The History of the General Strike: Shanghai 1925, A Chinese Minneapolis
It Could Happen Here
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.0 • 6.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mia discusses the history of general strikes starting with another strike over armed occupiers killing unarmed protesters: the Shanghai general strike of 1925.
Sources:
Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor: https://libcom.org/article/shanghai-strike-politics-chinese-labor
From War to Nationalism - China’s Turning Point, 1924-1925
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:05.9 | Cool Zone Media. |
| 0:10.6 | Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. |
| 0:17.6 | I'm your host, Mia Wong. |
| 0:20.5 | Over the course of about a month, |
| 0:24.3 | the general strike went from a pipe dream |
| 0:28.1 | that even the most optimistic organizers didn't think could happen |
| 0:31.6 | until potentially maybe 2028 |
| 0:36.2 | to something that happened here. We saw a one-day general |
| 0:42.4 | strike in Minneapolis, and everything is different now. People from SEIU are calling for general |
| 0:51.3 | strikes. It's become a demand, |
| 0:56.2 | it's become a tactic, |
| 0:57.7 | and it's become a term that is |
| 0:59.2 | on the tongues of people |
| 1:01.3 | who never would dare speak of it before. |
| 1:04.3 | And on this show, |
| 1:06.0 | we are going to talk about the history of General Strikes, |
| 1:09.2 | how they happen, |
| 1:10.5 | how they're organized, how they happen, how they're organized, how they succeed, |
| 1:13.9 | how they fail, and what the contemporary history of the tactic looks like. |
| 1:20.8 | Now, when I originally planned this first episode, I was going to do a overview of about 100 years of history of |
... |
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