KMT–CCP united front
국공합작
The two alliances between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party against a common enemy. The first (1924–1927), brokered by the Comintern, had Communists join the KMT as individuals and fight the warlords together in the Northern Expedition until Chiang Kai-shek’s coup of 12 April 1927 and the Wuhan government’s expulsion of the Communists. The second (1937–1945) formed after the Xi’an Incident to resist Japan, with the Red Army reorganised as the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies of the National Revolutionary Army, but it decayed into hostility after the New Fourth Army incident of 1941.
In depth
The first united front took shape in the Sun–Joffe statement of 1923 and the KMT’s First National Congress in 1924. Judging that China faced a bourgeois national revolution, the Comintern ordered the Communists into a “bloc within”; the Soviet adviser Borodin reorganised the KMT and the Whampoa Military Academy was founded. The Communists expanded the labour and peasant movements dramatically in these years.
As the Northern Expedition advanced in 1926, the KMT’s left–right split and conflict over the peasant movement deepened; Stalin insisted on keeping the alliance while Trotsky argued for an independent Communist line. The anti-Communist coup in Shanghai in April 1927 and the Wuhan government’s break in July destroyed the front, and the Communists turned to armed uprisings and rural bases.
The second front was formed as the “anti-Japanese national united front”. The Communists gave up their soviet government and land confiscation but kept the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region and their own army, and under the front they greatly enlarged their base areas. After the New Fourth Army incident of 1941 the two parties fought the war while watching each other, and after Japan’s surrender in 1945 Marshall’s mediation could not prevent civil war.