A Political and Economic History of China, Part 29: The First Nationalist-Communist Civil War of 1927-1936, Part 1 of 2

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5 MIN READ - After a whirlwind of Trump executive orders and articles about tariffs, DOGE, and inflation the Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs resumes his series of articles on Chinese history—this time discussing Chiang Kai-shek’s early years ruling China and his ongoing conflict with CCP rebels.

Our last column ended at Chiang Kai-shek’s tenuous alliance with the CCP which, on the morning of April 12, 1927, he broke when his secret police and Green Gang elements raided their offices and hideouts, slaughtering thousands of communists.

Tensions had been brewing for some time between the Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Communists, but now the break was completely in the open. With his surprise attack Chiang decimated much of the CCP organization and gained a seemingly insurmountable upper hand. Those communists who survived the purge fled from the KMT controlled cities into the mountainous terrain of nearby Jiangxi province. 

THE CHINESE SOVIET REPUBLIC

Once hidden away in the remote countryside the communist fugitives actually got a short reprieve: The KMT’s final annihilation of the CCP was put on hold.

Readers may recall that by 1927 the Northern Expedition to unify all of eastern China was still not complete, having only reached Shanghai. Chiang continued north to wrestle Beijing and Manchuria from warlords like Feng Yuxiang and Zhang Zuolin. Once the Northern Expedition was complete he would attend to mopping up the scattered remaining communists.

While Chiang advanced northward the path of the now devastated CCP was being remapped in the remote countryside.

With so many CCP officials killed in the purge, Mao Zedong rose to prominence and linked up with another famous communist named Zhu De (pronounced “zhew duh”). Zhu, who was trained as a cadet at the Qing dynasty’s Yunnan Military Academy, reorganized the military wing of the party. 

The Correspondent might return to discuss more Zhu De later, but for now CO readers should know he proved highly competent in guerilla warfare and in later years was elevated to hero of the Chinese Civil War of 1945-49. In the early PRC years Zhu was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), meaning American and UN forces would find themselves pitted against his nearly three million PLA troops in Korea.

With Mao handling political and ideological affairs and Zhu skilled in warfare the two became a formidable alliance—one that would soon burst into open disagreement with the CCP’s visiting Soviet Comintern advisors.

The Soviets wanted to follow standard Marxist credo which predicts communist revolution will always foment from exploited industrial workers in large cities. They urged the Chinese communists to return to Wuhan and Shanghai—now completely controlled by the KMT and its secret police—to agitate strikes and socialist uprisings.

Mao and Zhu, both children of farmers, broke with orthodoxy and pinned their hopes on the rural peasantry to spur revolution. The CCP took control of remote villages and large swaths of rural Jiangxi and Hunan provinces.

Eventually an archipelago of loosely connected CCP territories formed although they weren’t formally founded as the Chinese Soviet Republic (CSR) until 1931. For the few short years it lasted, the CSR acted as a nebulous, disjointed Marxist “nation within a nation.”

At its peak the CSR’s territory encompassed perhaps 9 million people and officially it was declared a “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants.” But just like other communist regimes the real power lied at the top; in this case the Central Executive Committee which was chaired by Mao.

True to communist principles the CSR confiscated land and farms from landlords and redistributed it to peasants in exchange for political support. Uncooperative landlords and other bourgeoisie were outright murdered along with “wrong thinking” prisoners who were worked to death. Estimates of deaths at the hands of the CSR lie in the hundreds of thousands which, within the context of a peak 9 million population, represents a high rate of death.

Of course hundreds of thousands would later prove to be a mere rounding error compared to the many tens of millions who would die once Mao's CCP controlled all of China (1949-1976).

CCP AND KMT CLASHES

With some territory under marginal CSR control Soviet Comitern advisor Mikhail Borodin urged communist forces to expand outwards and launch retaliatory frontal assaults against KMT forces. This strategy ultimately proved futile, even disastrous, for the outgunned and outnumbered rebels and it strengthened the Mao-Zhu alliance’s case for smaller-scale guerilla warfare. Of their new tactics Zhu famously declared:

-When the enemy advances, we retreat
-When the enemy halts and encamps, we harass them
-When the enemy seeks to avoid battle, we attack
-When the enemy retreats, we pursue

At first these guerilla tactics were effective and provided CSR-controlled territory some reprieve from KMT forces, in part because Chiang Kai-shek was still distracted by his campaigns against the remaining warlords.

By the end of 1928 Chiang declared the Northern Expedition over, but it wasn’t.

Two powerful warlords with whom he had reached power sharing agreements rebelled later that year. Feng Yuxiang, who Chiang had appointed as Vice President of the legislature, and Yan Xishan, who was now Minister of the Interior and Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the army, joined forces in revolt.

Once again Chiang was distracted by his quest for unification and defeated the rebelling warlord armies by 1930. 

Now at last Chiang could turn his attention back to the Communists, this time with a pair of military “annihilation campaigns” in 1930 and 1931. Both were surprisingly ineffective against the communists’ newly adopted guerilla tactics. Using rapid mobility and stealth the Communists captured many KMT weapons and prisoners.

Chiang planned a third annihilation campaign in 1931 but was forced to call it off due to yet another distraction: the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Japan planned to provoke China into an all-out war, one where its modernized military would rout the Chinese, but Chiang didn’t take the bait. Instead he employed negotiation and diplomacy, buying time to snuff out the communist rebels while enlarging and modernizing his own armies.

This policy of “first internal pacification, then external resistance,” effectively appeasing the invading Japanese while ridding himself of domestic rebels, would prove increasingly unpopular with the Chinese public and eventually caught up with Chiang as we’ll discuss soon in another column.

Hence in 1932 Chiang was free, once again, to focus on the Communists and he attempted a fourth “annihilation campaign” which was also unsuccessful against guerilla tactics. 

After so many failures using conventional frontal warfare against a swift, mobile, and elusive enemy Chiang knew he needed a change in strategy and he found one, a subject we’ll review in the next column.