“Hands Off China!” – CPGB Leaflet from 1927

Posted: October 26th, 2026 | No Comments »

My thanks to the great collector of all things Chinese ephemera, Roy Delbyck in Hong Kong for this rare copy of a Communist Party of Great Britain leaflet on China from February 1927. .

General strike in Hankow, trouble in Shanghai and particularly The Wanhsien (Wanxian) Incident of 1926, a series of maritime conflicts on the Yangtze between British merchant shipping and regional Chinese military leaders, culminating in a battle with Royal Navy gunboats, which also fired cannons into the city of Wanxian. In 1926, while China was in the midst of the Warlord Era, Sichuan province, surrounded by mountains, was fighting its own civil war in which local militants were backed by various Chinese warlords. In May, Chinese Marshal Wu Peifu, facing an imminent threat from Chiang Kai-shek‘s Northern Expedition campaign, appointed General Yang Sen as the Governor of Sichuan. The latter had used British commercial shipping to transport troops along stretches of the river Yangtze.

All this, so the Communist Party of Great Britain (founded in 1920) believed made the possibility of war between Britain and China imminent. And so they issued the leaflet below – “Hands Off China!”

It’s interesting as well to see who was on the British Hands off China Committee. Many of the big names on the British revolutionary left at the time – Cook, Maxton, Tillett, Tom Mann as well as Harry Pollitt who be the long time leader of the CPGB. Also featured is the left intellectual Bertrand Russell (who wrote the 1922 book “The Problem of China”), as well as the Irish novelist Liam O’Flaherty and poet Sean O’Casey

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