May Thirtieth Movement, 1925

The May Thirtieth Movement began after police in Shanghai’s International Settlement fired on Chinese demonstrators on 30 May 1925. The shootings followed industrial disputes and the death of a Chinese worker, and they turned local labour protest into a national campaign against foreign privilege.

Strikes, boycotts and demonstrations spread through major cities and treaty ports. The movement strengthened organised labour, increased support for both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, and exposed the political importance of the foreign concessions.

Adam Williams’s The Emperor’s Bones uses the movement as part of its reconstruction of Shanghai in the 1920s, where personal relationships intersect with anti-imperial protest and revolutionary organisation.