Chapter Five: The Docks Return to the Embrace of the People

Abstract

In the spring of 1949 the War of Liberation was winning victory after victory. The Chiang bandits were disintegrating, fleeing helter skelter. On May 27 the Chinese People's Liberation Army liberated all of Shanghai. From then on, the dock workers of Shanghai Harbor, along with all the laboring people of the city, were able to clear away the mists and see the sun. They stood up straight and began brand-new lives. However, in the first period of the liberation, the workers still encountered many difficulties that were fairly serious. To begin with, as those altogether vicious reactionaries fled, they had committed innumerable evil acts and had carried out terrible destruction throughout Shanghai Harbor's entrance and docks. For instance, quite a few boats had been stolen, and many docks had been burned or knocked down. Next, as the War of Liberation continued through the south, the enemy, who was entrenched on the islands up and down the coast, still had not been completely subdued. Mines were strung out outside the mouth of the Yangtze River, and the American-Chiang planes still carried out repeated harassment bombings of Shanghai. They recklessly tried to block the harbor and hinder the restoration of communications and transport. Accordingly, to a certain degree this affected the effort to normalize transport to the harbor and the loading and unloading work. In addition to this, after so many years under the heel of the Japanese and American imperialists and the Kuomintang reactionaries, the whole country's fundamental nature had been greatly injured, and the economy was decrepit. In the first days of the liberation, production could not be immediately restored in all phases. Because of this, commerce in Shanghai Harbor could not avoid suffering some bad effects. There was comparatively little loading and unloading work in the harbor. This set of circumstances forced the dock workers, who had just been liberated from a hard and bitter situation in the old society, to contend with great problems in their new lives.