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China Opposing the Warlords
The May Fourth Movement helped to rekindle the then-fading
cause of republican revolution. In 1917 Sun Yat-sen had become
commander-in-chief of a rival military government in Guangzhou in
collaboration with southern warlords. In October 1919 Sun
reestablished the Guomindang to counter the government in Beijing.
The latter, under a succession of warlords, still maintained its
facade of legitimacy and its relations with the West. By 1921 Sun
had become president of the southern government. He spent his
remaining years trying to consolidate his regime and achieve unity
with the north. His efforts to obtain aid from the Western
democracies were ignored, however, and in 1921 he turned to the
Soviet Union, which had recently achieved its own revolution. The
Soviets sought to befriend the Chinese revolutionists by offering
scathing attacks on "Western imperialism." But for political
expediency, the Soviet leadership initiated a dual policy of
support for both Sun and the newly established Chinese Communist
Party (CCP). The Soviets hoped for consolidation but were prepared
for either side to emerge victorious. In this way the struggle for
power in China began between the Nationalists and the Communists.
In 1922 the Guomindang-warlord alliance in Guangzhou was ruptured,
and Sun fled to Shanghai. By then Sun saw the need to seek Soviet
support for his cause. In 1923 a joint statement by Sun and a
Soviet representative in Shanghai pledged Soviet assistance for
China's national unification. Soviet advisers--the most prominent
of whom was an agent of the
Comintern (see Glossary), Mikhail
Borodin--began to arrive in China in 1923 to aid in the
reorganization and consolidation of the Guomindang along the lines
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CCP was under
Comintern instructions to cooperate with the Guomindang, and its
members were encouraged to join while maintaining their party
identities. The CCP was still small at the time, having a
membership of 300 in 1922 and only 1,500 by 1925. The Guomindang in
1922 already had 150,000 members. Soviet advisers also helped the
Nationalists set up a political institute to train propagandists in
mass mobilization techniques and in 1923 sent Chiang Kai-shek
(Jiang Jieshi in pinyin), one of Sun's lieutenants from Tongmeng
Hui days, for several months' military and political study in
Moscow. After Chiang's return in late 1923, he participated in the
establishment of the Whampoa (Huangpu in pinyin) Military Academy
outside Guangzhou, which was the seat of government under the
Guomindang-CCP alliance. In 1924 Chiang became head of the academy
and began the rise to prominence that would make him Sun's
successor as head of the Guomindang and the unifier of all China
under the right-wing nationalist government.
Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in Beijing in March 1925, but the
Nationalist movement he had helped to initiate was gaining
momentum. During the summer of 1925, Chiang, as commander-in-chief
of the National Revolutionary Army, set out on the long-delayed
Northern Expedition against the northern warlords. Within nine
months, half of China had been conquered. By 1926, however, the
Guomindang had divided into left- and right-wing factions, and the
Communist bloc within it was also growing. In March 1926, after
thwarting a kidnapping attempt against him, Chiang abruptly
dismissed his Soviet advisers, imposed restrictions on CCP members'
participation in the top leadership, and emerged as the preeminent
Guomindang leader. The Soviet Union, still hoping to prevent a
split between Chiang and the CCP, ordered Communist underground
activities to facilitate the Northern Expedition, which was finally
launched by Chiang from Guangzhou in July 1926.
In early 1927 the Guomindang-CCP rivalry led to a split in the
revolutionary ranks. The CCP and the left wing of the Guomindang
had decided to move the seat of the Nationalist government from
Guangzhou to Wuhan. But Chiang, whose Northern Expedition was
proving successful, set his forces to destroying the Shanghai CCP
apparatus and established an anti-Communist government at Nanjing
in April 1927. There now were three capitals in China: the
internationally recognized warlord regime in Beijing; the Communist
and left-wing Guomindang regime at Wuhan; and the right-wing
civilian-military regime at Nanjing, which would remain the
Nationalist capital for the next decade.
The Comintern cause appeared bankrupt. A new policy was
instituted calling on the CCP to foment armed insurrections in both
urban and rural areas in preparation for an expected rising tide of
revolution. Unsuccessful attempts were made by Communists to take
cities such as Nanchang, Changsha, Shantou, and Guangzhou, and an
armed rural insurrection, known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising, was
staged by peasants in Hunan Province. The insurrection was led by
Mao Zedong (1893-1976), who would later become chairman of the CCP
and head of state of the People's Republic of China. Mao was of
peasant origins and was one of the founders of the CCP.
But in mid-1927 the CCP was at a low ebb. The Communists had
been expelled from Wuhan by their left-wing Guomindang allies, who
in turn were toppled by a military regime. By 1928 all of China was
at least nominally under Chiang's control, and the Nanjing
government received prompt international recognition as the sole
legitimate government of China. The Nationalist government
announced that in conformity with Sun Yat-sen's formula for the
three stages of revolution--military unification, political
tutelage, and constitutional democracy--China had reached the end
of the first phase and would embark on the second, which would be
under Guomindang direction.
Data as of July 1987
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