China

The Northern Expedition

During the Northern Expedition the outnumbered southern forces were infused with revolutionary spirit and fought with great élan. They were assisted by propaganda corps, which subverted enemy troops and agitated among the populace in the enemy’s rear. Soviet military advisers accompanied most of the divisions, and Soviet pilots reconnoitred the enemy positions. The army was well-financed at the initial stages because of fiscal reforms in Guangdong during the previous year, and many enemy divisions and brigades were bought over. Within two months the National Revolutionary Army gained control of Hunan and Hubei, and by the end of the year it had taken Jiangxi and Fujian. The Nationalist government moved its central headquarters from Guangzhou to the Wuhan cities of the Yangtze. By early spring of 1927, revolutionary forces were poised to attack Nanjing and Shanghai.

The political situation, however, was unstable. Hunan and Hubei were swept by a peasant revolt marked by violence against landlords and other rural power holders. Business in the industrial and commercial centre of the middle Yangtze—the Wuhan cities—was nearly paralyzed by a wave of strikes. Communists and KMT leftists led this social revolution. In January the British concessions in Hankou and Jiujiang were seized by Chinese crowds. The British government had just adopted a conciliatory policy toward China, and it acquiesced in these seizures, but it was readying an expeditionary force to protect its more important position in Shanghai. Foreigners and many upper-class Chinese fled from the provinces under Nationalist control. The northern armies began to form an alliance against the southerners.

Conservative Nationalist leaders in Shanghai mobilized against the headquarters in Wuhan. There was a deep rift within the revolutionary camp itself; the leftists at Wuhan, guided by Borodin, pitted themselves against Chiang and his more conservative military supporters, who were also laying plans against the leftists. Resolutions of the CCP’s Central Committee in January 1927 showed that committee members were apprehensive about a counterrevolutionary tide against their party, Soviet Russia, and the revolutionary peasant and workers’ movement; they feared a coalition within the KMT and its possible alliance with the imperialist powers. The central leadership resolved to check revolutionary excesses and give all support to the KMT leadership at Wuhan. Others within the CCP, notably Mao Zedong, disagreed; they believed the mass revolution should be encouraged to run its course.