CO129-505-4 Labour situation in Canton and effect on Hong Kong- Labour Advisory Board 27-1-1927 - 31-8-1927 — Page 44

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most people were ignorant of them before March. Nor

did I my self know anything about them. Their slogans

such as "Support the three gigantic policies" and "over- throw unintelligent aged authorities" were introduced

for certain purposes of their own. As we can re-collect

when Chairman Wong left our country after the coup d'etat

on the 20th. March last year, they joined unanimously

in electing Generali ssimo Tseung and Mr. Cheung Ching hianɛ to be Chairmen, The power of Generalissimo Tseung was derived from the Central Kuomintang and the National- ist Government, and this was a necessary step in a mili- tary regime. But they wanted particularly to overthrow Generalissimo Tseung, giving as a pretext that military

power had overridden the authority of the Party, and also to overthrow Chairman Cheung, charging him with being aged, unintelligent and useless. All their actions in this regard appear directed to a definite end. Most of the workmen in the Canton Arsenal and the Mechanics'

Association are loyal members of our Auomintang, but Borodin often charged the workmen of the Canton arsenal with being reactionaries and suggested its re-organisation, which the Government was eventually compelled to carry into effect. He then provoked the workamen of the three railways in the Province to make a serious demand to the Government that the Arsenal should be re-instated and placed under the control of the Communists and that all workmen who owned any property should be expelled from the service. Later they again by a resolution at a Joint Conference at wuhan had the Canton Arsenal closed

and removed to wuhan so that they could monopolize the management of the two arsenals of Wuhan and Canton, and check all supplies of arms and ammunitions to our Northem

Expeditionary Force, by way of dealing a fatal blow to

our