Pan-Pacific Trade Union Secretariat
[1] A convention call was issued for a gathering to be held in Sydney, Australia on July 1, 1926, at under the auspices of the communist-led New South Wales Trades and Labour Council, but the Nationalist government of Stanley Bruce denied travel visas to the assembly's scheduled participants and the meeting was therefore postponed and moved to another location.
[3] Rapidly changing political events in China in the spring of 1927 had made both the time and the place impossible, however, and the decision was made to move to the safer ground of Hankou, immediately following the closure of the 5th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party[4] Hankou was selected owing to its place at the center of the Wuhan government of the Kuomintang, a revolutionary nationalist organization which was at the time briefly in alliance with the international Communist movement.
[5] The convention opened on May 20, 1927, and was attended to delegates from 8 nations — China, the Soviet Union, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, France, the United States, and Great Britain.
[8] Other members of the inaugural secretariat of the PPTUS included Jack Ryan of Australian, Crisanto Evangelista from the Philippines, Su Chao-jen of China, and K. Kawasaki of Japan.
[8] Member organizations endorsed a seven point platform which pledged the PPTUS to carry on a joint struggle against war between the military powers of the Pacific, to defend the Chinese Revolution, to aid oppressed nations of the region to liberate themselves from imperial powers, to fight against racial and national barriers, joint action, and a unified world trade union movement through a single Trade Union International.
[10] It was from there whence financial resources flowed and where organizational decisions were debated and determined, with representatives of the various constituent Communist and trade unions living permanently in Moscow's Hotel Lux.
[14] By August 1930 total membership in semi-underground red trade unions in the whole of China controlled by the Kuomintang is said to have been reduced by mass killings and attrition to just 49,826 members.
[15] By this time it was already clear that the PPTUS had failed as an instrument for amplifying labor radicalism, with Solomon Lozovsky noting that "extremely unfavorable conditions" had rendered the organization unable to meet openly in any capitalist country in the region.
[16] E.H. Carr notes that the only record of the second and final conference appears in a pessimistic account by Lozovsky in the Comintern magazine Kommunisticheskii Internatsional, with the memoir of one participant published a quarter century later indicating that the gathering was moved to Shanghai during the proceedings.
[20] Browder's own time in Shanghai was correspondingly short, lasting from February until June 1928, after which he departed for the "Home Office" in Moscow and thereafter to the United States.
