Click here to read the original Cautious Optimism Facebook post with comments
6 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs and Other Egghead Stuff chronicles the very bloody opening shot in the war between Chinese Nationalists and Communists.
Photo: from the April 12, 1927 "Shanghai Massacre." Links to more brutal photos at end of article.
By 1926 Chiang Kai-shek had gained control of the Nationalist Party (“Guomindang” or KMT) through a bloodless coup. His main rival, left-leaning Wang Jingwei, had left for France. The Soviets, who supported the Nationalists on the condition they admit the small Chinese Communist Party, felt China was not yet ready for full communist revolution and instructed the CCP to continue working with the KMT which Moscow still supported.
THE NORTHERN EXPEDITION
Given his assumption of full leadership Chiang decided the time had come to carry out the late Sun Yat-sen’s vision of defeating the provincial warlords by military force. Chiang and his new army, trained at the Whampoa Academy that he commanded, would march from Guangdong in southern China northwards, unifying the country one province at a time.
The so-called “Northern Expedition” began in July of 1926.
Chiang’s multiyear campaign enlarged Nationalist-controlled territory applying multiple strategies, each deemed appropriate for the targeted rival warlord. If a warlord felt weak and feared soldier defections to the stronger Nationalists, he would join the KMT without bloodshed.
If one warlord was fighting another, he might join the KMT in the hope their combined forces could then defeat his rival—as was the case when the “Christian general” Feng Yuxiang joined Chiang Kai-shek to battle Manchurian rival warlord Zhang Zuolin who had just handed Feng a decisive defeat.
Some warlords simply stood their ground and resisted Nationalist forces, nearly always losing to Chiang’s ever growing armies. Some battles were quite bloody and lasted several months, with KMT victories coming at considerable human cost on both sides.
Throughout the expedition the Chinese communists played their own role, organizing workers to strike, sabotage and disrupt warlord territories in the path of advancing KMT armies.
While the CCP inconspicuously took credit for these behind-enemy-lines operations, their scale was actually quite limited. Much more commonly the Communists preferred organizing worker strikes and disruptions in newly liberated KMT territory—after Nationalist armies had already conquered them.
As KMT troops fought sometimes bloody engagements to seize provincial cities and countrysides and moved on, the Communists came up from the rear and operated in a pacified environment. After Chiang’s Nationalists had done the hard work the CCP began organizing workers and peasants to strike and disrupt the businesses, farms, and economies of newly-won KMT territories.
While Nationalists were fighting and dying on the front, the Communists were recruiting workers and peasants at a dizzying pace. CCP membership, which was only about 200 at the party’s founding in 1921, had grown to several million by 1927.
Furthermore, communist activity was causing real headaches for Chinese farms, businesses, and the establishment in general. Communists were redistributing land wherever possible, “fining” and imprisoning landlords, and “canceling” debts faster than American college grads in the Biden era, all while general strikes were grinding business production to a halt.
A rift was beginning to form between the Nationalists—always a party of the established classes—and the Communists, a revolutionary party that aimed to completely reorganize society into a proletarian dictatorship. The two parties even disagreed on where to move the new Nationalist capital with Chiang preferring Nanjing and Wang Jingwei, who by now had returned from France to capitalize on the KMT left wing’s resurgence, preferring Wuhan.
THE SHANGHAI MASSACRE
As complaints poured in from Nationalist officials and businessmen from all over KMT-controlled areas, Chiang surveyed the Communists’ ballooning membership rolls and growing strength. His armies were doing the heavy lifting, liberating China from warlords often one bloody province at a time, and the Communists were moving in after the dust had settled to sow chaos and transform recently won territories into Marxist strongholds.
Thus Chiang, already distrustful of communism and the USSR since visiting Moscow a few years earlier, decided to end the Nationalist/Communist alliance. After a brief period planning his next move he launched what the CCP has ever since named the April 12 Incident—a violent purge of the CCP from the Nationalist Party.
At dawn on the morning of April 12, 1927 Nationalist troops and Shanghai gang members attacked known communist offices and hideouts all throughout Nanjing, Shanghai, and other Chiang-controlled areas. Communists were arrested and killed later in the day, many dragged out into the streets and beheaded. The number of communists killed ultimately reached into the thousands, and even communists in the left-wing stronghold of Wuhan were purged and/or executed.
Chiang was supported by establishment intellectuals and government officials who were petrified at the sight of millions of workers and peasants seizing farms and shutting down factories, sometimes violently. Business interests also supported Chiang’s purge including his old friends in Shanghai’s Green Gang who in turn provided many henchman to carry out the killings.
The Communist Party was nearly decimated with only a few key leaders escaping the purge with their lives. The Correspondent recalls reading about Zhou Enlai, who later engineered Chinese-U.S. reconciliation with Henry Kissinger in 1971, barely slipping away from the massacre.
Meanwhile the Soviets were initially undecided about how to respond. Paralyzed by what was now a power struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin over who would succeed the late Vladimir Lenin, the Soviets couldn’t yet bring themselves to sever relations with the KMT.
At the same time Chiang’s son Chiang Ching-kuo, studying in Russia and semi-brainwashed by the communist environment, publicly denounced his father as an imperialist counterrevolutionary, but the Soviet Communist International (Comintern) remained unmoved.
Years later the young Chiang Ching-kuo would regret criticizing his father and by 1975 assumed the presidency of Taiwan as one of the world’s most vocal anti-communist heads of state.
Meanwhile as the Nationalist left wing and Chiang rival Wang Jingwei floundered and the Chinese communist movement was being decimated, instructions from the Soviets reeked of delusional fantasy.
Communiqués from Stalin instructed the KMT left wing to continue seizing and redistributing land—a difficult task in itself given the havoc being wreaked by Chiang’s purge—but to leave alone land belonging to military officers. Verifying whether each plot belonged to an officer or not and disseminating instructions to peasants on the ground, all while Nationalist forces were butchering communists, was a near impossible task to carry out. Stalin also ordered a tribunal organized to punish “reactionary” officers, again oblivious to the tactical difficulties involved in identifying every officer among the confusion let alone which ones were actually “reactionaries.”
Stalin’s instructions were effectively unenforceable.
In light of the purge and unrealistic directives from an ally that seemed completely out of touch with the reality on the ground, the Chinese communists became increasingly irritated with what they viewed as counterproductive interference from Moscow. This was the beginning of many disagreements between Chinese communists like Mao Zedong and Soviet representatives like Mikhail Borodin, and the friction between CCP leaders and Soviet advisors would linger for many more years.
With the left-wing in retreat and seemingly powerless to stop Chiang’s violent purge Wang Jingwei, always the opportunist and vacillator, blamed himself for the party’s schism and announced that Chiang was right, all before packing up and moving to Europe again.
Chiang Kai-shek was once again in control of the Nationalist Party, his rival again having departed China. Most of the Communists had been wiped out. Although a few survived, their organizational framework was gone and Chiang had the support of most of China’s establishment. Frictions between what few Communists remained and their Soviet advisors were at an all time high.
The CCP would never forget April 12th and even today commemorate it as the fateful day a treacherous Chiang Kai-shek betrayed them, firing the opening salvo in what would become a 22-year on again, off again civil war.
With most of China seemingly under Chiang’s control he set out to complete the Northern Expedition, advancing further north to Beijing. In April 1928 Zhang Zuolin, the most powerful of the warlords and based in Manchuria, elected to fight but by June his army was defeated and the Nationalists integrated Beijing into their domains. Little did Zhang know that he would soon be assassinated by the Japanese that same month.
The Northern Expedition was over. Chiang had successfully reunified China’s most populated eastern provinces from Guangdong in the south to Beijing in the north. Those sparsely populated areas in the west that he didn’t control directly were still effectively subservient to him via warlord alliances and agreements.
For the first time since Yuan Shikai’s death twelve years prior it seemed China was finally unified.
=====
Links to more brutal photos of the 1927 Shanghai Massacre:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/BpBGEQYTA6gTHDXbxzZGQnmEgMd7p3ovk6Ieho887OxhTg8tPk7zkJsYvoHnEoGLgcstOpVbEUY_F79I2DYA-7_jpiLXbO2DNGF68g=s1200?
https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/shanghai-massacre-1927.jpg
https://i.scdn.co/image/ab6765630000ba8a4d4df39cd205c6c91f991918
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.