Putuo to highlight its history as birthplace of labor campaigns
The Memorial of Gu Zhenghong (1905-1925), a martyr who died in a massacre against a local workers’ strike in 1925.
Putuo District will promote its revolutionary history as the birthplace of China’s labor campaigns to mark the centennial of the Communist Party of China.
The district in Shanghai’s northwest downtown was once home to a large swathe of China’s earliest modern factories and workers. The riverside region along Suzhou Creek is known as one of the birthplaces of China’s modern national industries.
The district has built a new archive and exhibition hall about the first workers’ school founded by the Party in 1921 in Putuo. Major renovations are being conducted on the memorial of the martyr Gu Zhenghong (1905-1925) and the museum of the Caoyang Community, China’s first workers’ community to accommodate model workers.
“Putuo is known as ‘red Huxi (west Shanghai),’ where the working class entered the political arena for the first time under the leadership of the Party,” Hao Bingquan, director of Putuo's publicity department, told a seminar on Thursday.
Professors and experts on Party history, as well as curators of Party memorials in the Yangtze River Delta region, shared their latest research on the history and stories of the CPC at the seminar in Putuo.
The Archive of Huxi (West Shanghai) Half-day School for Workers is expected to become a cultural exhibition center and city landmark, the district government said.
Early Party member Li Qihan founded the school to promote Marxism and CPC principles among local workers and organize labor movements.
The memorial hall on the former site of the school on Anyuan Road will document the history of the school, with cultural relics and introductions to key historical figures.
It will work along with the memorial hall of Gu Zhenghong (1905-1925), a martyr who died in a massacre against a local workers’ strike in 1925, to show Putuo’s important status in China’s revolutionary history, according to the district government.
The sacrifice of Gu later developed into the overwhelming May 30 Movement in 1925 against foreign imperialists, according to Hao.
Meanwhile, a major renovation has been completed on the Caoyang Community history museum. The nation’s first workers’ community was created in 1951, and was home to model workers in factories in Putuo, Zhebei and Changning districts. Some senior workers with limited living space were also allowed to live in the community as the first group of inhabitants. The community is dubbed the “Model Workers’ Village.”
