2. “Idealists and Planners”
The Northern Expedition by the CCP from its stronghold in Canton stands today as one of only two instances where China was conquered and unified from the south rather than the more often used north.
The expedition was conceived by Chen Jionming and Li Yuanhong as the built up the military power of the Chinese Red Army. They presented it to the CCP leadership and the Soviet advisor Mikhail Borodin in May of 1925 and all of them approved, though they knew it would take time and a great deal of preparation before the party was ready for an invasion against the warlords. The wars between the different warlords and their backing by various foreign powers had driven swaths of people into both the CCP and the KMT, giving the parties a real chance at building a sizeable army.
Neither of the two men would live to see the fruit of their ambitious military planning. Chen died in a bar in Canton on 9 June 1925 when he got into an argument with several communists on how China should be run once the warlords had been removed. Most of the communists advocated for a central state and planning much like Soviet Russia, while Chen believed a multiparty federation system was better. A fight broke out and Chen ended up getting stabbed by a broken bottle. He did not live past sunrise.
Li Yuanhong remained as the military leader of the CCP and formalized the Chinese Red Army into an effective military force until his death from a stroke on 8 November 1925. He would be replaced by Ye Ting, the man who would take charge of much of the Northern Expedition and responsible for its success.
Meanwhile the KMT was also growing in strength and influence. Huang Xing had died in 1920 and since that time the party had been led by Chiang Kai-Shek and Liao Zhongkai, the former a soldier, the latter an administrator. The two men worked well together as leaders and increased efforts on membership in many of the cities in southern China, where there was a large amount of discontent, with both the ruling Beiyang government and foreign imperialism. All new members also joined the CCP. Chiang oversaw the creation of the party’s military wing, and they were trained alongside the Red Army at the Honam Military Academy.
The army had been trained and guided by Soviet military advisors and in addition the KMT had supplied the help of several German officers to advise them militarily.
And so, at the beginning of 1926, the communist-nationalist alliance, dubbed the “United Front”, had a large and capable army with modern weapons supplied by Soviet Russia and updated training and tactics.
On the 9 July 1926, Ye Ting and Li Dazhao addressed an enormous crowd of soldiers and announced the commencement of the Northern Expedition which would according to Li “Root out the bourgeois warlords and foireign imperialists and win back China for its people.” The goal of the military campaign was nothing less than the complete defeat of the most powerful warlords, Zhang Zuolin, Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang. The Red Army and departed from the Zhu River the next day, 100,000 strong. The first target were the Zhili Clique troops who answered to Wu Peifu.
The campaign against the Zhili Clique was a stunning success,with the Red Army and NRA divided into eight distinct armies that in half a year were able to march from Guangdon to the Yangtze River and distingrate most of the Zhili forces. They were also helped by the fact that a significant number of warlord generals opted to join the communists. This included Li Zongren and Li Jishen of the New Guangxi Clique, and several generals who had reluctantly been part of the Zhili Clique, but eagerly joiuned the communists at the chance to overthrow their warlord taskmasters. The final blows to the Zhili Clique occurred in March of 1927 with the capture of Nanjing and Shanghai.
Nanjing was one of the many cities that had been opened up as a ‘treaty port’ by foreign powers during the nineteenth century, as such it had a significant amount of foreign interests, mainly American and European. On 20 March 1927, Zhang Zongchang gave the order to his army to retreat form the city in the face of the approaching Red Army. Some of his soldiers instead began looting and attacking foreign expatriates. Many foreigners evacuated, terrified of what the “Bolshevik Chinese would reap”, in the words of John Elias Williams, vice-president of Nanjing University. The world had not forgotten what had happened in Russia towards the end of the civil war.
Three days later the Red Army marched into the city without any resistance. Initially they behaved respectfully towards the foreigners and the consulates as the communist leadership had ordered good behavior during the capture of the city. But it did not last, citizens and soldiers alike soon started attacking the homes and businesses of foreign residents. Several British and American naval vessels were forced to fire on Chinese Red Army soldiers to defend their citizens. In the aftermath, the Chinese Communist government blamed the looting and attacks on foreigners on the retreating warlord soldiers and subversives who had infiltrated the party via the KMT. Li Dazhao did not want to risk antagonizing the European powers when he still had to deal with the northern warlords and the growing power of the nationalist movement, whose ideology had never really been compatible with the CCP.
At the same time as the Nanjing Incident, in Shanghai an armed uprising had overthrown the forces of the Zhili Clique who remained in the city and CCP union workers occupied all of urban Shanghai, with the exception of the international settlements. Zhou Enlai was one of the leaders of the uprising and he was an astute diplomat. He had given explicit orders for the communists not to attack any foreign interests or persons, not wanting a repeat of Nanjing. Some of the KMT members in the city did organize protests and demanded the return of the settlements but they did not commit any violence. Nonetheless, this would be the point which Li Dazhao would use to finally rid himself of the Nationalists, much as he had enjoyed the American financial backing they provided.
Even within his own party there was dissension on this decision. Chen Duxiu who had founded the party with Li was firm friends with the high-ranking KMT leader, Wang Jingwei. Chen had captured the city of Wuhan and in April met Wang to reaffirm the cooperation between the two parties. This was enough for Li. He declared the communist government in Wuhan illegal and in Shanghai and Nanjing thousands of nationalists, actual and suspected were arrested, hundreds of them being killed or executed. The opium gangsters in Shanghai, allies of the KMT, were hunted down and killed.
Chen Duxiu claimed Wuhan as the true capital of Communist China and several other prominent communists joined him, disgusted at the Red Terror now being carried out against their KMT comrades who had helped defeat the southern warlords. But it did not stop the tide of the purge. All across cities in southern China, nationalists and anyone suspected of being a reactionary were rounded up and executed. Over thirty thousand were killed during April of 1927. Chen Duxiu’s Wuhan government collapsed from lack of support and Chen went into exile in Hong Kong.
The remainder of the KMT retreated from the cities to the countryside or went underground and began planning rebellions against the communist forces. The surviving leaders of the KMT were Chiang Kai-Shek, Hu Hanmin, Lin Sen, The Chen brothers, Guofu and Lifu and He Yingqin and the separated to each forment uprisings in different provinces. Wang Jingwei had tried to escape Wuhan but had been killed after Chen’s government collapsed and the communists in the city had turned on the KMT members.
In Nanjing, Li Dazhao declared the Chinese People’s Republic. And while he was now leader of the world’s second most powerful communist state he still had to contend with the KMT and the northern warlords. The first attack form the north came in the middle of summer as Sun Chuanfang, an ally of the powerful Fengtian Clique warlord, Zhang Zuolin attacked Ye Ting’s three armies in Jiangsu province.
