You have to say that Chen Muwu was lucky, he caught up with a general strike.

You have to say that Chen Muwu was not lucky, he became a witness to the biggest strike in British history.

The root cause of the strike, of course, was the class contradictions between the mine owners and the workers.

But the direct cause is the convergence of various factors.

Britain is the birthplace of the first industrial revolution, and more than 150 years have passed since then.

In the steam age, people burned coal to drive steam engines.

In the electric age, people used to burn coal to generate electricity.

Even though God is a good eater, the small island nation of Britain has been endowed with sufficient coal resources.

But after more than 150 years of mining, the coal that is easier to obtain in the shallow layers of the coal mine has basically been mined.

Although there are still a lot of coal resources under the shallow level, it is much more difficult to mine, and the coal production in the UK has been declining year by year.

At the start of World War I, Britain's war machine was running at full speed, and factories across the country were running at full capacity, and British coal was mainly supplied domestically.

Coupled with the fact that the war caused the sea route to be blocked, the export of coal was greatly reduced, which further stimulated the development of the coal industry in other countries.

Although the UK's coal production is decreasing year by year, overall, it is still in excess of demand.

After the end of the war, the domestic demand for coal declined, and Britain wanted to continue to export surplus coal in exchange for money, but found that the United States, Germany and even Poland had become a big coal country, and no one bought their own coal.

In order to save Germany's economy, the United States came up with one of the Dawes plans, allowing Germany to repay the war reparations between France and Italy by exporting free coal, which further lowered the price of coal in Europe.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, who "recast the glory with glory, is duty-bound" insisted on restoring the gold standard of the pound sterling, so that the inflated exchange rate of the pound sterling would be too strong, and it would be even more detrimental to Britain's commodity exports.

All these factors have taken together, and why did British coal miners find that their profits had suddenly become lower?

If the profits are lower, then the coal miners can only be squeezed.

Not only to lower their wages, but also to extend their working hours.

This matter became more and more troublesome, and finally it went directly to the British government.

Negotiations between the Confederation of Trade Unions and the British government began in a tug-of-war until May 1, 1926, International Workers' Day, when negotiations broke down and the strike finally began.

Among the main members of the strike were not only the coal miners, who had been treated unfairly, but also workers from other industries who stood in solidarity with and sympathized with the coal miners.

It stands to reason that the strike would have had a fairly minor impact on Cambridgeshire, an academic city that was neither a mining city nor an industrial city.

The only inconvenience may be that the traffic will be affected by the strike.

But this is the case, and he was caught up by the unlucky Chen Muwu.

Didn't get the customized accelerator parts, Chen Muwu, Cockcroft, and the truck Chadwick found, all came in good luck and returned disappointed.

After returning to Cambridge University, Chen Muwu could only finish the paper on path integration while listening to various people around him talk about the news of the general strike.

Poor traffic and the disruption of postal routes also affected the transportation of newspapers.

Now Cambridge University can't even receive the Times and the Daily Mail.

Of course, because the printing workers were part of the strike in solidarity with the coal miners, even the two most widely circulated newspapers in Britain were unable to escape a sharp decline in their pages and print runs during the strike.

But there are always well-informed people, and Cambridge is not far from London, only fifty miles.

If you take a car, it only takes two or three hours.

Even for Eddington, a cyclist, 50 miles was nothing.

The modified bicycle that Chen Muwu gave him made Eddington like a tiger.

So that he can ride his bicycle from Cambridge to London in one day.

From the most primitive way of information dissemination - word of mouth, Chen Muwu probably understood the specific attitude of all aspects of the British in this strike.

King George V of England stood up and called on the workers to end the strike and return to work.

Prime Minister Baldwin is also thinking about how the strike can be resolved peacefully and quickly.

Wherever there is a crowd, there is a left, a center and a right.

Within the Conservative Party, there are moderates, of course, and there are hardliners.

The hardliners are represented by Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, who does not yet know that he is also part of the cause of the strike.

He felt that Prime Minister Baldwin was a little too rational, and it was better to send soldiers directly.

As the largest opposition party, the Labour Party is also not monolithic.

Within the Labour Party, which has the word "worker" in its name, there is naturally a part of the people who support the workers to defend their own interests.

But there is a much larger group of people who fear that the strike might link them up with the SL-Communists who are in solidarity with the strike, thereby damaging the party's reputation.

After all, a large part of the reason for the collapse of MacDonald's cabinet was the Zinoviev letter, which made the British think that the Labour Party was the British agent of the Communist International.

They are now overkill and do not want to have the slightest connection with the Sulians, and they are even more afraid that there will really be a few real revolutionaries among the workers on strike, and that Britain will follow the old path of Tsarist Russia.

When the red flag flew over Buckingham Palace, George V's family was executed, and the House of Lords and Houses of Commons were dissolved.

Without parliament, where are the ruling and opposition parties? Isn't there no future for the Labour Party?

Therefore, most of the Labour Party still has a deep resistance to this strike.

Cambridgeshire, the city of academics, was once again embroiled in the matter.

As the top university in the UK, the University of Cambridge has not only produced countless world-renowned scientists, but also trained generations of politicians for the UK.

The conservative students, who are in line with the British government's position and want the strike to end as soon as possible, can only do little but wait and see.

And the students, who were influenced and inspired by the Red Sulian and stood on the side of the workers, supported the workers in various ways.

Rutherford, who was very indifferent to political topics, gave a death order in the Cavendish laboratory, and everyone should focus on the experiment, and no one should talk about it in the laboratory, let alone express an opinion on this matter.

He didn't name names, but it was known that the director was targeting a few people who regularly talked about communism in the lab, including his beloved Kapitsa.

In Rutherford's eyes, Chen Muwu, another beloved disciple who was bent on the particle accelerator, was much cuter than those students who didn't let him worry.

But he didn't know that Chen Muwu was also one of the most radical secret organizations in Cambridge University, one of the members of the Cambridge Apostolic Society.

At the weekly meeting of the Apostolic Society, there was a lively discussion about the strike.

Most of the news about the strike that Chen Muwu learned was heard from the gatherings.

Not only did the apostles discuss donating money to the unions to support the coal miners in their continued struggle against the capitalists, but they also planned to publish newspaper articles in solidarity with the strike under their real names or pseudonyms.

When it came to donating money, no one came to ask Chen Muwu if he would donate.

Although in Rutherford's eyes, Chen Muwu, a student, was the richest in the Cavendish laboratory, so he lobbied him to give up the Maxwell Scholarship.

But in the eyes of the sons and daughters of the Cambridge Apostle Society, the various bonuses that Chen Muwu received, plus the royalties he received from the George Chen series and the shareholder dividends he received from Penguin Press, were not a lot of money at all.

However, when they published an article in support of the strike, they still sought Chen Muwu's opinion.

To everyone's disappointment, their Chen brother's performance in this matter was just as negative as when he participated in the discussion of related topics before.

Some people even began to think in their hearts whether it was a wrong decision for them to recruit Chen Muwu into the Apostolic Society only because of his wisdom and without considering his position.

……

There are those who support the strike, and there are those who oppose it.

In the city of London, there are some people who use their private cars as car-sharing to make it easier for people to get around.

Others saw a business opportunity in the strike and organized privately run buses in an attempt to make a fortune in the largely paralyzed city of London.

London in England and Edinburgh in Scotland, where trains connect the two most important cities in the UK, are also back on the line thanks to volunteer drivers.

As a result, Britain's fastest steam locomotive, the Flying Scotsman, which traveled on the main railway artery, derailed near Newcastle due to sabotage by striking workers.

In this case, Chen Muwu finished writing his path integration paper.

Rutherford did not understand, and did not want to, understand the content of this paper.

He thought that it was only because the strikes caused the previously ordered motor parts to not be transported to Cambridge by rail, resulting in the follow-up work not being able to be carried out, so Chen Muwu was idle and bored, so he went to write a theoretical paper to pass the time.

Rutherford had long believed that the sympathetic strike would not last long, and that it would not be long before all sectors of life, except for the coal miners, who were at stake in their lives, would return to their status quo ante.

His advice to Chen Muwu was that it would not be too late for him to send someone to deliver the paper to the Royal Society in London after traffic was restored.

However, the good student did not agree with Rutherford's idea, and showed an attitude of eagerness to get the paper published.

So Chen Muwu found Kapitsa and asked the latter to drive him from Cambridge to London.

Kapitsa, who likes to be lively, has long been tired of being trapped in Cambridge University and isolated from the outside world, so he is willing to accompany his good friends on a trip.

Rutherford didn't raise any objections to this, but just told the two disciples to go back quickly and pay attention to safety on the way.

Within a day, Kapitsa drove a car and took Chen Muwu a hundred miles round trip.

After returning, everyone felt that Capitsa, who had gone to London, seemed to be more excited than before, and everyone talked about the scene of London during the general strike.

After a few words of Rutherford's loud voice, he relented.

In the city of London, the editors of the Journal of the Natural Sciences showed little enthusiasm in the face of Chen Muwu's long-lost paper on theoretical physics.

It's not because they can't read the paper, it's just that the editors feel that even if they get the paper and publish the supplement as soon as possible, the supplement will be stuck in the printing house, which is also on strike.

Despite drastically scaling back their pages, The Times and the Daily Mail are still in a de facto standstill.

During the strike, two new newspapers appeared in London to deliver news, the British Gazette and the British Worker.

The British Gazette was a temporary newspaper created by the British government to promote the government's views, and Winston Churchill, a former journalist, was appointed editor-in-chief of the paper.

The British Workers' Newspaper was a counterattack by the trade union confederation in response to the British Gazette and the morale of the workers.

In order to stop the spread of the Worker, Churchill used a trick to extract the salary, and in the name of the British government, he requisitioned most of the newsprint of the Worker.

The "Workers' Daily" had no choice but to reduce its page from eight to four, and it still persisted in the struggle.

Also on the same day after the curtailment, the Workers newspaper ran an article in solidarity with British coal miners.

The author of the article did not use a pen name, he was the model student who never prick his head in Rutherford's eyes, Chen Muwu.

In his article, Chen Muwu expressed his solidarity with the striking workers, and at the same time introduced them to the other side of the Eurasian continent, China, where their workers' brothers had been fighting against the capitalists who enslaved them.

In May last year, a large number of workers went on strike at the Zi Yarn Mills in Lihai and Qingdao.

The behavior of the capitalists was much worse than that of the British miners, and they shot the striking workers, arousing public outrage in China.

On May 30, the workers of the public concession staged a strike and were arrested by the concession authorities.

But the Chinese did not bow to the capitalists and, until now, have stubbornly persisted in the struggle.

Chen Muwu appealed in the newspapers, hoping that the British workers would persevere like their Chinese brothers and never give in to the coercion and temptation of the capitalists.

He had asked Capitsa to drive him to London, and the submission of a paper to the Royal Society was just a cover.

Sending this article to China is Chen Muwu's real purpose.

At the very beginning of the strike, he had this idea already in mind.

At the gathering of the Apostle Society, Chen Muwu's thoughts became more mature, but he didn't reveal it to those sons and brothers.

He wrote this article in support of the strike movement, and at the same time used the sympathy of the British people for the workers to promote to them the "May Day Movement" a year earlier.

was previously regarded as a model of British education and frequently appeared in British newspapers, Chen Muwu is not a household name, but can be regarded as an influential public figure.

The newspaper that published the article caused a great sensation in London.

Although because of the requisition of newsprint, the "Worker" could not be reprinted.

More and more readers know that Dr. Chen of Cambridge University supported the strike, and also knew what a disgraceful role their motherland played in the May Day tragedy.

Churchill, who monitored the strike through the Workers' Daily, also read this article by Chen Muwu.

He didn't care about the dirty things that the British government did in China that was advertised in the article, and the report in the Daily Mail about an old man named Gandhi in India had been reported for so many years, didn't it make any waves?

Churchill's immediate priority remained to deal with the issue of strikes.

He was just angry, Chen Muwu's article was likely to boost the morale of the striking workers and cause trouble for himself.

In his heart, Churchill already remembered that he had a grudge against this Chinese man who ate inside and out, and he must teach him a lesson when he has an opportunity in the future.

Chen Weicheng, the chargé d'affaires of the People's Republic of China in Britain who had just taken office, was very "grateful" to Chen Muwu for the "inauguration gift" he had sent, and estimated that he would soon be busy with this article.

But he can't complain yet, because his predecessor Zhu Zhaoxin specially told himself before going to Italy to take up his post that as long as he serves the world's most famous Chinese well, then it is not a problem to be promoted and make a fortune in the future, and he is the best example.

The embassy in the UK held an emergency meeting overnight to discuss countermeasures against Chen Muwu's article that "smeared" the empire.

Su Lian's embassy in Britain sent a secret message to China.

At the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a Scotsman from Canada, Henry Norman Bethune, also read Chen Muwu's article in the Workers' Daily.

(End of chapter)