In the political chaos of the early years of the bourgeois Republic of China,
provincial warlord military governors and regional military groups emerged
based on residual Qing Dynasty connections and personal loyalties. To establish
central control by the government of the new republic, the regime of warlords
who had seized control of much of northern China since the collapse of the Qing
Dynasty had to be defeated.
Kuomintang (KMT) leader Sun Yat-sen, assisted by his able
comrade Liao Zhong-kai (1877-1925), realized that the Western imperialist
powers, in order to continue their plundering of China, would maintain a
divided China by supporting the warlords engaged in internecine power
struggles. Thus in 1921, Sun turned to the new Soviet Union and communism, the
only anti-imperialist force. The Western democracies were proving themselves to
be happy heirs to overseas empires whose imperial governments they had
overthrown at home.
In 1923, a joint statement by Sun and a Soviet representative in Shanghai
pledged Soviet support and assistance for China's national unification. The
Comintern sent Soviet advisers such as Mikhail Borodin to China to aid in the
reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union. Communist Party of China (CPC) members were
encouraged to join the KMT as individuals, forming the First United Front
between the two parties. The CPC was still small at the time, having a
membership of only 300 in 1922 and only 1,500 by 1925. The KMT in 1922 already
had 150,000 members and was well financed by US-based protestant churches, as
both Sun and Chiang Kai-shek converted to Christianity out of geopolitical
expediency.
Soviet advisers also helped the KMT set up a political institute to train
propagandists in mass mobilization techniques, and in 1923, Chiang, one of
Sun's lieutenants from pre-revolution Tongmeng Hui days while in exile in
Japan, was sent for several months' military and political study in Moscow.
After Chiang's return in late 1923, he participated in the establishment of the
Whampoa Military Academy (Huangpu Junxiao) as its commandant, with Liao
Zhong-kai as political commissar for the KMT and Zhou En-lai of the CPC as the
deputy commissar. The military academy was founded with a Soviet gift of 2.7
million yuan supplemented with a monthly stipend of 100,000 yuan. Soviet
weapons were supplied including 23,000 rifles, machine guns and artillery.
In 1923, when Sun Yat-sen started to reorganize the KMT and installed a
provisional government in Guangzhou, Soviet advisers A A Yoffe and M M Borodin
proposed that the KMT and the CPC form a united front (guo gong hezuo)
against the Beiyang warlord regime. Dual membership in both parties was common
for communists at this time. Sun had lost faith in the will of the Western
imperialist powers to cooperate with China's anti-imperialism aims and leaned
more and more toward the Soviet Union for support.
In 1924, Sun held the first national congress (Guomindang diyici quanguo daibiao
dahui), during which he stressed the Three People's Principle (sanmin
zhuyi - nationalism, democracy, people's livelihood, or minzu zhuyi,
minquan zhuyi, minsheng zhuyi) as a doctrine against imperialism.
Within the KMT-CPC united front, Sun adopted three major policies (sanda zhengce):
alliance with the Soviet Union (lian su), alliance with the communism (lian
gong), and supporting peasants and workers (fuzhu nonggong).
Five months after Sun's death from cancer on March 12, 1925, Liao Zhong-kai,
leader of the left wing of the KMT, was assassinated on August 20 of the same
year at age 48 at the behest of the right-wing leaders of KMT. Chiang, as
commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, with communist help, set
out on the long-delayed Northern Expedition against the northern warlords to
unite China under KMT control. By 1926, the KMT had divided into left-wing and
right-wing factions. Neither wing had any use for Western democracy, which
openly presented itself as an agent of Western imperialism. The left turned
toward communism, while the right turned toward fascism.
Later, the KMT did put up a facade of democracy after the US got involved in
Chinese domestic politics during World War II. If the United States in this
century is really serious about spreading democracy around the world, its
leadership needs to realize that the world will not accept Western democracy
unless and until it rids itself of its pugnacious role as an agent for Western
neo-imperialism.
By 1926, communist influence within the KMT was growing fast. In March 1926,
Chiang abruptly imposed restrictions on CPC member participation in the top
leadership, and emerged as the pre-eminent KMT leader on an anti-communist
platform. By early 1927, the KMT-CPC rivalry led to an open split in the
revolutionary ranks. The CPC and the left wing of the KMT moved the seat of the
Nationalist government from Guangzhou to Wuhan.
After Chiang Kai-shek seized control of the KMT and achieved initial successes
in the Northern Expedition with communist help, all communists were expelled
from the KMT. On April 12, 1927, a workers' movement in Shanghai was brutally
suppressed by Chiang (si-yi-er zhengbian). He and Wang Jingwei later
were to form a traitorous puppet government in Nanjing under Japanese tutelage.
Chiang then launched an anti-communist purification program within the KMT (qingdang
qugong) and drove out all communists as well as leftist KMT members
such as Song Qingling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, and He Xiangning, the widow of
Liao Zhong-kai, ending the first alliance between the KMT and the CPC. After
the end of World War II, the two great ladies formed the Revolutionary
Committee of the KMT and joined in the founding of the People's Republic as
vice chairmen of the PRC.
Chiang Kai-shek, riding on the bipartisan success of the Northern Expedition,
turned his elite forces to destroy the Shanghai CPC apparatus. Chiang, with the
aid of Western imperialists and the Shanghai underworld criminals, arguing that
communist activities were socially and economically disruptive, turned on
communists and unionists in Shanghai, arresting and summarily executing
hundreds without trial on April 12, 1927 for activities that were legal prior
to the date of arrest. The purge obliterated the urban base of the CPC that
laid the ground for the rise of Mao Zedong with his strategy of a rural peasant
revolution.
Chiang, expelled from the KMT for his reactionary moves, formed a rival
reactionary government in Nanjing. Three political capitals now emerged in
China: the foreign imperialist-recognized Beiyang warlord regime in Beijing;
the communist and left-wing Kuomintang coalition government at Wuhan; and the
right-wing reactionary military regime at Nanjing, which would remain the
Nationalist capital for the next decade, until Japanese occupation in 1937.
The CPC adopted a strategy of armed insurrections in urban centers in
preparation for an anticipated rising tide of revolution. Unsuccessful attempts
were made by communists to take cities such as Nancang, Changsha, Shantou and
Guangzhou. All failed.
A successful armed rural uprising, known in history as the Autumn Harvest
Uprising, was staged by peasants in Hunan province, led by Mao Zedong. But in
mid-1927, the CPC was at the low ebb of its history. Their left-wing KMT allies
in Wuhan were toppled by a militarist regime led by Wang Jingwei.
The KMT resumed the campaign against the warlords and captured Beijing in June
1928, after which most of eastern China came under Chiang's control, and the
Nanjing government received prompt international recognition as the sole
legitimate government of China. The Nationalist government announced that in
conformity with Sun Yat-sen's formula for the three stages of revolution -
military unification, political tutelage, and constitutional democracy - China
had reached the end of the first phase and would embark on the second, which
would be under KMT political tutelage. After Adolf Hitler came to power in
Germany in 1933, the KMT turned to the Nazis as a model both in political
organization and in military modernization.
During the Japanese invasion and occupation of the northeast (Manchuria),
Chiang still saw the CPC as the greatest threat, and refused to ally with the
CPC to fight against the Japanese invasion. On December 12, 1936, two young
Kuomintang generals, Yang Hucheng and Zhang Xueliang, son of the warlord Zhang
Zuolin, who earlier had been assassinated by the Japanese for opposing Japan's
plan to set up a puppet government in Manchuria headed by Pu Yi, kidnapped
Chiang Kai-shek while he was visiting Xian and forced him to enter into a truce
with the CPC to form a united front against Japan. The event became known as
the Xian Incident.
Both political parties agreed to suspend inter-party fighting and form a second
united front to focus their efforts against the Japanese. However, the alliance
existed in name only. The level of actual cooperation and coordination between
the CPC and KMT during World War II was minimal. While CPC forces were fighting
the Japanese, Chiang was reserving his best troops for dealing with the CPC
after the war.
US general Joseph Stillwell, commander of US forces in the Burma Theater, was
openly critical of the KMT leader and advocated US assistance to the People's
Liberation Army (PLA), which was prosecuting a guerrilla war against Japanese
in earnest with inadequate supplies and equipment. The situation came to a head
in late 1940 and early 1941 when KMT forces attacked the PLA.
In December 1940, Chiang Kai-shek demanded that the CPC New Fourth Army
evacuate Anhui and Jiangsu provinces, promising safe conduct. When the New
Fourth Army commanders complied in order to preserve inter-party coalition,
their forces were ambushed by Nationalist troops and suffered great losses in
January 1941. This treachery, known as the New Fourth Army Incident, weakened
the CPC position in central China and in effect ended any substantive
cooperation between the KMT and CPC.
The use of two atomic bombs in short order by the US caused Japan to surrender
much more quickly than anyone in China had imagined. As insurance in the event
that the bomb might not work, US president Harry Truman had pressured the
Soviet Union to open an eastern front against Japan. Under the terms of
unconditional Japanese surrender dictated by the United States, Japanese troops
were ordered to surrender to KMT troops and not to the PLA, which actually had
done most of the fighting.
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