ABSTRACT
During the 30 years from the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 to the end of 1978, the study of workers’ movement history had experienced three different states: rise, initial prosperity and serious setbacks, and these 30 years can be divided into two phases: the 17 years before 1966 and the 13 years from 1966 through the transitional period until 1978. The first 17 years were the period of beginning and initial prosperity for the research on the workers’ movement history, during which nearly 60 monographs and 170 articles had been published. The main purpose of workers’ movement history research during this period was to cooperate with education which taught the cadres and the masses class consciousness and revolutionary tradition. In the 1980s, studies on the history of the workers’ movement had shown unprecedented prosperity, which could be considered as the golden age of Mainland China’s research on the history of workers’ movements.
