Whampoa Military Academy
황푸군관학교
The army officers' academy the Kuomintang founded in 1924 on Changzhou Island at Huangpu, Guangzhou, with Soviet money and instructors. It trained junior officers for the National Revolutionary Army, with Chiang Kai-shek as superintendent, Liao Zhongkai as party representative and Zhou Enlai as head of the political department. Under the first united front Communists entered as instructors and cadets, and generals of both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party came out of it. The original academy ran until 1926 and in 1928 moved to Nanjing as the Central Military Academy.
In depth
The Kuomintang's First National Congress approved its creation; the school opened in May 1924 and was formally inaugurated on 16 June. Soviet instructors trained at the Frunze Military Academy carried the main teaching, the Soviets paid for it, and political commissars entered a Kuomintang army for the first time. The 6-to-12-month course combined mostly infantry training with lectures on the Three Principles, party history and political economy. It fell short of professional armies but, as a party-controlled officer corps, outclassed the warlord forces. The first class of 490 graduated in November 1924.
The academy soon became the force that held the Guangzhou base. In October 1924 a training regiment of cadets crushed the rising of the Guangzhou Merchants' Corps, and Whampoa cadets formed the units that beat Chen Jiongming in the Eastern Expedition of 1925. Many of those killed in the Shakee massacre of June 1925 were Whampoa cadets and officers. When the Northern Expedition began, Whampoa men became the core commanders of the National Revolutionary Army, and by the start of the war with Japan in 1937 most Chinese divisions were commanded by its graduates.
The academy was also an arena of rivalry between the two parties. Most political instructors were Communists, Zhou Enlai ran the party's secret military organisation, and future Red Army commanders such as Lin Biao and Xu Xiangqian passed through it, while right-wing cadets organised the Society for the Study of Sun Yat-senism. In the Zhongshan Warship incident of March 1926 Chiang used Whampoa cadets to arrest the Communist political commissars. The Korean Choe Yong-gon taught there, Kim Won-bong and members of the Heroic Corps enrolled as cadets, and Ho Chi Minh lectured young Vietnamese there.