Introduction
In the summer of 1920 in Shanghai, an eyewitness account of a meal period for textile workers in the workplace headlined the first issue of Laodongjie (Labour World)—a magazine published by underground communist cell members even before the official founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).Footnote 1 The investigated workplace was one of nine mills belonging to the Shenxin Textile Manufacturing Company, China's largest textile business, the owners of which—the Rong family—were nicknamed the ‘Rockefellers of China’.Footnote 2 The author, using the pseudonym Ji, was appalled by the chaotic scene in the factory compound during the meal break. The makeshift canteen was crowded with workers who brought their own bamboo lunch baskets because meals were not provided. The canteen looked like a battlefield because the workers had to find a seat to finish their meals as quickly as possible.
Like many other textile mills in Shanghai, Shenxin's mealtime was the only officially permitted break—generally 15 minutes, 30 minutes at best—during a more than 12-hour work day. Because of the long working hours and limited lunch break, the workers had no choice but to finish the cold rice that they had cooked at home and brought to the workplace as quickly as possible. Therefore, they poured hot water over their lunch baskets to warm the rice and make what was called paofan or ‘hot-watered rice’. Even the available hot water at the mill was not clean. Ji lamented that the ‘hot water the workers poured on their lunch baskets was extremely smelly’. Nonetheless, the workers appeared to be ‘accustomed to—or have given up already—eating their lunch with such dirty water’.Footnote 3 Even decades later, Shanghai workers never forgot what they had eaten and how they ate it in such a detestable workplace environment. One Shenxin Textile worker, Yao Guiying, even more than 40 years later, recalled that the ‘hot water pipeline was often clogged; the water was usually not warm enough’.Footnote 4 The inadequacy of the workers’ diets and meal environment was prevalent in every Chinese industrial city. There was ‘no set time for eating’. When ‘we finished eating,’ recollected Zhang Wenqing, a Tianjin cotton mill worker, ‘there was no hot water, so we drank cold water. During the night shift, people were farting all over the place, and it stank because we were not digesting our food properly.’Footnote 5 Chinese workers’ miserable eating conditions were an ideal breeding ground for radical and militant labour movements in 1920s China.
This article explores how workers’ diets and meal service at factory canteens became the centrepiece of labour politics in Republican Shanghai, China's largest industrial city. At the heart of Chinese labour politics was a demand for the improvement of workers’ diets, particularly for an adequate meal service, which was to be provided by the management at a decent price—if not for free—at the workplace. Having initiated a number of successful labour disputes before the appearance of the CCP cadres, Chinese workers themselves took significant political action, namely ‘rice strikes’ (migui bagong), in the 1920s. These ‘rice strikes’ in turn triggered significant social repercussions. In the wake of labour disputes, industrial employers changed their perceptions of the relation between industrial health and work efficiency. Setting up a factory canteen and providing meal services did not simply denote a concession to the workers’ demands. Rather, the factory canteen was turned into a testing ground for forward-looking industrial entrepreneurs to experiment with a new method of labour management at a minimal cost and for maximum industrial output because they came to realize that well-fed workers who were able to maintain an optimal physical condition were able to generate maximum productivity.Footnote 6 With a series of industrial-reform programmes, the Guomidang (GMD) Nationalists also began to make unsparing efforts to garner the growing political potential of the labour force. In the eyes of the GMD technocrats, providing optimal nutrition to the workforce was quintessential to fulfilling the party's cardinal cause: building a strong industrial nation.Footnote 7
This article argues that the issue of food in the arena of labour politics was apparently less political but much more consequential than any other labour issue. Wave upon wave of Chinese labour strikes in the turbulent 1920s have drawn significant scholarly attention.Footnote 8 However, few have paid careful attention to the issue of workers’ food in the heyday of Chinese labour activism. Previous scholarship tends to regard labour unrest caused by the issue of food as nothing more than what contemporary labour activists called an ‘economic struggle’ (jingji douzheng), which should be distinguished from a ‘political struggle’ (zhengzhi douzheng) that would have either awakened class consciousness or galvanized militant and massive labour protests. Compared with well-known political strikes culminating in the May Fourth Movement (1919), the May Thirtieth Movement (1925), and the Workers’ Armed Uprisings (1926–27), workers’ outrage over the issue of food and the subsequent labour disputes rarely developed into meaningful political protests. They were spontaneous, impetuous, and less political, if not apolitical.
However, no other issue provided a better opportunity to unite workers, from labour activists to so-called scabs, than the issue of food. For example, when ‘the price of rice soared beyond all previous records’ in the summer of 1926, ‘the question of a rice allowance [came] up in a large number of factories’. ‘Even if workers struck,’ one contemporary observer noted, ‘the strike was of the shortest duration, a lightning strike.’ However, the same observer was stunned by the volatility of the food issue in labour politics: ‘When the rice allowance was refused, workers became particularly antagonistic and bitter.’Footnote 9 Even after Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists relentlessly purged the CCP members and radical labour activists from Shanghai, the city's continuous increase in food prices caused labour unrest. As Elizabeth J. Perry argues, it was inflation, not production, that united workers at the point of consumption. Whereas Chinese workers in the workplace were divided by skill, gender, and a sense of belonging to a native place, as consumers, they all suffered from cost-of-living increases in the marketplace.Footnote 10 A labour-investigation report compiled by the Nationalists’ Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs observed unique characteristics of the labour disputes caused by rice prices: the short duration of the dispute but the massive number of affected workshops and workers.Footnote 11 The steady increase in consumer prices and living costs also harmed employers because their expenditures for meal services (or various forms of food-based labour benefits) outweighed the company's net profits. In short, labour relations between management and workers—whether they were contentious or collaborative—were in tandem with market uncertainty, particularly the fluctuations of rice prices.
My goal is not only to draw attention to a lacuna in Chinese labour history, but also to shed new light on the agency of workers in their labour disputes from the perspective of food history. Recent studies have examined the social and cultural significance of food in twentieth-century China by illuminating the role played by dietary reformers and public-health authorities vis-à-vis their technical expertise.Footnote 12 In this field of scholarship, however, workers were not able to assert their political presence, but were rather depicted as passive objects of various top-down reform practices such as the public-hygiene movement, dietary-reform campaigns, and scientific relief activities. Factory canteens and new meal services in the industrial workplace were not an easily arranged labour benefit; they were the painstaking outcome of contentious labour politics in which both workers and employers played the game with their own calculations and logic. This article places factory canteens at a convergence point at which a number of colliding perceptions and practices existed: labour entitlement, a new method of industrial management, and the GMD's industrial-reform policy. The installation of a canteen and improvements in the quality of meal service were not the end of the labour dispute by any means. The factory canteen evolved into the starting point for a new type of contentious food politics because labour and management had opposing expectations of canteen food.
Horrors of the table
Shanghai had approximately 600,000 wage workers—one-sixth of the 3.6 million Chinese wage workers in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 13 Most unskilled workers cooked only once a day; daytime shift workers cooked dinner in the evening after returning from work; the night-time shift workers prepared their first meal of the day before going to work. This meal was the only hot meal that the workers had on a given day; they ate leftover food the next morning because they did not have sufficient time to cook before going to work.Footnote 14 They poured hot water over the leftovers and made a lukewarm meal in the morning. Again, the leftovers were taken to the factories. The aforementioned mealtime at Shenxin Textile was not the worst situation amongst workplaces at that time. Because most textile mills did not switch off the machines during the lunch break, the workers were organized into groups to alternate their lunch breaks: while one group ate, the other group kept watch over their own machines and the machines of those who were eating. To finish their lunch on time, the workers had to eat ‘hot-watered rice’ (paofan), which was neither hot enough nor too cold; the consumption of this rice involved partly drinking and partly chewing. Both the portions and the calories from their meals were extremely small. Over this paofan, workers added ‘a few mouthfuls of bean curd, salt fish, or some other simple relish’.Footnote 15
Satiety never lasted long. Workers testified that ‘they felt hunger immediately when they urinated after the meal even though they had had two or three bowls of hot-watered rice’. Satiety did not last until 11:00 am; many workers complained that they ‘felt their eyes were bulging out of their faces and their stomachs were growling’.Footnote 16 The weather conditions also affected the workers’ diets and subsequent health problems. In the hot and humid summer months, the workers could not eat their paofan because the high temperature of the room spoiled the rice they brought from home. Some workers instead bought fruit and berries at the front gate of the factory and ate them in the factory. Fruit and berries offered sufficient liquid for hot-weather periods and the juice was doubtless safer than the non-potable water. However, fruit did not offer sufficient nutrients by any means.Footnote 17
Regardless of seasonal changes, some workers bought snacks such as buns, whole-grain cakes, and similar foods from peddlers and hawkers at the front gate of the factory; however, this was only possible when the workers had sufficient money on hand. The factory gates of large factories became a bustling place for food peddlers, hawkers, and makeshift food stalls of all varieties. This was particularly so when the time came for the shift change; more than 1,000 workers entered the factory, and a similar number of workers left the workplace from the previous shift and passed through the gates. In the working-class neighbourhoods in Yangshupu and Pudong, in which industrial mills and plants abounded, countless makeshift food stalls in tents lined the streets to sell light snacks such as noodles, dabing (plain whole-grain cakes), buns, noodle dumplings, and sweet cakes. These snack items were popular because they were easy to carry into the workplace.Footnote 18
Meal spaces outside the factory were no better than those within the factory compounds. Many contemporary observers criticized the unhealthy eating conditions both inside and outside the factory compound. In his first visit to the British-American Tobacco Company in the Pudong industrial compound, George Sokolsky, an American journalist, was struck by the factory's poor eating conditions. It was known that foreign companies in Shanghai offered working conditions and benefits that were better than, if not profoundly superior to, those of their Chinese counterparts. In particular, the British-American Tobacco Company was renowned for its generous employee benefits, including dormitories, factory clinics, schools for the employees’ children, and savings funds.Footnote 19 However, food was a completely different story; there was no meal service for the workers. The British-American Tobacco Company's more than 7,000 workers had no choice but to bring rice baskets from home or buy snacks outside the factory compound. Sokolsky was astounded when he looked around the neighbourhood streets outside the compound in which small food shops were packed and were ‘filthy and the food shops provide food of little nourishment; which [wa]s expensive because nutritious value [wa]s so small compared to prices paid’.Footnote 20 He strongly urged that ‘something should be done to clean up the environs of the factory and to control the food vendors’.Footnote 21 Likewise, Vera Kelsey, another contemporary American journalist residing in 1920s Shanghai, asserted that the workers’ poor diets and unsanitary eating conditions were urgent issues facing industrial China. Throughout the city, workers had to eat at ‘shops and restaurants’ on streets that were ‘crowded day and night with passing workers, motor trucks, trucks pulled by coolies, rickshaws, wheelbarrows, venders of vegetables, fruits, clothes, cakes, cans, and sandals’. Kelsey bemoaned that Chinese industrial workers could not escape the ‘horrors of the table’.Footnote 22
How did the workers themselves respond to this issue? In what manner did they speak out themselves? The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) was one of the earliest labour activist organizations that raised the issue of food and industrial health. The YMCA's ‘returned labourer programme’, which was organized by Chinese workers who returned from France after the First World War, during which they were temporary workers, played a leading role in the YMCA's industrial programme. They called for an immediate improvement in workers’ eating conditions because, they argued, those conditions were closely related to the problems of industrial health, labour welfare, and public hygiene.Footnote 23 These workers publicized a petition submitted by ‘workers of one of the large factories in Shanghai’ to the Health Department of the Shanghai YMCA. The petition listed proposed guidelines for food providers, including the following: rice was not to be stored in large quantities in the restaurants to avoid decay; all foodstuffs were to be covered with wire; all vegetables were to be washed before cooking; all bowls and dishes were to be washed thoroughly after use; clean oil was to be used for cooking food; toilets were not to be located near eating areas; food waste was to be removed daily; all utensils were to be covered to prevent attracting flies; and floors were to be washed at least once a month. To demonstrate their fury and to maximize social influence, the workers enclosed ‘insects found in the food’ and included ‘the addresses of the restaurants [in which] they had been found’.Footnote 24
Whereas workers perceived themselves to be victims of unhealthy eating conditions and poor diets, the municipal authorities regarded the workers as potential perpetrators of the city's hygiene problem. From the beginning, improving food safety to minimize the spread of contagious diseases was the core activity of the Health Department, which was established in 1898 by the Shanghai Municipal Council. Having understood the connection between public-hygiene problems and China's decline, the Chinese elite also spearheaded a series of food-hygiene campaigns to encourage the Chinese public's participation in the Health Department's initiatives.Footnote 25 The department conducted inspections in wholesale food markets, slaughterhouses, and the dairy industry. However, its administrative capacity was not sufficient to monitor the rapidly growing numbers of small food stalls and street vendors, the primary customers of which were the penniless working class.Footnote 26 These stalls were a type of open-air food shop (lutian shitang) that were highly vulnerable to food-related diseases but easily escaped the health authorities’ inspections.Footnote 27 In 1920, one staff member at the Health Department of the Shanghai Municipal Council lamented that posting ‘public health notices’ in these food stalls was of ‘little or no use’ because ‘few cooks and boys can read Chinese’.Footnote 28
The 1920 rice strikes
What plagued workers’ diets the most was the high cost of rice. Rapid economic growth in Shanghai introduced a steady but ceaseless increase in living costs and overall consumer prices. Rice—the most price-elastic commodity and the most sensitive indicator of social stability—tended to lead increases in other commodity prices but descended last.Footnote 29 By the 1920s, the price of rice became extremely vulnerable to unpredictable factors, such as changes in climate conditions; local skirmishes between warlords, large and small; and bandits’ blockades of rice shipments in the hinterlands. In particular, the summer months from the rice-planting season in early May to the harvesting month in September was an annual rice-dearth season. During these months, the Shanghainese had to rely on stored rice that had been harvested previously. Even if the stored rice was sufficient, there were several factors that influenced the fluctuation of rice prices. The highest annual rainfall occurred during the summer so that the river-borne rice trade to Shanghai was often blocked by floods; the hot and humid weather also caused the quality of the rice to deteriorate.Footnote 30 The Shanghai working class, which was approximately one-quarter of the entire urban population in the 1920s, was the most vulnerable to the rice dearth.Footnote 31 Soaring rice prices affected not only low-income workers in the industrial plants, but also hundreds of thousands of shop employees (dianyuan) who had to spend the long years of apprenticeships in small-scale workshops.Footnote 32 These employees received food and lodging—food was catered and they slept in the workshop—as part of their wages; during the average two to three years of apprenticeships, food and lodging were, in most cases, virtually their entire wages. For the scale of this business, the employees as well as their employers, the owners of the small shops, were regarded as part of the low-income group that was vulnerable to the rice-dearth season in the city.Footnote 33
The summer of 1920 was unusual. Rice prices began skyrocketing from early spring onward and reached unprecedented levels even before the annual scarcity season began because of several factors. First, the Jiangsu province and other rice-producing areas along the Yangzi River had bad harvests for two consecutive years: 1919 and 1920. A number of transnational factors also made matters worse. The Japanese authorities, panicked by nationwide rice riots on an unprecedented scale in 1918 and 1919, spared no effort in securing an external rice supply from China and Southeast Asia.Footnote 34 To do so, the Japanese authorities offered an immediate loan of 9 million Yen to Beijing's Beiyang government. The Beiyang government, in return, allowed the Japanese to purchase Chinese rice. The Shanghai-based English-language daily newspaper, the North China Herald, decried the ‘Dear Rice Scandal’, reporting that the Japanese were given ‘the right to purchase rice in China whenever and wherever they pleased’.Footnote 35 Coincidentally, rice harvests in Southeast Asia in 1919 and 1920 were not as good as usual; Cantonese rice merchants rushed to rice markets in Shanghai and other cities throughout the lower Yangzi area, abandoning the Hong Kong rice markets in which they usually purchased rice. Chain reactions continued. To fend off these unwelcome buyers, many provincial authorities of rice-producing provinces along the Yangzi River, one after another, prohibited extra-provincial rice exports.Footnote 36 For three months from the beginning of May 1920, rice prices increased by 300 per cent, thereby increasing the prices of other daily necessities such as vegetables, dairy products, and firewood. What made matters worse was the currency difference. Whereas many workers, particularly those in labour-intensive, unskilled, and low-wage industries, were paid in copper coins, rice was traded in silver dollars. In the years following the First World War, during which China enjoyed a ‘golden age’ of its nascent industries, copper coins were continuously depreciated, further increasing the workers’ hardships.Footnote 37 Even Chinese staffs in the Shanghai Municipal Council—widely regarded as having decent and stable jobs—requested additional pay because of the abnormal rice-price hikes.Footnote 38
Shanghai's elite mercantile groups and industrialists attempted to take pre-emptive measures. In May, they designated six rice depots throughout the city to practise ‘cheap rice sales’ (pingtiao) for the urban poor.Footnote 39 At Yangshupu and Pudong, where industrial plants were concentrated, a number of rice depots for ‘cheap rice sales’ opened. In particular, the Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company ran a separate rice depot for pingtiao practice for its workers and their families in the neighbouring town of Pudong. The owner family of the company, the Jians, took advantage of their native-place ties as Cantonese; they ordered special shipments of French Indochinese rice from the rice markets in Canton and Hong Kong.Footnote 40 This year, however, such a time-honoured philanthropic practice could not alleviate the public rice panic. For example, crowds flocked to a rice depot built at the Dragon God Temple (Longhuangsi) to obtain relief rice, although available relief rice numbered no more than 200 packs. Stampedes and subsequent injuries occurred. In Pudong, the Nanyang Brothers’ depots for the special ‘cheap rice sales’ from Hong Kong were built, notwithstanding a number of rice shops were looted by mobs. More cases of looting were subsequently reported here and there throughout the city.Footnote 41 In other words, traditional charity activity that had once blossomed in the imperial past no longer worked properly in this rapidly industrializing city. Rather, soaring rice prices under the scorching summer heat that year ignited a new type of food politics: labour strikes.
Against this backdrop, a wave of labour strikes swept the city in the summer of 1920. The underground communists’ magazine Laodongjie (Labour World) estimated that Shanghai saw more than 40 incidents of labour disputes, large and small, in which thousands of workers went on strike and called for extra wages to match the increasing rice prices.Footnote 42 Textile workers in Yangshupu spearheaded the rice strikes. On 20 June, more than 4,000 workers, both men and women, in three mills—two Japanese-owned and one British-owned—went on strike demanding a pay increase of one dollar. It took more than a week for the first negotiation to be arranged, and the management and workers eventually reached an agreement in which the workers would be provided three dous (litres) of rice per month towards which the workers would pay 80 cents (jiao) for each dou of rice until the normal rice prices were restored.Footnote 43 To many workers, however, this arrangement was not significantly different from the traditional charity provided by the management in the days of the rice shortages or the ‘cheap rice sales’ (pingtiao).
Approximately a week later, more than 2,000 dissatisfied workers went on strike again; however, they were much more militant than before. Agitated workers led by a migrant worker from Hubei province, Chen Yusheng, smashed the windows and lights of the factory to prevent the strikers from resuming work. A police investigation later assessed that more than 1,000 windows and lamps were destroyed. With no light during the night, the management had no choice but to stop mill operations for two additional days and nights. No one knew whether Chen carefully calculated the consequences of his Luddist activity or whether this was nothing more than spontaneous vandalism. The consequences, however, changed the tide. Because the machines stopped, thousands of scabs were unable to enter the factory compound to resume their work and thus joined the strike. Negotiations resumed and lasted for days to generate a final deal; one of the promised three dous of rice would be free.Footnote 44 Moreover, the workers also succeeded in including an important stipulation: the standard quality of rice was to be mutually agreed upon and underwritten: ‘The rice must be the best grade of foreign xian rice (zuihao yangxianmi) regardless of changes in market prices.’Footnote 45
This stipulation of rice quality should be understood to be a collective expression of Shanghai workers’ food entitlement. Their diet was primarily based on rice because the overwhelming majority of migrant workers were southerners whose staple grain was rice. They regarded rice as the quintessence of their daily diet, although they had little choice but to eat whole-grain buns and cakes for their meals because of convenience and affordability.Footnote 46 As historian Mark Swislocki argues, Shanghai residents, even the working poor, had strong dietary preferences when purchasing rice. Since machine-powered rice-polishing technology was first introduced to Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century, highly polished, machine-produced white rice had become popular in the Shanghai rice markets.Footnote 47 By contrast, xian rice was regarded as lower-grade rice (xiadengmi) because of its undesirable flavour. Because of the higher prices of polished white rice, Shanghai's working poor purchased second, third, or much lower grades of local rice, yet they sharply distinguished xian rice, particularly foreign xian rice, as the least preferable. As food historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher argues, dietary preferences took shape based not only on the quality of food per se, but also its provenance, real or imagined.Footnote 48
In Shanghai, foreign xian rice was regarded as a ‘different type from the local product’ and there was certain prejudice ‘against its taste and cooking properties’.Footnote 49 When the scarcity of rice in the summer of 1920 worsened, Shenbao, the most popular Chinese daily in the city, reported that Shanghai's ‘middle class’ (zhongdeng shehui) began to reluctantly purchase xian rice because of the excessive prices of better grades of rice. However, the quality of rice was not a frivolous issue of appetite that concerned only the ‘middle class’ or above. Even the 1920s’ unusual rice shortage could not change the Shanghai workers’ unfavourable attitude towards xian rice overnight. For example, one factor that ignited a rice riot in the working-class town of Jiabei in July was that neighbourhood rice retailers mixed xian rice with other rice varieties of differing quality.Footnote 50 The notoriety of foreign xian rice was too profound to be forgotten. Even in the late 1950s, Shanghai workers still said that ‘a rice bowl cooked with foreign xian rice (yangxianmi) could not be a bowl of rice (damifan)’.Footnote 51 Because foreign xian rice was the least preferable type, the Yangshupu textile workers demanded that it should be the best grade within the category of foreign xian rice, although they had little choice but to accept it as part of the management's offer.
Towards labour entitlement
The triumphant news of the Yangshupu rice strikes emboldened workers in other districts and businesses. In Pudong, home to approximately 30 dockyards, more than 5,000 shipbuilders went on strike with a demand for extra income to purchase rice. Each dockyard's business scale was relatively small, ranging from 100 to 450 workers. However, thousands of shipbuilders took to the streets, which became an enormous bargaining chip. They demanded a more than 40 per cent increase in daily wages, from five to seven cents. This time, the management adopted a pragmatic stance. Without a violent confrontation, the management quickly accepted the increase to seven cents on the third day of the strike. However, not all of this raise was to be paid in cash; half would be paid to the workers in cash, whereas the other half would be spent on meals provided in the factory.Footnote 52 To facilitate sufficient meal times, in turn, the management stipulated a rule of punctuality. Although a ‘lunch break would be guaranteed at 12:00 noon for an hour, workers should punctually start their work at 7:00 am and work until 12:00 noon’. The afternoon work would start at 1:00 pm and end at 6:00 pm, with a half-hour snack break at 3:00 pm.Footnote 53
Workers in small-scale workshops did not have the bargaining power of the thousands of textile workers. In handicraft workshops, a strict workplace hierarchy was in place in which workers were extremely polarized, namely skilled artisans and apprentices. Apprentices in this industry could not stipulate a rice-quality standard as their compensation, nor could they demand new canteens or meal services. However, they expedited food politics in their own manner, demanding a change in the setting of the meal. Blacksmiths who flocked outside Shanghai's South Gate (Nanmen) were famous for workshop hierarchy and hardship. The authority of experienced artisans, called ‘old masters’ (laoshifu), was nearly absolute and unchallengeable to young apprentices (xuetu). Although the apprentices did not dare request salary increases, they utilized a sense of proto-professionalism in their work world; regardless of one's position in the workplace hierarchy, they claimed, blacksmithing was extremely labour-intensive, difficult work because of the handling of iron. Their workload therefore required them to eat ‘more food (chi de duo)’ than workers in any other industry.Footnote 54 Despite such hard work, the blacksmiths complained that ‘they only earned small amounts for their daily wages, and the meal portions provided at the workplace were too small to sustain a hard workload by any means’. The meal at the workshop was ‘two servings of gruel and one serving of rice’ a day (yifan liangzhou). However, the workers were not able to endure the hunger (bukan naiji) from these daily portions because the less starchy gruel could not sufficiently fill their stomachs. They demanded a change in the portion size to ‘two servings of rice and one serving of gruel’ a day (liangfan yizhou).Footnote 55 The blacksmiths were not able to achieve an immediate victory, partially because of their lack of massive bargaining power and partially because of the workplace hierarchy. However, their demand for ‘two servings of rice and one serving of gruel’ became a major catchphrase that spread throughout other small-scale workshops in the ensuing years.Footnote 56
The rice-price hike eventually subdued, as did the strikes that year of 1920. However, the political repercussions were immense. The annual soaring of rice prices and the subsequent relief activities were no longer an issue of apolitical philanthropy. The strikes placed food at the focal point of labour politics in many industrial workplaces. Insofar as Shanghai could not escape from the annual rice-dearth season, what the contemporary Shanghainese called ‘rice strikes’ (migui bagong) would also be perennial. In 1920s Shanghai, as labour historian Jean Chesneaux states, monthly variations of strikes were parallel to monthly variations in the price of rice. The strikes were concentrated in the summer months of May and June—the annual rice-dearth months during which Shanghai saw a seasonal high point in rice prices.Footnote 57 Against this backdrop, ideologically passionate yet unseasoned communists came to realize the political potential of the industrial working class. The rice strikes, in turn, provided an invaluable learning experience to the communists: how to catalyse working-class allegiance. Going one step further, they learned how to guide the working class and transform their spontaneous and temporary allegiance to class consciousness. How should workers respond to a perennial scarcity of rice, and how should the communists guide their political potential? A young communist intellectual who would play a key role a few months later in the founding congress of the CCP in July 1921, Li Hanjun, eloquently argued that workers should not beg ‘philanthropists for famine relief (cishanjia ban pingtiao)’ any longer. Instead, Li went on to assert: ‘Let the employers raise the workers’ pay.’Footnote 58 In a special section entitled the ‘Section of Workers’ Contribution (gongren tougao)’ in Workers’ World, Li Zhong, a ship builder at the Jiangnan Shipyard and a member of the underground Shanghai communist cell, clamoured: ‘What made us eat smelly food (nongde women chideshi choude)?’ To achieve a fundamental change in the workers’ miserable lives, Li concluded that ‘the workers should unite’.Footnote 59
Canteens and their discontents
The 1920 rice strikes also became a learning experience for industrial employers, who came to realize the political volatility of food in the workplace. Installing a factory canteen and offering decent meal services as part of the package of labour benefits would not necessarily be a concession to workers. Insofar as food services could prevent labour discord and thereby save unanticipated expenditures, canteens would function as a good management tool. By the early 1920s, canteens for employees were regarded as a labour privilege exclusively offered to workers in high-wage and non-manual-labour industries such as department stores, banks, and public services.Footnote 60 Soon after the 1920 rice strikes, however, many companies in large-scale and labour-intensive industries began to establish canteens for their workers. Afterwards, industrial canteens and meal services became a symbol of both labour welfare and an innovative method of new management. For example, a number of reporters were invited to a grand opening ceremony by the Great China Textile Company (Dazhonghua fangzhi gongsi), which had opened a new factory compound in Wusong on the northern outskirts of the city in April 1922. One new plant facility attracted reporters’ attention: a new factory canteen (gongren fanting) with a 400-seat capacity. The meal service for the workers was, as the company emphasized, one of 12 innovative policies that the management had introduced. For this, ‘a number of cooks would be hired’. The press briefing continued: ‘What the workers had to do was to purchase a set of meal tickets at the general office and receive a stamp at the canteen entrance. All the balance settlements would be resolved at the end of month and deducted from the monthly wages.’Footnote 61
Facilitating the factory canteen in and of itself, however, did not bring about industrial harmony immediately. Factory canteens generated new complaints about, for example, the unpalatable food, limited seating and serving capacity, and the subsequent long queues. During meal service, some canteens intensified segregation and discrimination by staff hierarchy, gender, and regional affiliation. For example, the factory canteen at the Great China Textile Company mentioned above exclusively served male workers.Footnote 62 These complaints, if seemingly trivial, possessed sufficient potential to ignite action when they became mixed with various labour issues.
In the summer of 1926, for example, the Wing On (Yongan) Textile Company decided to provide a meal service to the workers in the factory compound. However, this was nothing but a countermeasure to cope with the annual rice-price increases in the summer. Even in March, many contemporary observers anticipated ‘a serious shortage’ of rice that would be ‘accompanied by discontent and hunger’.Footnote 63 The Wing On management opened a sort of gruel kitchen (shizhou) to provide gruel in the factory compound, the purpose of which was to establish a temporary operation (zanding), presumably only for the summer rice-dearth season.Footnote 64 What the workers were offered was extremely disappointing: not a bowl of rice, but a bowl of gruel. The workers were divided. Some wanted to accept the gruel because it was provided at an allegedly cheaper price than the actual market price; some obstinate workers, however, could not accept this type of temporary allowance because it was not different from traditional charitable activities. A few days after the operation commenced, the soup kitchen became a scene of pandemonium.Footnote 65 According to the management's press release, a few ‘troublemakers (buliang fenzi)’ intentionally thwarted the bona fide intention of this policy: ‘They picketed the entrance and, after some time, broke into the kitchen to overturn the gruel pots.’ It was not until riot-police squads were called to the scene and five instigators—two females and three males—were arrested that the riot came to an end. The next morning, however, more than 300 workers walked out with a demand for the immediate release of their detained colleagues who had fought for their food entitlement.Footnote 66 The number of walkouts increased to 800 and, the following morning, the number increased again, comprising the entire morning shift of 800 workers. Handbills filled with workers’ demands were distributed throughout the crowd, stating: ‘We want more pay, not a few bowls of gruel a day!’Footnote 67 Afterwards, the factory canteen could not be installed in the compound of the Wing On Textile for a while. Six months later, the Wing On workers requested, instead of a gruel kitchen, the installation of hygienically proven ‘potable water boilers in the factory pantries’.Footnote 68
Not every labour dispute was tumultuous; much depended on how the management considered the workers’ concerns regarding the meal quality. The Meihua Textile Company turned a labour dispute over meals into a new opportunity to innovate management methods. After a short standoff, management and workers reached an agreement. First, management decided to stop paying rice allowances in cash to workers, even if rice prices rose abnormally, because extra cash expenditures, even if temporary, would unexpectedly damage the company's financial stability. Instead, the management decided to hire a professional caterer to operate the industrial canteen. At the same time, the management claimed that the cap of rice expenditures for the operation of the canteen would be no higher than ten dollars per picul. To alleviate the workers’ concerns over the meal-quality issue, the management accepted the workers’ request for a quality clause. No matter how much the rice prices increased, ‘the quality of the rice should not be worse than that of the previous year’.Footnote 69
In fact, a series of strikes caused by the issue of food gave rise to a new understanding of the relation between workers’ health and industrial productivity. From the late 1920s onward, many more industrialists took a conciliatory stance on the issue of factory meals. By the end of the 1920s, for example, most textile factories under Japanese ownership and management (Zaikabō) installed factory canteens in their industrial compounds.Footnote 70 Workers’ meals were no longer a matter of traditional charity, but changed into the core issue of industrial relations. One opinion piece in the Republican Daily argued that the ‘traditional cheap rice sales (pingtiao) would not be suitable anymore in this recurring annual food problem’.Footnote 71
Canteen meals and the politics of labour welfare
The timely introduction of management innovation to China helped social reformers and industrial employers consider workers’ dietary issues in a profoundly different manner.Footnote 72 Insofar as workers’ health had a direct effect on industrial productivity, the problem of workers’ inadequate diet indicated an important industrial problem. How could a basic level of subsistence for the working class be ensured? How could workers’ best industrial output be ensured while maintaining the minimum requirement for workers’ sustenance? How could a stable, industrious, and efficient industrial order in the nascent stage of the industrial economy of China be established?Footnote 73 Amongst many elements of labour welfare, sociologist Chen Da argued that furnishing facilities for dining and accommodation should be a top priority. Industrial employers had no reason to maintain a defensive stance in this regard. Instead, they had to take pre-emptive measures. Chen argued that the ‘foodstuffs that workers eat do not need to be expensive but should contain sufficient nutrients’.Footnote 74 According to Chen's understanding, workers’ bodies were not very different from machines: ‘Machines need fuel when they begin motion, as do human bodies.’ With the analogy of food and fuel, Chen insisted on the significance of an adequate diet for workers: ‘As better fuel enables machines to perform better, a dietary regimen containing more nutrients produces a more dynamic physical output.’Footnote 75 Chen was well aware of the thermodynamic understanding of calories and their relevance to industrial productivity. According to Chen, the scientific improvement of workers’ diets would achieve a dual goal: assuring basic welfare to workers and achieving optimal industrial output. Healthy workers’ bodies and hygienic working conditions should be the starting point.
Contemporary experts such as Chen Da were not indifferent to the problem of workers’ diets; rather, they regarded diet as one component of the more complicated social problems facing China.Footnote 76 In his seminal research on the everyday life of Shanghai's working class, the economist Yang Ximeng emphasized that the poor diet of Shanghai's working class was not merely a matter of working-class misery, but rather should be understood as a serious problem for the entire Chinese population.Footnote 77 The compilers of China's First Labour Yearbook acknowledged that China was in a nascent age of industrialization; therefore, Chinese industry lacked two elements, although growing numbers of people realized that these two elements were necessary for China's industrial development: one was large-scale manufacturing and the other was workers’ welfare.Footnote 78
A number of Chinese dietary reformers adopted the factory meal as an issue for the entire society. From their viewpoint, workers’ dietary problems were inseparable from what they called the weisheng (literally, hygiene) problem of the entire Chinese society. Yu Fengbin, a leading advocate of the dietary-reform campaign, was outstanding. Yu endorsed the workers’ rice strikes in 1926. Perhaps his reputation and expertise provided weight to his endorsement of workers’ requests for meal improvements. As a physician trained in Western medicine at Shanghai St. John's University and the University of Pennsylvania, Yu was one of the founding members of the Chinese Medical Society. Yu asserted that everyone should ‘have sufficient nutrients (ziyang) and rest (xiuxi) to improve personal health’. Penurious workers were no exception. With the demand for ‘8-hour work days’, Yu emphasized that workers’ demands to increase food-based benefits were a ‘reasonable request’.Footnote 79 Moreover, Yu was particularly famous for his advocacy of the improvement of school meals and canteen facilities. Providing a canteen and a sufficient meal period, Yu argued, was not a negligible matter by any means. Negative consequences for the entire society would extend far beyond the matter of individual health.Footnote 80 Whereas society should ensure proper intake of nutrition for workers as much as possible, reformers such as Yu had to correct workers’ ignorance regarding what and how to eat. From Yu's perspective, the food problem in labour politics was not so much the workers’ inadequate income as their ignorance and misunderstanding of a proper diet.
To forward-looking industrialists, providing an adequate meal service to factory workers was more than a defensive countermeasure to workers’ demands. Building a technologically advanced canteen facility would instead be a positive step in increasing China's industrial capacity. They found their rationale in Fordism. In a magazine article entitled ‘Cooking Plant (chuishi gongchang)’, the author, Jing, asserted that industrial China needed to build what he called a ‘cooking plant’—a cooking and dining facility in which cooking processes would be fully mechanized and the overall operation would be on an industrial scale. With a long citation from Henry Ford's ‘Repairing Men Like Boilers’, Jing argued that such an industrial-scale canteen would function not only for the workers’ welfare, but also as a scientific solution to improve China's overall industrial productivity. Furthermore, to optimize the caloric input to workers’ bodies, a nutrition research centre had to be built in the compound of the Cooking Plant. To maximize the Cooking Plant's efficacy, argued Jing, dieticians and experts in relevant fields should be hired in this research centre to plan and determine all daily variations of diets and menus based on their scientific research.Footnote 81
The GMD members came to perceive the factory canteen as a useful instrument to expedite the party's own credo, for many reasons. First and foremost, it would be the best way in which to fulfil the ‘Principle of People's Livelihood’ (minsheng zhuyi)—one of the three major principles that the party's ‘Founding Father’, Sun Yat-sen, had proposed before his death. Assuring minimum conditions for workers above the subsistence level was indeed the centrepiece of the ‘Principle of People's Livelihood’. It also represented the party's ideological position well: paternalistic care of people's livelihoods with a refutation of Marxist radicalism.Footnote 82 The party's industrial policy should be conducive to both augmenting production and simultaneously improving distribution.Footnote 83 The workers’ strikes that sought decent meals were legitimate because such a demand was not different from supplying better fuel for the improved performance of a machine. Second, because workers’ health and diets were closely related to the productivity of the industrial workforce, facilitating industrial canteens would be the first step towards rebuilding China into a strong industrial nation. Cheng Shuzhen, Chief of the Public Hygiene Bureau under the Nationalists’ Shanghai Special Municipality, asserted that ‘without the worker's robust body being able to bear any form of hardship, the progress of industry would be impossible’.Footnote 84 The potential of food issues in the arena of labour politics was equally attractive to the communists. Having become cognizant of such a recurring annual rice problem, a communist argued that the party-supporting unions and their leaders should not avoid these issues. Rather, they should help turn these types of ‘economic struggles into more-advanced political struggles’.Footnote 85 Otherwise, the CCP would lose the initiative to its archenemy: the GMD and labour unions under its control.Footnote 86
The GMD authorities, in return for the canteen facilities and meal services, requested a fundamental reform in the workers’ dietary habits. They regarded the workers’ complaints regarding the quality of rice to be unacceptable profligacy. In 1926, Shanghai municipal officials stated: ‘The difference between Kiangsu [Jiangsu] rice and Saigon rice (i.e., the unpopular foreign xian rice discussed above) was largely imaginary, and only an epicure could distinguish them, although some Chinese say that Saigon rice is unpalatable to them.’Footnote 87 A few years later, the Municipal Bureau of Social Affairs declared that such preferences should be regarded as an ‘undesirable taste’ (buliang shihao)—a notion with which the GMD members often associated various unethical habits, including prostitution, opium smoking, gambling, and heavy drinking.Footnote 88 Workers’ dietary habits could now be the target of the authorities’ moral condemnation, if not criminalization, in the name of an ‘undesirable taste’. At the same time, the bureau launched dietary-reform campaigns that encouraged the local population to eat less preferable but substitutable food items such as wheat-based buns, noodles, and foreign xian rice.Footnote 89
Afterwards, the factory canteen became the most tangible labour-welfare facility that the GMD regime encouraged. According to an investigation report on factory welfare facilities conducted on 47 Chinese-owned textile mills by the Centre for Social Science Research at Academia Sinica in the mid-1930s, ‘nearly all factories were equipped with canteens’.Footnote 90 The canteens were a necessary condition for industrial China that the technocratic GMD members envisioned; however, they were not sufficient to ensure GMD-style industrial relations that were more cooperative but less confrontational. The authors were struck by the fact that few workers had their meals in the canteen during the designated lunch break. The workers were either having their meals while running the machines or were skipping the lunch break because workers were able to earn more money if they produced more. Because they were paid based on how much product they produced, they simply wanted to save on their lunch expenses.Footnote 91 The sociologist Wu Zhixin, who conducted a survey on China's industrial welfare facilities, had the same impression. More than 50 per cent of the workplaces that he investigated were operating factory canteens. However, neither the workers nor the employers were satisfied with the factory canteens in their workplaces. Because the workers had different palates that were ‘as diverse as their geographic origins (gedi gongren kouwei butong)’, the factory canteens were full of dissatisfaction and complaints. In particular, there was an ineluctable difference between the southerners’ rice-based diet and the northerners’ wheat-based one, which led to a brawl.Footnote 92 Wu lamented that changing workers’ eating habits and dietary preferences was no less difficult than facilitating a canteen. Management attributed the perennial malfunctioning of factory canteens to the ‘worker's lack of discipline and a sense of morality (gongren pinde xunlian buzu)’.Footnote 93 In other words, factory canteens could never be free from the collisions of competing interests.
Conclusion
This article has highlighted factory canteens as a crucial component of labour politics in Republican Shanghai. In the wake of militant labour activism in the 1920s, factory canteens and workers’ meals became the centrepiece of Republican Shanghai's labour politics. The perennial fluctuations of rice prices triggered an outburst of labour disputes. A series of what were called ‘rice strikes’ turned into a learning experience for both labour activists and industrialists. For the labour activists, few had the political potential to organize the workers beyond food issues. Demanding factory canteens and adequate meal services significantly helped the labour activists to mobilize labour. Industrialists came to realize that facilitating factory canteens and offering food-based benefits was more than an emblem of benevolent management. Factory canteens offering scientifically proven regimens at minimal cost and maximum efficiency were the best manner in which to increase overall industrial productivity. To the GMD members, factory canteens were the most appropriate institutions to practise the party's cardinal principle: the Principle of People's Livelihood. The technocratic GMD elites had little reason to oppose the labour movement as long as the workers’ demands possessed constructive elements within the party line: increasing industrial productivity and enriching both employers and workers. As a consequence, factory canteens—some built as labour entitlement, others built as a component of new labour management—became the very places in which highly politicized expectations of food were encountered, collided, and contested. At the factory canteens, workers’ demands for labour entitlement, industrial employers’ new way of workplace management, and the GMD's industrialization top-down policy intersected.
However, operating a canteen was sufficiently complex to create some contention, which was seemingly trivial and yet never negligible. A canteen required an ample amount of capital investment for the initial cost to acquire the equipment. Given the dense urban population, it was difficult to find available space. Above all, operating a canteen required a different sort of expertise and it was nearly impossible to find suitable personnel. A canteen required a manager who, if not a highly versed restaurateur, was able to manage the business on an industrial scale and simultaneously offer economical meals to the workers. It was also necessary to hire cooks who not only understood basic nutritional knowledge, but were also familiar with workers’ dietary expectations. Otherwise, meal services at the canteens often led to brawls and feuds in the factory compound. For these reasons, the operation of factory canteens required a new method of management—namely scientific management. The installation of canteens and offering a new dietary regimen did not end labour disputes by any means. Rather, factory canteens became the starting point of a new sort of contentious food politics.
The emergence of factory canteens in the industrial landscape of Republican China was a watershed in many regards. They were an emblematic space for ascending labour activism that eventually paved the way for the CCP's political triumph.Footnote 94 Simultaneously, factory canteens were an experimental platform on which various forms of managerial innovations and new labour-management techniques were applied. In sum, once workers’ canteens appeared in the wake of militant labour activism in the 1920s, they became a new space in which historical actors experimented and contested various political practices that mobilized new forms of technical expertise ranging from nutrition science and culinary innovation to statistical calculations and social classification to public hygiene and industrial health.
