone operator, a cook, a mechanic, a lacquer worker, a tailor, a pedlar. The Council also printed the hospital superintendent’s finding that the bullets had entered from the front, to answer the charge that the crowd had been shot in the back as it dispersed. The Chinese Ratepayers’ Association asked a doctor of its own choosing, Cecil Davenport, for a report on the casualties, which he sent to both sides on 12 June. The report calls the crowd a mob shouting “Kill the foreigners” and calls Shanghai University “pro-Bolshevik”; the other side of the street remembered unarmed students.

2 June: the meeting that did not take place

The special meeting went ahead as called, three days after the shooting, with the city on strike. At five o’clock the Council’s secretary, E. S. B. Rowe, asked those present to stay seated in the hope of a quorum. At a quarter past he announced that “as a quorum is not present, this special meeting of ratepayers, duly and formally convened, has not taken place.” The chairman, Stirling Fessenden, thanked the ratepayers who had come: “we feel we have your support in the rather critical period we are now going through.” The bye-laws on printers and child labour were not passed, then or later. The Settlement’s electorate, which had just been told by the Chinese city that it did not represent it, had not managed to represent itself.

The emergency

The proclamation Rowe signed on 1 June is printed in the Gazette of 4 June. The Council “hereby makes Proclamation that a State of Emergency exists”. No person was to “organize or take part in any Procession or Assembly or take any action that may cause a crowd to collect”; to “loiter in the public streets or in any public place”; or to deliver any speech, exhibit any “documents, picture, flag, banner or any other device”, or “invent, publish or spread any rumour or report which may stir up animosity”. “All Peaceful Residents are exhorted to retire to their houses during the Hours of Darkness,” and “the Defence Forces have orders forcibly to Disperse any Crowds”. On 3 June Colonel W. F. L. Gordon, commandant of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, was put in command of the defence forces, and residents were asked to volunteer for “the maintenance of Essential Services, such as Food, Water, Fuel, Light, Communications”. The same day, in a small notice beneath the large ones, the Council cancelled the rise in the rickshaw licence fee from $2 to $3 a month that had been due to take effect on 1 June. It was the one demand of the streets that it granted at once.

The strike grew for a fortnight. “By the morning of June 4, about 74,000 industrial workers were on strike in the Settlement,” the police reported, “and this number steadily increased until June 18 when not less than 82,500 industrial workers were unemployed.” Among them were 1,800 men at the Council’s own Riverside power station; when its Chinese electricity staff walked out the Council cut off power to Chinese mills on 6 June, putting perhaps 40,000 more people out of work, and it noted with alarm an attempt to bring out the waterworks, “for the city is entirely dependent upon the Water Works Company for supplies of potable water.” By the beginning of August 96,509 workers in the Settlement were on strike; 26,927 had gone back by 1 September, leaving 69,582 out. The state of emergency was lifted on 28 August, “as peace and order now prevail”, but the police mobilisation order of 30 May stayed in force until noon on 16 September. On 6 June the members of the Council’s Chinese Advisory Committee, the body set up in 1921 in place of Chinese seats, resigned. The Council, they wrote, showed no wish to punish those responsible for the shooting.

The demands, as the Council printed them

The Council’s reports are the only place its side of the argument can be read in full, and, to its credit, it printed the other side’s too. The police report for June describes a meeting of “about 1,500 persons”, students, labourers and delegates of societies, at the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce on 31 May, which decided on the general strike and passed twelve resolutions. In the Council’s summary they were: a boycott of foreign banknotes; withdrawal of deposits from foreign banks; Chinese control of the municipal police; foreign warships to leave the Huangpu; release of the students and workers in custody; the killers brought to justice and compensation paid; the right to organise and strike; no assaults in the mills; hygienic conditions in the mills; no cruelty to women and children; no Indian watchmen in the mills; and opposition to the printing bye-law, the wharfage dues and the exchange licensing. The Council drew its own moral: “the economic grievance of the workers were only a minor part of the programme of the student agitators.”

By the middle of June the Peking government had sent commissioners, and the diplomatic body delegates, and the Council printed the thirteen points the Chinese commissioners put. Cancellation of the state of emergency. Release of all those arrested and the return of the schools the foreign authorities had occupied. Punishment of the offenders. Compensation for the dead, the wounded and the losses of “labourers, merchants and students”. Apology. Rendition of the Mixed Court, with prosecutions “in the name of the Republic and not in that of the Shanghai Municipal Council”. Reinstatement of strikers with no loss of wages. Better conditions, and the freedom of any labourer “to work or not of his own accord”. The municipal franchise: Chinese “shall have a voice at Ratepayers’ meetings and be eligible for election to the Municipal Council”, in numbers “in proportion to the amount contributed by them to Municipal Revenue”, with the vote going to the beneficial owners of property. No more Council roads beyond the boundaries, and the existing ones handed over. The printing, wharfage and exchange proposals “finally abandoned”. Liberty of speech and assembly and a free Chinese press. And, thirteenth, “Dismissal of the Secretary of the Municipal Council, Mr. E. S. B. Rowe.” The Council added a further list of eleven “extremist” demands it said were in circulation, from the abolition of extraterritoriality to the death penalty for the men who fired.

The Chinese side had its own counts. Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白, Qú Qiūbái), writing for the Communist Party on 18 August, complained that the Federation of Workers, Merchants and Students had put forward seventeen demands which “leaned towards” the Shanghai questions of the Mixed Court and Chinese seats on the Council, and that the foreign chambers had privately offered the Chinese chamber those two things to end the strike. The texts of the Federation’s seventeen and the chamber’s thirteen are not in the Council’s papers. What is in them is enough to show that the three things the Council eventually gave, Chinese seats, the end of the Mixed Court in 1927 and the dropping of the printers’ bye-law, were all on the list by June 1925.

The Mixed Court was busy. The police counted 92 arrests for rioting or assault, 22 for tearing down proclamations, 35 prosecutions for “inflammatory strike and anti-foreign literature”, and 34 other charges, and reported, in a phrase that reads differently now than it did then, that “all of these, with a few exceptions, and thirty-four other persons charged for other offences arising out of the strike were extremely leniently dealt with, either by being cautioned, fined or imprisoned for short periods.”

The inquiry

The inquiry that the Council asked for was held by three judges, E. Finley Johnson of the United States, Sir H. C. Gollan of Britain and K. Suga of Japan, who arrived at the beginning of October and sat in the Town Hall on thirteen days between 7 and 27 October 1925. Commissioner McEuen was suspended from duty, “without prejudice”, from midnight on 2–3 October. No Chinese judge sat, and “the witnesses examined included only one Chinese, who is a police sergeant attached to Louza Station.” That was not for want of Chinese opinion. In September “local societies at various meetings during the month passed resolutions opposing the decision of the Powers to hold a Judicial Inquiry” and telegraphed Peking “urging that China take no part”. In October they took advertisements in the foreign press “setting forth in moderate language various objections”, which the Council’s own police report said “undoubtedly expressed the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese population.” The American judge found that a larger police force earlier in the afternoon might have avoided the firing and that the commissioner had been remiss in leaving the city at noon; the other two exonerated the police.

On 21 December Fessenden wrote to the senior consul. “Notwithstanding the fact that the findings of the majority of the judges exonerate the police from blame,” McEuen and Everson had “tendered their resignations”, which the Council had accepted “with an expression of appreciation of the meritorious services rendered by these officers in the past”. The Council “desires further to renew its expression of regret at the loss of life”, and “as a mark of sympathy with the wounded and with the relatives of those killed encloses herewith a cheque for $75,000” for the Chinese Commissioner for Foreign Affairs “to distribute to those concerned as a compassionate grant”. He returned it. The Finance Committee, meanwhile, had put the cost of the emergency at “about two lakhs” by September, with compensation claims still coming in, and had told every department to practise “the strictest economy”.

The seats

Chinese representation had been refused before. In April 1920 a motion to add three Chinese councillors was lost at the ratepayers’ meeting by about three to one; the Chinese Advisory Committee that started work in May 1921 was the consolation, and it satisfied nobody. After 1925 the argument changed. At the ratepayers’ annual meeting on 14 April 1926 Fessenden moved that Chinese participation in the Settlement’s government was desirable and that the Council should seek three Chinese members at an early date. He pointed out that Chinese residents paid a large part of the taxes and had no voice. An amendment to make the number depend on the taxes Chinese ratepayers paid, which was the formula of the thirteen points, was lost; the resolution carried with one vote against.

Three seats on a council of nine was not what Chinese organisations had asked for. The General Chamber of Commerce protested at any arbitrary fixing of the number, and the two years of civil war that followed gave both sides reasons to wait. The arrangement finally made in March 1928 was called an interim one by the Chinese Ratepayers’ Association, chaired by Yu Ya-ching (虞洽卿, Yú Qiàqīng), which asked for six more seats as soon as possible. The Council announced it on 6 April 1928. On 19 April the senior consul notified the election of the three councillors, printed in the report as Pei Sung-sun, Yuan Li-teng and Chao Chin-ch’ing, and they took their seats at the first meeting of the new Council, with six more Chinese members on committees. The Council’s report for the year called the arrangement completely satisfactory. In April 1930 the ratepayers at first refused to raise the number to five; after a further meeting the increase was approved by the diplomatic body in May, and five Chinese members sat from that year until the Settlement’s end. The Mixed Court had gone back to Chinese administration in 1927, and the parks had opened in 1928. Of the thirteen points of June 1925, the Council had conceded, in its own time and on its own terms, about half.

What the sources disagree on

The dead of 30 May are nine, twelve, thirteen or twenty-two depending on which page of which report is read, and the differences are partly of definition: killed outright, died in hospital, killed on 30 May alone, killed in the riots of the whole week. The Council’s figure of four killed outright, which it used in its public manifesto, is the smallest, and the Chinese figure of thirteen the one cut into the memorial. The texts of the Chinese demands here are the Council’s summaries, printed by the party they were addressed to; the Chinese originals, which exist in the published documentary collections on the May Thirtieth Movement, were not consulted. The Council’s own Gazette contains no reply to the twelve resolutions or the thirteen points, and its negotiating correspondence, if any survives, is not in the volume. And the Council’s reports never say who the thirteen were; the names come from Chinese sources a century later.

What to look for

Louza station stood on the north side of Nanking Road just east of Zhejiang Road, on today’s pedestrian street; the shooting took place on the road outside it. The Town Hall where the ratepayers failed to meet and the judges sat was at the corner of Nanking and Kweichow Roads, a block to the west; it is gone. The Shantung Road Hospital that took the wounded is the Renji Hospital, still on Shandong Road. A memorial to the dead of May Thirtieth stands in People’s Park, and the dates are cut into the paving at the Nanjing Road end of the park.