The great demonstration at Hankow was a further proof of the feeling of solidarity of the masses of China with the workers of the West, to whom they look for aid in their heroic struggle to throw off the yoke of foreign imperialist oppression.
***
Appeal of the International Workers' Delegation to the Troops
of the Imperialist Powers in China.
Hankow, April 2, 1927.
To the Soldiers and Sailors of Great Britain, France and America:
The ruling class of your country has sent you to China. It wants to use you as a servile instrument in its policy of oppression against the Chinese people. It wants to use you to maintain the shameful privileges which it enjoys in this country.
It is the very same ruling class which exploits you, and your brothers and sisters, in your own country. It is the same class which draws scandalous profits and enriches itself from your toil and misery. It is the same class which fights mercilessly against you, soldiers and sailors, who but yesterday were workers and farmers yourselves, and who tomorrow will be workers and farmers again.
Like you, the Chinese people suffer from this exploitation. Like you, they aspire to liberation. Like you, they struggle to improve their miserable conditions.
For two months, our Delegation, consisting of representatives of revolutionary labor organizations of England, America, and France, has visited numerous organizations of the Chinese people. It has studied the situation of the workers, of the peasants, of the merchants, of the students, in town and village. It has found untold misery caused by the oppression of imperialism and its ally in China, local militarism. The International Workers' Delegation are profoundly convinced that the cause for which the Chinese people are fighting is a just cause.
The ruling classes which sent you, sailors and soldiers, here, accuses the Chinese people of hatred against foreigners. You are told that the hatred of the Chinese people is directed particularly against you. Even if this were really the case it would indeed be comprehensible, for, besides the untold misery which the imperialists impose upon the Chinese people, they have periodically, during the past two years, instituted massacres and bloodshed such as the Shamen, Shanghai (several massacres), Hankow and Wanhsien massacres in which hundreds of Chinese were massacred in cold blood. Only the other day in order to avenge the six Europeans who were killed by the paid agents provocateurs of the Northern militarists, the33
