Historical Studies (Chinese Edition)

No.1, 2015

 

The Guild Concept, Class Consciousness and Party Politics: Changes in the Relationship between Labor and Capital in Guangzhou during the Era of the National Revolution   

(Abstract)

 

Huo Xinbin

 

“The coexistence of labor and capital in a single guild” was a symbiosis of labor and capital in one guild. This guild organizational structure, with its “community of labor and capital,” determined the emergence of the themes in the traditional laborcapital relationship in Guangzhou, a relationship in which both parties “got along” with “no concept of class consciousness.” However, due to political penetration by the Kuomintang and the Communist Party after the National Revolution began in 1924, the relationship between labor and capital in Guangzhou began to evolve from the “labor-capital coexistence” of the guild to party politics. Consultation and cooperation versus class struggle now became the twin themes of the interaction between the two groups; but the themes were not fixed, but fluctuated with changes in society, politics and the economy. The evolution of these themes led to changes in this relationship between the two groups amid the realities of a power shift from labor to capital. This affords us a glimpse of the complex interest games between the Kuomintang and the CPC around the issues of labor and capital during the era of the National Revolution and of the many factors involved in the split in the class-consciousness of capital and labor during the modern transformation of the traditional Chinese guild.