workingclasshistory:

On this day, 28 January 1942, Australian troops armed with machine guns, rifles and bayonets attacked striking Chinese sailors in Fremantle.
Around 500 Chinese sailors on six ships had gone on strike and sat down on deck, demanding equal pay with white Australians, as well as better conditions and a guarantee that they would not be sent back to Japanese-occupied China.
On January 28, the 5th Garrison Battalion attacked the workers, killing Tong Youn Tong, 44, with a bayonet and shooting Ping Sang Hsu, 22, in the back. One of the workers managed to grab a rifle and shoot back, injuring one of the sailors, before eventually the workers surrendered. The strikers were then arrested, sent to a concentration camp and then most were drafted to the Chinese Labour Corps and used as forced labour for the Allies fighting against Japan in northern China. The Australian press described the workers in stereotypically racist language as being “of a cunning, ruthless type never before seen in Australia”.
Around the same time, a Chinese crew aboard a Norwegian ship tried to disembark, and several were then shot by Norwegian guards. Elsewhere, after a Chinese ship fireman complained that an Australian had kicked him in the mouth, the whole crew walked off the ship in sympathy.
Chinese sailors’ struggles continued and in 1944 a new agreement was reached in which Chinese workers’ wages were increased to be 80% of whites’.
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Pictured: two of the striking sailors https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1908786699306471/?type=3