On May 1, 1927, workers across Taiwan engaged in the first island-wide strike in history. Six thousand workers, a significant part of the workforce at the time, stopped working to demand better working conditions. This moment was the genesis of a radical labor movement that was central to the island’s anti-colonial struggle, a struggle similar to those found throughout the colonized world at the time. But only seven years later, the Left would be defeated, and today this history and its role in the formation of Taiwanese nationalism has been forgotten.

Chiang Kuo-yu (蔣闊宇) is a Taiwanese doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh studying the history of Taiwan’s labor movement. His 2020 book, Island-wide General Strike, discusses the history of the early Taiwanese labor movement that grew under Japanese colonialism in the late 1920s. This movement was also at the core of the development of Taiwanese nationalism, which today has become a key factor in Taiwan’s political development and tensions with China.

In this conversation, Jacobin contributor Itamar Waksman asked Chiang about the history of Taiwan’s early labor movement, its relation to the development of Taiwanese nationalism, and its continued influence in contemporary Taiwanese politics.