THE NORTHERN EXPEDITION IN CHINA, 1926–1928 Term paper

In the early 1920s Sun Yat-sen and the Guomindang (Nationalist) Party had limited power in a China ruled by warlords and foreign powers. This situation began to change after Sun’s talks with Soviet diplomat Adolf Joffe in January 1923. The two agreed that China was not ready for communism and that independence and unity were the most important issues. Shortly after the talks, the Communist International (Comintern) sent Mikhail Borodin to supervise an alliance between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which had just been founded in 1921.

Borodin also helped the Guomindang establish the Whampoa Military Academy. Its first commandant was Chiang Kai-shek. The first director of the political department was Zhou Enlai.

Sun died in 1925. The alliance, together with assistance from the Comintern and the Soviet Union, continued. The Guomindang in this period included not only members who were also communists but many others on the left. A substantial part of the organization, however, began to move to the right. Chiang emerged as the most powerful figure.

In June 1926 Chiang was named commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, and the Northern Expedition began. By October, the army had taken the important tri-cities area of Wuhan in Hubei province. The question for the Guomindang became where next?

Late in March 1927 a general strike and armed insurrection by the powerful communist-led labor movement broke out in Shanghai. The National Revolutionary Army moved quickly to take control ofthe city. A few days later members of the so-called Society for Common Progress (a front for the Green Gang) attacked the headquarters of all the large unions in Shanghai. Many people were killed outright. Hundreds were arrested, some of them later executed. Chiang, who had connections to foreign business interests and the Green Gang, did nothing to interfere. He and a large part of the Guomindang moved to the right, splitting the alliance with the CCP. Josif Stalin, responding to a domestic political struggle with Leon Trotsky, used the Comintern to order the CCP to cooperate with a leftist faction of the Guomindang. When this failed, he ordered the CCP to stage an insurrection in Canton (now Guangzhou). This was brutally suppressed by the Guomindang. The CCP suffered unnecessary defeats because of Stalin’s use of the Comintern in domestic politics. The Guomindang now controlled a large part of China. By the late 1920s the Chinese Republic appeared to be firmly established.

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under the entries for “The May 4th Movement in China, 1919” (#12), “The New Economic Policy (NEP) in Russia, 1921–1928” (#14), and “Mao Zedong’s ‘Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, March 1927’” (#17). Search under M. N. Roy, Vasily Blyukher, Chen Duxiu, Li Lisan, Mao Zedong, and T. V. Soong.

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

Roy, M. N. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1973. Reprint of the 1946 edition. Roy was an official of the Communist International and active in the 1920s in China.

Wilbur, C. Martin, and Julie How, eds. Documents on Communism, Nationalism, and Soviet Advisers in China, 1918–1927. Papers Seized in the 1927 Peking Raid. New York: Columbia University Press, 1956. Useful source material on a central topic.

Secondary Sources

Bergère, Marie-Claire. Sun Yat-sen. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. An excellent biography of Sun by a leading scholar.

Cambridge History of China. Vol. 12, Republican China, 1912–1949, Part 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Useful essays on aspects of the 1920s by leading scholars of the period.

Eudin, Xenia, and Robert North. M. N. Roy’s Mission to China: The Communist Kuomintang Split of 1927. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. A long introduction to the problems associated with the alliance between nationalists and communists together with thirty-seven documents related to the 1927 split.

Isaacs, Harold. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. 2nd rev. ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961. One of the best books available on the Chinese revolutionary movement in the 1920s.

Jacobs, Dan. Borodin: Stalin’s Man in China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard