ABSTRACT
Changsha Riot's construction workers before 1922 were not the most obvious target for Communist organizers. Yet Mao Zedong managed to recruit these hard hats into a Communist-led union. His opportunity came as a result of a long and usually quiet battle between the proponents of two different ways of organizing production: guild members and the new industrial captains of Europe, the advocates of free trade and free enterprise. The ability of journeymen to induce a favourable response from the guild over time had produced an expectation that the guild would keep wages in line with the cost of living. The major issue that revealed the differentiation and set off the process of unionization was a demand of the journeymen for higher wages in spite of a wage freeze that had been imposed by the war-lord Zhang Jingyao after a construction workers' strike in 1919.
