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

Moscow chooses Guangzhou

Rebuffed repeatedly by Britain and the United States in 1922, Sun Yat-sen turned to the Soviet Union. His joint statement with the Soviet envoy Adolph Joffe in Shanghai in January 1923 affirmed that “communism or the soviet system cannot be introduced into China” while promising Soviet support. That autumn Mikhail Borodin, sent by the Comintern, arrived in Guangzhou and began rebuilding the Kuomintang as a Leninist party. Source 1 · Source 2

In January 1924 the Kuomintang’s First Congress adopted Borodin’s constitution, introducing democratic centralism and a party apparatus, and Communists including Li Dazhao and Tan Pingshan joined the Central Executive Committee. Sun made “alliance with Russia, admission of Communists, assistance to workers and peasants” the policies of his reinterpreted Three Principles. The Soviets sent arms and money, and in June the Whampoa Military Academy opened with Chiang Kai-shek as commandant and Zhou Enlai as head of its political department. Source 3 · Source 4

The logic of the “bloc within”

The device of Communists joining the Kuomintang as individuals was Maring’s. By the Comintern’s colonial theses China was in the stage of bourgeois national revolution, and the small Communist Party had to build strength by organising the masses inside the Kuomintang, the “bloc of all classes”. Chen Duxiu objected that the party would lose its class independence but submitted to Comintern discipline. Source 1 · Source 5

The alliance brought the Communists dramatic growth. The May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 and the sixteen-month Guangzhou–Hong Kong strike raised membership from a thousand to 58,000 by early 1927, and the peasant associations of Hunan and Guangdong counted millions. But the same growth fed the fears of the Kuomintang right and of landlords and merchants, and after Sun’s death no authority remained to manage the tension. Source 6 · Source 1

The Northern Expedition: army and mass movement race north

After the Zhongshan Warship incident of March 1926 Chiang curtailed the Communists’ positions in the Kuomintang and consolidated his military authority; the Soviet advisers accepted this to preserve the front. As commander-in-chief from July he launched the Northern Expedition, smashed Wu Peifu’s army, took Wuhan in October and Nanjing and Shanghai the following March. Soviet arms and the Communists’ propaganda and intelligence networks aided the advance. Source 7 · Source 8

Where the army passed, the mass movement exploded. In Hunan peasant associations tried landlords and seized land, and in March 1927 Mao’s “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” defended their violence — “a revolution is not a dinner party”. Unions in Wuhan and Shanghai organised armed pickets. Most National Revolutionary Army officers came from landlord families, and this collision decided the fate of the front. Source 9 · Source 7

12 April 1927, Shanghai

On 21 March 1927 the Shanghai worker pickets under Zhou Enlai rose, drove out the warlord garrison and welcomed the National Revolutionary Army. But Chiang had made his arrangements with the city’s bankers and merchants, the concession authorities and the Green Gang boss Du Yuesheng. Before dawn on 12 April Green Gang gunmen and the 26th Army attacked union headquarters and disarmed the pickets; machine guns were turned on the protest march that followed. Source 10 · Source 11

Within days hundreds were executed in Shanghai and “party purification” followed in Guangzhou, Nanjing, Xiamen and elsewhere. On 18 April Chiang established a rival Nationalist government at Nanjing against Wuhan. In Beijing Zhang Zuolin raided the Soviet embassy and on 28 April hanged Li Dazhao. Within months the urban Communist organisation had all but vanished. Source 10 · Source 12

The Wuhan experiment and its collapse

Stalin and the Comintern designated the Wuhan Kuomintang left under Wang Jingwei the “centre of the revolution” and ordered the Communists to keep the alliance. The party’s Fifth Congress in April–May 1927 rejected the radical land-confiscation line of Mao and others and chose cooperation with Wuhan. But in May a National Revolutionary Army unit massacred peasant associations at Changsha (the “Horse Day incident”), and the Wuhan generals too turned against the Communists. Source 1 · Source 13

In June the Comintern delegate M. N. Roy showed Wang Jingwei Stalin’s new telegram — arm the workers and peasants, replace the Kuomintang leadership — and hastened the break. On 15 July the Wuhan government resolved to expel the Communists, and Borodin returned to Moscow by way of Mongolia. Chen Duxiu took the blame and resigned as general secretary; the Comintern attributed the failure not to its own line but to his “right opportunism”. Source 2 · Source 14

The debate in Moscow: Stalin and Trotsky

China policy was a central issue of the Soviet party struggle of 1926–1927. Trotsky and Zinoviev’s United Opposition argued that the Communists should leave the Kuomintang and form soviets; Stalin and Bukharin compared the Kuomintang to a “revolutionary parliament” and defended the alliance. On 5 April Stalin said Chiang would be “squeezed like a lemon and then thrown away”; a week later came the Shanghai massacre. Source 15 · Source 16

Stalin staked his last hopes on Wuhan and, when that too collapsed, swung to ordering armed uprisings — Nanchang in August, the Autumn Harvest rising in September, the Guangzhou Commune in December — all of which failed. Trotsky recorded the sequence in Problems of the Chinese Revolution as the bankruptcy of Stalin’s line, and the argument became the prototype of later debates in the world communist movement over the terms of the “united front”. Source 17 · Source 18

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun

The emergency conference at Hankou on 7 August 1927 removed Chen Duxiu, installed Qu Qiubai and resolved on agrarian revolution and armed insurrection; it was here that Mao said “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. On 1 August the troops of He Long, Ye Ting and Zhu De had risen at Nanchang, the starting point of the People’s Liberation Army, and after the defeat of the Autumn Harvest rising Mao’s force withdrew to Jinggangshan to found the first rural base. Source 19 · Source 20

The Kuomintang took Beijing in June 1928 and, after Zhang Zuolin was killed by a Japanese bomb, achieved nominal unification when Zhang Xueliang submitted. The Nanjing decade (1927–1937) recovered tariff autonomy and modernised the cities but left the countryside untouched, concentrating its armies on exterminating the Communists. The catastrophe of 1927 was the point from which both parties set out to settle “who rules China” by force. Source 7 · Source 21