3 - Winds of Change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
Summary
Throughout the late spring of 1925, as the Bucks prepared to return to Nanking, anti-foreign sentiment was increasing dramatically throughout China. Events reached a crisis when Chinese laborers organized a series of strikes against Japanese-owned textile mills in Shanghai and other cities. On May 30, 1925, several thousand Chinese strikers and students staged a rally in Shanghai to protest the death of a worker in an earlier demonstration. As the crowds marched through the International Settlement, they were attacked by a police detachment under the command of a British inspector. At least twelve Chinese died in the shooting, and another two dozen were wounded.
The tragedy, which became known as the Shanghai Incident, marked a fundamental turning point in China's relations with Japan and the West. The May 3Oth Martyrs, as the victims were called, were immediately transformed into symbols of foreign oppression. “The patience of the Chinese … was at an end,” in historian Dorothy Borg's laconic phrase; “underneath was revealed an amount of hostility that astonished even the most experienced observers.” Anti-foreign hatred, which had been rising for a century, now crystallized into an explicit and central feature of Chinese political life.
Many Chinese would have preferred to see Westerners simply thrown out. Short of that, protest leaders concentrated on two issues: they called for substantial revision of the unequal treaties and an end to extraterritoriality. Surprisingly, there was a great deal of Western support for reform.
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- Pearl S. BuckA Cultural Biography, pp. 86 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996