Today’s Strikes

In 2023, data circulating on strikes in China showed a growing trend in workers’ struggles, with at least 1,794 “incidents,” strikes, or worker protests recorded by the end of the year, an increase compared to both the pandemic and pre-pandemic periods, with 1,389 struggles in 2019.

In 2024, however, there was a slight decrease compared to the previous year, with 1,509 strikes recorded, which was still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

2025 seems to confirm the level of 2024, with at least 540 strikes and protests recorded in the first four months of the year, mainly due to wage delays, factory closures, and layoffs, which are part of a worsening economic situation characterized by the trade war with the United States.

These rather sparse data, which may be incomplete in terms of numbers, do not provide information on the number of strikers, the duration of the struggles, etc. Therefore, it is not possible to identify in the current strike movement in China anything more than a few indications, which do not go beyond the obvious confirmation of the inevitable struggle of the proletariat and its growth in recent years.

In this context, the strikes at BYD, a giant among the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturers, involving thousands of workers, were particularly significant. The protests were triggered by sharp wage cuts and the failure to comply with the agreements signed in 2023 when BYD acquired the assets of the multinational Jabil. Thousands of workers in factories in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, and Chengdu went on strike between late March and early April 2025.

These strikes at BYD, given the importance of the group, the number of workers involved, and the fact that the strike took place in two different plants, may set an example for the hundreds of thousands of other Chinese workers affected by the crisis of capitalism.

In particular, the trade war with the United States is spreading protests throughout China demanding back pay or against layoffs in factories that are closing due to tariffs. According to estimates by Goldman Sachs analysts, up to 16 million workers are at risk of layoffs due to the collapse of exports following the increase in US trade tariffs.

Any worsening of the country’s economic situation will inevitably be offloaded by the Chinese bourgeoisie onto the shoulders of its own working class, pushing hundreds of thousands of workers into the arena of class struggle to defend their working and living conditions. A resumption of large-scale class struggle will require the Chinese proletariat to equip itself with the class-based tools that have already been used in the history of that sector of the world working class.

Looking Back at the Great Struggles of 1925-27

Exactly a century ago, an impetuous revolutionary movement began to shake old China. On May 30, 1925, in Shanghai, soldiers deployed to defend the international concession killed several workers and students during a demonstration.

This episode triggered a wave of strikes that spread from Shanghai to the main Chinese cities. In Canton, on June 23, British troops fired on a procession of workers and students, killing dozens. The proletarian reaction was immediate, with a general strike in Canton and Hong Kong. At least 100,000 workers left the British colony of Hong Kong en masse, moving to Canton, where some 250,000 workers were on strike and had practically taken control of the city. This was in June 1925, but it was in 1927, with the proletarian uprisings in Shanghai and Canton, that the movement reached its peak.

These episodes of class struggle in China have been repeatedly recalled in the writings of the Party, not to celebrate empty anniversaries, but because they constitute a fundamental experience for the revolutionary proletariat, not only in China, which, looking back at that period of disruptive rise in struggle and organization, can find examples to follow even today.

Looking back at that period of revolutionary upsurge, however, means identifying the profound differences with today’s economic and social changes, and therefore the different tasks that were set yesterday and today.

In that backward China, with a small working class compared to the boundless peasant world, where an anti-colonial national revolution was the order of the day, the Third International had clearly established in its Theses on the National and Colonial Questions that the true revolutionary movement was represented “by the poor and backward peasants and by the workers who are fighting for their liberation from all kinds of exploitation,” not by the bourgeois democratic nationalists, who were incapable of achieving their own bourgeois political and national goals. Therefore, even in backward countries such as the colonies, it was the proletariat that had to place itself at the head of the revolutionary movement, consisting mainly of the vast peasant masses, distrusting a Chinese bourgeoisie which, due to its economic role, having developed mainly as a comprador bourgeoisie, was closely linked to imperialism and therefore incapable of carrying through a genuine struggle for national independence. A fundamental condition for the Chinese proletariat to lead its struggle at the head of the revolution in China and in close connection with the purely proletarian struggle in advanced capitalist countries was the leadership of its Communist Party, strong in its political and organizational independence. Stalinism sabotaged this Marxist perspective by imposing the classic Menshevik tactic, leaving the bourgeoisie in charge of the national revolution and subjecting the young Communist Party to the bourgeois leadership of the Kuomintang through the entry of communists into the nationalist party, thus disarming the generous struggles of the proletariat.

Today, when a national revolution in which the proletariat would have to relate to other potentially revolutionary forces is no longer on the agenda in China, it is precisely the experience of its struggles and its organization in the 1920s that must be recovered by today’s proletariat, which is much more numerous than in the past, but crushed by the material force of a bourgeois state that ideologically paints itself deceptively red.

Within a few years, the small proletariat had organized itself into class-based unions, which at the first congress of Chinese unions in May 1922 had at least 200,000 members, while three years later, in May 1925, at the second congress, the number of members was around 570,000. This class-based organization had grown with the spread of strikes in the country’s industrial areas, which began in the aftermath of the First World War but gained strength and intensity from 1925 onwards.

Compared to the conditions of a century ago, the current economic and social context has seen a reversal in the proportions between the urban and rural worlds, with the formation of a large proletariat concentrated in huge metropolises, which continues to grow as farmers continue to move from the countryside to the cities. Above all, however, the tasks that this proletariat must perform have changed. It no longer has to shoulder the burden of a double revolution, placing itself at the head of the endless peasant masses, but must lead its own single-class revolution.

To accomplish this task, there are no last-minute innovations to learn and apply, but it is necessary to resume the path traced by those early Chinese proletarians who, a century ago, dared to fight their own class war, with the goal of seizing power.