ABSTRACT
Shanghai, located on a tidal tributary twelve miles from the Yangzi River in south-east China, had been an important market town, county seat, and local port since the latter part of the Song dynasty. The most salient characteristic of dock labour at Shanghai in the nineteenth and twentieth century was its ethnic division and the persistence of traditional guild forms of organisation that, together with criminal intervention, inhibited the formation of true union activity. The historical circumstances of labour organisation at Shanghai at first favoured Communist efforts to create worker unions before 1927. The Qing dynasty traditionally regulated and taxed trade but delegated labour matters to the local authorities, who in turn relied on the guilds. In 1930, 157 unions had registered with the Nationalist government, which, again with Green Gang help, formed the Unification Committee for Shanghai Union Organisations, an umbrella for all the local labour organisations.
