April 12 Incident
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The suppression of 12 April 1927 in which Chiang Kai-shek used Green Gang gunmen and National Revolutionary Army troops in Shanghai to disarm the Communist-led workers' pickets and kill Communists and labour activists. The Kuomintang calls it the "party purification", the CCP a "counter-revolutionary coup". It spread into a purge of Communists across Kuomintang territory that destroyed the first united front, and on 18 April Chiang set up a separate Nationalist Government at Nanjing.
In depth
Its background was the Third Armed Uprising of Shanghai workers on 21–22 March 1927, led by Zhou Enlai, Zhao Shiyan, Wang Shouhua and others. When the workers' pickets took the city outside the concessions and set up a Citizens' Representative Government, Shanghai's bankers and merchants and the foreign powers took fright. The merchants secretly paid more than three million dollars to Chiang's side, and on 2 April the Kuomintang Central Control Commission voted to purge the Communists. Chiang had the Green Gang bosses Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin build an organisation to oppose the Communist unions, and declared martial law in Shanghai on 9 April.
On the night of 11 April Wang Shouhua, chairman of the Shanghai General Labour Union, was murdered at Du's mansion. Before dawn on the 12th Green Gang gunmen attacked union offices in Zhabei, Nanshi and Pudong and the 26th Army disarmed the pickets. The union headquarters and the Commercial Press resisted but fell to machine guns and field artillery, with more than 300 killed or wounded. On the 13th troops fired on a protest march, killing a hundred. The toll was never settled: one account has over a thousand arrested, some 300 executed and more than 5,000 missing, another 5,000 to 10,000 killed within weeks.
On 15 April Li Jishen began the same purge in Guangzhou, and the purification spread across Kuomintang territory. Thirty-nine members of the Kuomintang Central Committee in Wuhan and Soong Ching-ling denounced Chiang as a traitor to Sun, but on 18 April he founded the Nationalist Government at Nanjing. The purge won the Nanjing government the support of most of the army, the merchant class and foreign business. When Wuhan too broke with the Communists in July the alliance was over, and the Communists, all but wiped out in the cities, turned to armed uprisings and rural bases.