The first united front, the Northern Expedition and the catastrophe of 1927

Moscow chooses Guangzhou

By 1922 Sun Yat-sen had lost almost everything. In June the Guangdong strongman Chen Jiongming shelled his presidential headquarters and drove him out of Guangzhou, and the financial and military aid he repeatedly sought from Britain and the United States never came. The Soviets, by contrast, had reached out early. In 1918 Chicherin announced that Russia would renounce the privileges the tsars had won in China, and after sending Voitinsky in 1920 to help Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao found a Communist party, the Comintern made direct contact with Sun through Maring (Henk Sneevliet). Meeting Maring at Guilin in December 1921, Sun showed a keen interest in the Russian revolution and Lenin's policies. The early Comintern also courted northern and southern power-holders such as Wu Peifu and Chen Jiongming, but once Chen had expelled Sun, the CCP and the Comintern settled on supporting Sun. 1 2 3 4

On 26 January 1923 Sun and the Soviet envoy Adolph Joffe issued a joint statement in Shanghai. It affirmed that neither communist organisation nor the soviet system could be introduced into China, yet promised Soviet help for China's unification and independence, and it became the foundation of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Soviet Union. It had a price: Sun in effect accepted Soviet management of the Chinese Eastern Railway for the time being and the presence of Soviet troops in Outer Mongolia. In July Sun sent a delegation under Chiang Kai-shek to Moscow to study Soviet military and political institutions, and in August the Soviet Politburo appointed Mikhail Borodin political adviser to the revolutionary government at Guangzhou while making Lev Karakhan its chief envoy to the Beiyang government in Beijing, with orders that the two coordinate. It was a dual policy: formal diplomacy in the north, revolutionary aid in the south. 4 1 5 6

The "bloc within", in which Communists entered the Kuomintang as individuals, was the method Maring pressed for. In the Comintern's judgement China was at the stage of bourgeois national revolution, and a Communist party of a few hundred members had to build strength by organising the masses inside the Kuomintang. Chen Duxiu objected that the party would lose its class independence but submitted to Comintern discipline. The CCP's Third Congress, held at Guangzhou in June 1923 by 40 delegates representing 420 members, resolved that all members would join the Kuomintang while pledging to expand the Communist Party itself. Sun, for his part, admitted Communists only as individuals bound by Kuomintang ideology and discipline, ruling out an alliance of parties or entry as an organised bloc. From the start the two sides understood the same alliance differently. 1 3 7 8

Arriving at Guangzhou on 6 October 1923, Borodin talked with Sun in English and concluded that the Kuomintang leaned on warlord armies without popular support. When Chen Jiongming's troops pressed towards the city in November, he proposed mobilising the masses with promises of landlord land for the peasants, an eight-hour day and a minimum wage. Facing opposition from his allies, Sun rejected land reform and accepted only a 25 per cent rent reduction. The Kuomintang's First National Congress, held from 20 to 30 January 1924, adopted a democratic-centralist constitution drafted by Borodin. Among the 25 full members of the Central Executive Committee, Tan Pingshan, Li Dazhao and Yu Shude were Communists, as were Mao Zedong, Qu Qiubai, Zhang Guotao, Lin Zuhan (Lin Boqu) and others among the 17 alternates; Tan headed the Organisation Department and Lin the Peasant Department. The CCP later called the policy of these years the "three great policies" of alliance with Russia, alliance with the Communists and support for workers and peasants, while the Kuomintang insisted that Sun had only ever had one set of Three Principles. 5 2 1

Whampoa and the Guangzhou base

The Kuomintang's First Congress approved a military academy to train junior officers for the coming National Revolutionary Army. The Whampoa Military Academy opened in May 1924 on Changzhou Island at Huangpu, Guangzhou, and was formally inaugurated on 16 June, with Chiang Kai-shek as superintendent, Liao Zhongkai, the party's finance chief, as party representative and Sun as its ceremonial premier. Instructors trained at the Frunze Military Academy carried the main teaching and the Soviets paid for the school. The 6-to-12-month programme combined mostly infantry training with lectures on the Three Principles, party history and political economy. Most political instructors were Communists, and the head of the political department was Zhou Enlai. The first class of 490 graduated in November. The training fell short of professional armies, but a party-controlled officer corps gave it an edge over the warlord forces, and future Red Army commanders such as Lin Biao and Xu Xiangqian passed through it alongside the Nationalist generals. 9 2 10 11 12

The revolutionary government held its base by force. In August 1924 Chiang's gunboat seized a ship carrying 9,000 rifles and 3 million rounds that the Guangzhou merchants had bought from a British firm for their private Merchants' Corps, and the corps answered with a shop strike across Guangdong. In October the first training regiment of Whampoa cadets, together with armed workers and peasants, crushed the corps' uprising. In spring 1925 the First Eastern Expedition under Chiang and Zhou Enlai routed Chen Jiongming's army on the East River, and in June the returning expedition put down a revolt by the Yunnan and Guangxi warlords Yang Ximin and Liu Zhenhuan, who had tried to seize Guangzhou. The Nationalist Government was formally established in Guangzhou on 1 July 1925, and between the end of that year and early 1926 a Second Eastern Expedition and a Southern Expedition unified the province. Along the East River, Peng Pai's peasant army, armed during the expedition, dug in so firmly that Haifeng came to be called "Little Moscow". 13 9 2

Guangzhou was also a school of mass organisation. On 3 July 1924, at Peng Pai's suggestion, the Peasant Movement Training Institute opened under the Kuomintang's Peasant Department. Of its six terms, run until September 1926, Peng directed the first and fifth and Mao Zedong the sixth and largest, with Zhou Enlai, Yun Daiying and Xiao Chunü among the lecturers. A count of April 1926 put peasant association membership in twelve provinces at some 980,000, 65 per cent of them in Guangdong. Guangzhou became a gathering place for East Asian revolutionaries. Ho Chi Minh, sent at the end of 1924 as Borodin's interpreter and secretary, organised the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League and lectured young Vietnamese at Whampoa and elsewhere. Koreans came too. Choe Yong-gon served from 1925 as a Whampoa instructor and cadet company leader, and in spring 1926 Kim Won-bong of the Heroic Corps obtained Chiang's permission for young Koreans to enter the academy. Lyuh Woon-hyung joined the Kuomintang in 1925 at Sun's recommendation. 14 15 2 16 5 17 18 19

From May Thirtieth to the Canton–Hong Kong strike

What turned the alliance into a mass movement began in Shanghai's Japanese-owned cotton mills. A layoff dispute at the Naigai Wata Kaisha No. 8 Mill in February 1925 gave rise to a cotton workers' union, and on 15 May a Japanese guard of the same company shot dead the worker Gu Zhenghong. When students marching for him were arrested in the International Settlement and put on trial on 30 May, thousands of Shanghai University students and workers converged on Nanjing Road. Outside the Louza police station the British inspector Everson fired his revolver after a warning, and his Sikh and Chinese constables loosed some forty rounds. At least eleven people died on the spot and five more later. Casualty figures vary widely, and accounts that include the repression of later protests put the dead at between 30 and 200. 20 21

That evening the CCP Central Committee called a general strike, shop closure and school strike across Shanghai, and the Shanghai General Labour Union under Li Lisan directed the struggle with student and merchant bodies. By 10 June some 130,000 workers at 107 foreign establishments and 26,000 at eleven Chinese factories were out. The Settlement declared martial law on 1 June and called out its Volunteer Corps and foreign marines, and by 8 June 26 foreign warships surrounded it. Protests in Beijing and other cities also left dead and wounded. The movement eventually subsided, but in July alone seventy new unions joined the Communist-led General Labour Union. Liu Shaoqi, who had led the Anyuan miners, worked with Li Lisan in Shanghai at this time. May Thirtieth turned anti-imperialism into the language of the urban masses. 20 22

In the south the movement lasted much longer. Communist-affiliated unions began a strike in Hong Kong on 19 June 1925, and on the 23rd more than 100,000 people marching along Shaji Road opposite the Shamian concession were fired on by British and French troops; more than fifty were killed, many of them Whampoa cadets and officers (the Shakee massacre). The strikers set up a Strikers' Delegates Congress of 800 and a strike committee chaired by Su Zhaozheng, which blockaded Hong Kong and ran pickets against British goods. By the end of July some 250,000 people had left Hong Kong for Guangdong and the colony's trade fell by half. The sixteen-month Canton–Hong Kong strike gave the Guangzhou government a base of armed workers, but it squeezed a government whose revenue depended on foreign trade and fed the hostility of the Kuomintang right. It ended in October 1926, after Kuomintang negotiations with Britain, with few of its demands met. 21 23 24

After Sun: from Liao Zhongkai's assassination to the Zhongshan Warship incident

Sun died of liver cancer in Beijing on 12 March 1925, and the Kuomintang soon split over his legacy. From April Dai Jitao published a series of works on "Sun Yat-senism" that claimed a "pure" Three Principles and contested the Communists' reading; the CCP labelled him the "new right". On 20 August Liao Zhongkai, the left-wing leader who had held the alliance together, was shot dead by five gunmen outside a meeting of the Central Executive Committee. Suspicion fell on Hu Hanmin, who was sent to Moscow, and Xu Chongzhi was ousted, leaving Wang Jingwei, chairman of the Nationalist Government, and the rising Chiang Kai-shek at the top. In November anti-Communist elders meeting at the Biyun Temple in Beijing's Western Hills (the Western Hills Group) styled themselves the Fourth Plenum of the Central Executive Committee and voted to strip Communists of party membership and dismiss Borodin, but the Guangzhou centre ruled the meeting inquorate and void, and Chiang publicly defended Borodin and the alliance. 10 2 25 5 26

The Kuomintang's Second Congress at Guangzhou in January 1926 disciplined the Western Hills Group and placed Communists in key central posts, leaving the party "almost wholly under leftist control". Party membership reached 200,000 on the eve of the congress, and Communists were the working heads of many provincial branches; Guangzhou was now called the "red capital". In Moscow, Hu Hanmin applied for the Kuomintang to join the Comintern, which its Executive Committee declined in March 1926. Meanwhile Chiang, eager to launch the northern campaign, clashed over the plan with the Soviet adviser Kisanka (Nikolai Kuibyshev) and suspected that the Soviet advisers and the Communists meant to join Wang Jingwei in stripping him of his command. 26 2

On the night of 18 March the Zhongshan, the strongest ship of the Nationalist navy, commanded by the Communist acting naval chief Li Zhilong, moved from Guangzhou to the anchorage off Whampoa and came back the next day. Chiang's suspicions grew over a captain citing orders he had never given and a string of odd telephone calls; he bought a ticket for a steamer to Shantou, then decided to fight. On 20 March he declared martial law, cut the telephone network, arrested Li and seized the ship, detained the Communist political commissars of the First Corps and Whampoa (Zhou Enlai among them) and surrounded the Soviet advisers' residences and the Canton–Hong Kong strike committee. What really happened is still disputed: a pre-emptive coup by Chiang, a Communist plot to kidnap him to Vladivostok, or an accident of misunderstandings, crossed lines and rivalries among junior staff. Andrei Bubnov, head of the Soviet mission then in Guangzhou, reported that an abortive putsch attempted by some Communist commanders was to blame. 26 27

Afterwards both Moscow and Chiang chose compromise over rupture. Bubnov agreed to recall Kisanka, continue Soviet aid and accept that Communists would no longer hold top Kuomintang posts, while Chiang balanced matters by dismissing the right-winger Wu Tiecheng and criticising the Western Hills Group. Wang Jingwei resigned and left secretly for France in May. On 15 May the Kuomintang's Second Plenum adopted the "Resolution on Readjusting Party Affairs": Communists were not to criticise Sun or his principles, were to hand over a list of their members inside the Kuomintang, were not to exceed one third of any party committee and were not to head central departments. The same session formalised Chiang's leadership of party and army. Trotsky and the CCP committees in Shanghai and Guangdong opposed the deal, but Stalin backed it. The Communists stayed inside the alliance with their positions cut back, and Chiang became commander of the Northern Expedition with Soviet aid in hand. 26 2 8

The Northern Expedition: army and mass movement race north

In 1926 the enemy consisted of three coalitions. Wu Peifu held northern Hunan, Hubei and Henan; Sun Chuanfang's "five provinces" covered Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui and Jiangxi; and Zhang Zuolin, master of the Beiyang government, ruled Manchuria, Shandong and Zhili. The plan drawn up by the Soviet advisers Borodin and Blyukher (alias Galen) was to strike Wu first, placate Sun and leave Zhang alone. The Nationalist Government appointed Chiang commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army on 5 June, and his installation on 9 July formally opened the expedition. Fighting had already begun: in May Ye Ting's Independent Regiment entered Hunan as the vanguard to help Tang Shengzhi, who was being pushed back by Wu, and Tang joined the army in June as commander of the Eighth Army. The army took Changsha on 11 July. 24 5 28 2

In late August the army fought its decisive battles on the road to Wuchang. Ye Ting's regiment turned the rear of Tingsiqiao, and at Heshengqiao on 29 and 30 August Wu's counterattack collapsed, costing him 8,000 men. After losing Hankou and Hanyang, his remaining troops held the walled city of Wuchang for more than a month until it fell on 10 October; within the Fourth "Iron" Army, Ye's units stood out. Jiangxi was harder going against Sun Chuanfang. Chiang briefly took Jiujiang and Nanchang in September only to lose them, and Sun killed hundreds of students, teachers and suspected Nationalists and displayed their heads on spikes. The army retook Nanchang on 9 November, suffering 20,000 casualties in the final push alone. In the north, Feng Yuxiang took office at Wuyuan on 17 September as commander of the Guominjun allied armies and joined the national revolution, aided by Soviet advisers and Communists such as Liu Bojian. 24 28 2 29

Where the army passed, the mass movement exploded. Mao Zedong's "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (March 1927) wrote that Hunan's peasant associations, with 300,000 to 400,000 members up to September 1926, had at least two million by the end of January 1927, a mass following of some ten million. The associations paraded landlords and local bullies in tall paper hats and cut rents and interest, and in places revolutionary tribunals carried out executions. "A revolution is not a dinner party," Mao wrote, dismissing the charge of "going too far" as a landlord's theory. Wuhan's unions grew to some 300,000 members by the end of 1926, and in January 1927 crowds led by Liu Shaoqi occupied the British concession at Hankou; Eugene Chen's negotiations returned the Hankou and Jiujiang concessions. But most officers of the army came from landlord families, and when the landholding family of General He Jian was paraded through the streets as criminals the anger inside the army grew. The revolution's army and the revolution's masses were not running in the same direction. 30 31 22 5

Spring 1927: Shanghai

In December 1926 the Kuomintang centre and the Nationalist Government moved from Guangzhou to Wuhan, where Borodin, the Kuomintang left and the Communists ran the government; Chiang stayed at his headquarters in Nanchang and tried to keep the government there. In March 1927 the Kuomintang's Third Plenum at Hankou, which Chiang boycotted, set up a left-dominated Political Council to bring the army under party control, and Mao spoke at length there on his Hunan report and the land question. In the same months the Communists in Shanghai tried three times to overthrow the warlord Sun Chuanfang with workers' risings. After a first rising in October 1926 and a second general strike of 360,000 in February 1927 had failed, a special committee of Chen Duxiu, Luo Yinong, Zhao Shiyan, Wang Shouhua and Zhou Enlai prepared a third. On 21 March a general strike called by the Shanghai General Labour Union turned into an armed rising, and after two days of street fighting the workers' pickets took the North Station, the last warlord stronghold, on the 22nd and held the city outside the concessions. The Shanghai Special Municipality Citizens' Representative Government, the first regime the Communists had set up in a major city, was established. 31 8 32 33

Before Bai Chongxi's Eastern Route Army entered Shanghai and Chiang moved his headquarters there on 26 March, troops of the National Revolutionary Army entering Nanjing on 24 March, together with local people, attacked the British, American and Japanese consulates and foreign homes, killing several foreigners. British and American warships shelled the city, killing at least forty, and Chiang's camp blamed this Nanjing Incident on the Sixth Army, whose political commissar was the Communist Lin Zuhan. Shanghai's bankers and merchants secretly paid more than three million dollars to curb Communist influence, and the powers feared the "Bolshevik menace". On 2 April the Kuomintang Central Control Commission under Cai Yuanpei voted to purge the Communists. Wang Jingwei, back in China, issued a joint declaration with Chen Duxiu on 5 April reaffirming the alliance and soon left for Wuhan. Chiang had the Green Gang bosses Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin form a "Common Progress Association" to oppose the Communist unions. In the north, on 6 April Zhang Zuolin raided the Soviet embassy with the tacit approval of the diplomatic corps and arrested Li Dazhao and some sixty others; Li was hanged with nineteen comrades on 28 April. 24 34 8 35 36

On the night of 11 April Wang Shouhua, chairman of the Shanghai General Labour Union, was invited to Du Yuesheng's mansion and murdered. Before dawn on 12 April Green Gang gunmen wearing armbands marked "Labour" attacked union offices in Zhabei, Nanshi and Pudong, and the 26th Army, under an emergency order from Chiang, disarmed the workers' pickets. Only the union headquarters and the Commercial Press, where arms were stored, resisted, and they fell to machine guns and field artillery; more than 300 were killed or wounded that day. On the 13th, when thousands of workers and students struck in protest on Zhou Enlai's orders and marched on the headquarters of the 26th Army's 2nd Division, troops opened fire and killed a hundred. The Shanghai toll was never established. One account has more than a thousand arrested, some 300 executed and over 5,000 missing; other estimates put the dead at 5,000 to 10,000 within weeks. On 15 April Li Jishen declared martial law in Guangzhou and arrested thousands, and the "party purification" spread to Guangxi under the New Guangxi clique and elsewhere. On 18 April Chiang, with Hu Hanmin and others, set up a separate Nationalist Government at Nanjing, and the Kuomintang split into two governments, Nanjing and Wuhan (the Ning–Han split). 8 35 2 31

The collapse of Wuhan

Wuhan was isolated politically and collapsing economically. When the banks of Shanghai and Guangzhou cut off dealings, taxes went uncollected, and by May 1927 the Wuhan government was spending ten million dollars against revenue of 1.8 million. The CCP's Fifth Congress, held at Wuchang from 27 April to 9 May with 82 delegates, heard Qu Qiubai and Cai Hesen attack the "right opportunism" of Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi, Qu distributing a 70,000-character pamphlet, but it kept working with the Wuhan government, whose promised agrarian reform never took off. Meanwhile Wuhan's generals turned one by one. On 13 May Xia Douyin's 14th Independent Division marched on Wuhan and was beaten back by Ye Ting's 24th Division, and on the night of 21 May at Changsha Xu Kexiang, commander of the 35th Army's 33rd Regiment, surrounded more than twenty offices of the provincial Kuomintang, the labour federation and the peasant associations, disarmed the pickets and peasant guards and massacred the left (the Horse Day Incident, "horse" being the telegraphic code for the 21st). Some 10,000 people are estimated to have been killed in and around Changsha over the following three weeks. 31 37 38 39 8

On 1 June Borodin and the Comintern delegate M. N. Roy received Stalin's secret telegram, the so-called "May Instructions". It demanded that the Communists seize land while sparing that of officers and soldiers; raise an army of 20,000 Communists and 50,000 revolutionary workers and peasants; bring new leaders of worker and peasant origin into the Kuomintang to replace those with "old mindsets"; and set up a revolutionary military court to punish reactionary officers. Borodin and the CCP leaders thought it an impractical "fairy tale from overseas", but Roy, consulting no one, showed the telegram to Wang Jingwei, who concluded that following it would destroy the Kuomintang. Wang sent Deng Yanda to meet Feng Yuxiang at Zhengzhou on 8 to 10 June to seek his backing, but Feng met Chiang at Xuzhou on 19 to 21 June, was promised 2.5 million yuan a month for his army and sided with Nanjing. Feng wired Wuhan demanding Borodin's dismissal and the expulsion of the Communists. 31 5 2 29

At an enlarged Politburo meeting in Hankou on 3 and 4 July, Chen Duxiu and Borodin argued against carrying out the May Instructions for now and for halting the workers' and peasants' movements in Hunan and Hubei to save the alliance with the left. The Comintern branded this "opportunism", recalled Borodin and on 8 July demanded that the Communists leave the Wuhan government. On 12 July Chen stepped down as general secretary and a five-man group of Zhou Enlai, Li Lisan, Li Weihan, Zhang Tailei and Zhang Guotao took over (Qu Qiubai joined later). On the 13th the CCP announced its withdrawal from the government, and on the 14th Soong Ching-ling denounced the break as a betrayal of Sun's principles. On 15 July Wang Jingwei disclosed the May Instructions at a meeting and gave Communists the choice of leaving the CCP or suspension, the "separation from the Communists"; the only one to protest and walk out was Soong's representative Eugene Chen. Borodin left Wuhan on 27 July, passed through Feng's Zhengzhou and crossed Mongolia to Moscow, the American journalist Anna Louise Strong travelling with him. "When the next Chinese general comes to Moscow and shouts Hail to the world revolution," he said, "better send at once for the GPU. All that any of them want is rifles." 31 38 2 40 5

The debate in Moscow: Stalin and Trotsky

China policy was the watershed of the Soviet party struggle of 1926–1927. Stalin held that the small Communist Party had first to accomplish a bourgeois national revolution inside the Kuomintang, and at a Comintern meeting in November 1926 said that "the exit of Chinese communists from the Kuomintang would be the gravest error". The United Opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev argued that the Communists must break clearly with the Kuomintang, keep their class independence and build soviets of workers and peasants. In a closed speech against the opposition Stalin said that Chiang's right-wing Kuomintang alone could defeat the imperialists and should be squeezed like a lemon and then thrown away; Chiang struck first and massacred the Communists in Shanghai. Trotsky had likewise opposed, and Stalin backed, the compromise after the Zhongshan incident. 5 41 26

After the Shanghai massacre Stalin pinned his hopes on Wuhan. In a speech to the Eighth Plenum of the Comintern Executive on 24 May 1927 he argued that "Nanking is the centre of national counter-revolution and Wuhan the centre of the revolutionary movement in China", so the Wuhan Kuomintang must be supported and the Communists must take part in its government. He also rejected the slogan of soviets, since forming soviets of workers' and peasants' deputies in Wuhan territory at that moment would mean a dual power and a call to overthrow the Wuhan government. In the same speech he quoted, to refute it, Trotsky's description of Wuhan as a "fiction". Seven weeks later Wuhan broke with the Communists. Trotsky recorded the sequence as the bankruptcy of the Stalin–Bukharin line in Problems of the Chinese Revolution, a collection of his writings from 1927 onwards, He was expelled from the party in November, just after the opposition's street demonstration on the tenth anniversary of October, and in December the Fifteenth Congress declared the opposition's views incompatible with party membership. 42 43 41

The blame was laid on the men on the spot. The Comintern named not its own line but Chen Duxiu's "right capitulationism" as the cause, and Borodin and Roy too were held responsible in Moscow. Roy, refused an audience with Stalin, left the USSR with Borodin's help, while Borodin, protected by Stalin, drifted through minor posts. Chen, the scapegoat, read Trotsky's writings in 1929 through students returning from Moscow and found that their explanation of why he had been made a scapegoat for Soviet policy matched his own earlier views on the need for an independent party. With Peng Shuzhi he organised an opposition inside the party and was expelled from the CCP on 15 November 1929, becoming the leader of the Chinese Trotskyist movement. In this way China in 1927 fed directly into the Soviet party struggle and the split of the international communist movement. 5 44 31

The year of uprisings and the end of the Northern Expedition

Moscow swung abruptly to armed insurrection. The Nanchang Uprising, first proposed by Li Lisan, began at 2 a.m. on 1 August when some 30,000 men, including He Long's 20th Army and Ye Ting's 11th Army, attacked Nanchang. Zhou Enlai was secretary of the Front Committee, He Long commander of the Second Front Army, Ye Ting acting front commander and Liu Bocheng chief of staff, with Zhu De, Nie Rongzhen, Chen Yi, Lin Biao and Ye Jianying taking part. The rebels seized 5,000 rifles and about a million rounds and kept the Kuomintang banner flying with a "Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang" listing Tan Pingshan, Deng Yanda and Soong Ching-ling, among others; during the rising Tan recruited He Long into the Communist Party. But the troops marching south to Guangdong, the Comintern's chosen target, were beaten at Shantou and Chaozhou in early October and scattered. Some went to Hailufeng; about a thousand under Zhu De and Chen Yi passed through southern Hunan and joined Mao at Jinggangshan in April 1928. The first of August later became the founding day of the People's Liberation Army. 45 46 47 2

The Central Emergency Conference held on 7 August in the former Russian concession at Hankou (the August 7 Conference) was presided over by the Comintern delegate Vissarion Lominadze. It condemned Chen Duxiu's "right capitulationism", adopted agrarian revolution and armed resistance to the Kuomintang as the general line and elected a provisional Politburo with Qu Qiubai as de facto leader. There Mao argued that political power is won by the gun and became an alternate member of the Politburo; Deng Xiaoping attended as secretary to the Central Committee. The Autumn Harvest Uprising that Mao launched on the Hunan–Jiangxi border on 9 September was soon crushed by Kuomintang forces, and he led the survivors into the Jinggang Mountains. In November Peng Pai, with remnants of the Nanchang troops, founded the Hailufeng Soviet at Haifeng and Lufeng, the first soviet regime in China, but it did not last four months. 48 49 50 51 15

The last urban rising came at Guangzhou. While Zhang Fakui and Li Jishen fought over Guangdong, the CCP provincial committee set up a Revolutionary Military Council with Zhang Tailei as chairman and Ye Ting as commander, and the Comintern agent Heinz Neumann took a leading part in the preparations. On 11 December a Red Guard of 2,000 armed workers and a Communist-infiltrated cadet regiment of 1,200 rose, took most of the city within hours and proclaimed the Guangzhou Soviet. Military commanders such as Ye Ting, Ye Jianying and Xu Xiangqian had objected that they were short of arms. When the National Revolutionary Army counterattacked, the rising was crushed by the early hours of the 13th, and Zhang Tailei was killed in an ambush. In the purge that followed more than 5,700 Communists died and as many went missing, and Soviet consular staff were killed. Some 200 Korean Communists, among them the Whampoa men Choe Yong-gon and Kim San, are said to have joined the rising, about half of whom fell. The blame was put on Ye Ting, who broke off contact with the party and left for Europe. 52 53 54 17 28

On 13 December, two days after the Guangzhou rising, Chiang called for ending relations with the Soviet Union, and the Nanjing government closed the Soviet consulates, ending even the "alliance with Russia". In February 1928 the Kuomintang's Fourth Plenum annulled every resolution connected with alliance with Russia and admission of the Communists. Chiang, who had resigned in August 1927, resumed command in January 1928 and led the second phase of the expedition. A million men, with the armies of Feng Yuxiang, Yan Xishan and Li Zongren grouped as collective armies, advanced into Shandong in April, and at Jinan on 3 May clashed with Japanese troops in an incident in which some 5,000 Chinese civilians were killed. On 4 June the Kwantung Army blew up Zhang Zuolin's train at Huanggutun, and on 6 June the National Revolutionary Army entered Beijing, ending the Beiyang government. When Zhang Xueliang declared in December that Manchuria accepted the Nationalist Government, the expedition closed with nominal unification and the "Nanjing decade" began. 24 2 55

Assessment

The two parties remember the same events under different names. Kuomintang historiography calls April 1927 the "party purification" that stopped a Communist "usurpation" and describes the alliance itself as "alliance with Russia and toleration of the Communists", Sun admitting Communists as individuals to obtain Soviet aid. CCP historiography calls the period the "Great Revolution" and 12 April a "counter-revolutionary coup", and formalised Sun's policy as the "three great policies". At the heart of the dispute is the fact that the Communists, through secret party groups, aimed at "the central position in the Kuomintang": the CCP Central Committee's plenum of November 1923 said so explicitly, and by early 1926 Communists were the working heads of many provincial Kuomintang branches. That was the basis of the right's complaint of "a party within the party", and the method by which the Communists grew their mass organisations inside the Kuomintang's vessel. 2 8

The death tolls cannot be stated as single figures. For 12 April in Shanghai the accounts range from some 300 executed and over 5,000 missing to estimates of 5,000 to 10,000 killed within weeks. The dead around Changsha after the Horse Day Incident are estimated at about 10,000, and there are claims of tens or even hundreds of thousands killed in Hunan's counties whose basis and method of counting cannot be verified. The purge after the Guangzhou rising is said to have killed more than 5,700 with as many missing. The change in the party's size is clearer. Membership rose from 420 in 1923 and 994 in January 1925 to 57,967 at the Fifth Congress of April–May 1927; by 1928, according to Zhou Enlai's report, fewer than 32,000 union members remained loyal to the party and only ten per cent of members were workers. As a party of urban workers, the CCP was all but destroyed in 1927. 8 50 52 7 56 57 33

Soviet China policy is still judged in opposite ways. Defenders of Stalin's line argue that the small Communist Party could never have built so large a mass movement without the Kuomintang framework, and that it gained its future military cadres inside Whampoa and the National Revolutionary Army. Critics, like Trotsky, hold that a bloc within that gave up class independence left the party disarmed before the massacre, and that Moscow, after Wuhan failed, ordered unprepared risings that cost it most of its remaining cadres. Facts of the decisive moments, such as what really happened in the Zhongshan incident, are still contested. Borodin himself understood the aim of the expedition as "not the establishment of a proletarian state, but the creation of conditions which would give an impetus to the mass movement". Because that mass movement was then broken by the ally who held the army, 1927 became the prototype to which the world communist movement returned whenever it debated a united front with the national bourgeoisie. 5 41 43 26 9

The lesson the CCP drew from 1927 was the army. Mao formalised his remark at the August 7 Conference in "Problems of War and Strategy" (1938) as "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun", adding at once the principle that "the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party". A revolution staked on the mass movement inside the Kuomintang became a revolution of the party's own army and rural bases, a road that led to Jinggangshan and the Jiangxi Soviet. At the same time the experience of 1924–1927 stayed with the party's united front work: its ties to Kuomintang leftists such as Soong Ching-ling, He Xiangning, Deng Yanda and Feng Yuxiang, the network of Whampoa alumni, and the links with Koreans and Vietnamese who had learned revolution in Guangzhou were used again in the second united front of 1936 and in the revolutions of East Asia that followed. 58 48 2 17