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Revolution and Civil War, episode 10

White Terror

At four in the morning on 12 April 1927 Green Gang gunmen and Chiang Kai-shek's troops fall on Shanghai's labour unions, and within weeks Chiang has a government of his own at Nanjing and a terror against Communists spreading through the provinces. The episode follows Chiang and Wang Jingwei, who leads the rival Nationalist government at Wuhan still allied with the Communists, until Stalin's demand for a peasant revolution frightens Wang into expelling them in July, and asks who betrayed whom. It is told through scholars and the Nationalists' own history, written by a man close to Wang; the Communists' side is heard only through scholars.

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Transcript

Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the evening of the eleventh of April 1927, a Shanghai gangster named Du Yuesheng invited a friend to his house for a chat. The friend was Wang Shouhua, the Communist who led the city's federation of trade unions. The two men knew each other well. Du advised him to quit the Communist Party and join the Nationalists. Wang Shouhua said no. As he left the house, two assassins were waiting for him, and they killed him. A few hours later, the rest of the city found out what that had meant. Last time, the Nationalist army marched north from Guangzhou and, in less than a year, reached the Yangtze. Shanghai's workers rose, brought down its warlord, and handed the city to Chiang Kai-shek without his army firing a shot. Then Wang Jingwei came home on a Soviet ship. Chiang and most of the party's leaders in the city asked him to stay in Shanghai, lead a united party, and rein in the Communists. Wang refused. He made a joint statement with the Communist leader, Chen Duxiu, saying the alliance must hold, and the two of them slipped away up the river to Wuhan, where the party's left and the Communists had their government. He left Chiang the leader of every anti Communist force in the army and the party. This time, the alliance that built the revolution dies, twice over. First at the hands of Chiang, in Shanghai. And then, three months later, at the hands of the very man who had gone to Wuhan to save it. And we will have to ask who betrayed whom. To understand the morning of the twelfth of April, start with the Green Gang. The Green Gang was the largest criminal organisation in Shanghai. Its business was opium, gambling and protection, and its bosses lived comfortably inside the foreign concessions, beyond the reach of Chinese police. Its two great bosses, Du Yuesheng and Huang Jinrong, had kept close to the Communists as well as to the Nationalists, for political reasons. Du was in direct touch with Wang Shouhua, who was both a Green Gang man and a Communist. That was why the Communist leaders did not believe the Green Gang was a threat. Chiang knew this world. He had spent his younger years in Shanghai, and he had dealt with its secret societies then. On the sixth of April, the party's supervisory committee in Shanghai, a mostly honorary body that included Chiang's chief backers, voted unanimously to remove the Communists from the party and set up a Shanghai Purge Committee. Its most important job, Chen Lifu, one of Chiang's closest aides, said later, was to make sure the Green Gang did not side with the Communists. The go between was Yang Hu, a gang member who had worked with Chiang in his early revolutionary days. Du Yuesheng was given six hundred thousand yuan to raise a Mutual Progress Society of armed thugs. And before Chiang left the city, he made Yang Hu commander of the Shanghai garrison. Then Chiang declared martial law, ordered every civilian bearing arms disarmed, and steamed off in his warship to Nanjing. Each side in this paid a price, and each got something. To win the Green Gang, Chiang offered to let the lucrative opium trade of the Yangtze valley carry on. Shanghai's businessmen, frightened of the unions, lent Chiang ten million yuan, which he badly needed to pay his soldiers. And the foreign authorities gave the gangsters five thousand rifles with ammunition, and promised them safe passage through the settlement. For the promise of labour peace, it seemed a small price to pay. Moscow, meanwhile, had told the Chinese Communists to avoid clashes with Chiang's army in Shanghai at any price. And on the sixth of April, Stalin told three thousand party workers in Moscow that when the Nationalist right was no more use, Chiang Kai-shek would be "squeezed out like a lemon and flung far away." He had the order of events the wrong way round. After midnight on the twelfth, the troops of the Seventh Corps took over the offices of the Communist led labour federation, and shot workers who resisted. At four in the morning, armed men of the Green Gang and Nationalist troops fell on the General Labour Union, killing and arresting workers. The gang's armed bands attacked the workers' pickets in one district after another, killing several dozen men who fought back. Many more were arrested and taken to the headquarters of Bai Chongxi, the Nationalist general whose troops had marched into Shanghai in March. One of them was Zhou Enlai, the young Communist who had led the workers' rising three weeks before, and the highest ranking Communist in the city. Bai let him go, very likely with Chiang's approval or on his orders. Zhou Enlai was twenty nine. He had studied in France, run the political teaching at the Nationalists' military academy at Whampoa, and would spend the next half century surviving things he should not have. The Communists had spread all through the city, waiting for the joyful moment when the Nationalist army arrived. What they did not know was that Chiang had used his old contacts in the Green Gang to have every known Communist rounded up. The next day, the workers marched in protest. The troops fired on them and killed almost a hundred. Then the hunt began. Blacklists went round with the names of known and suspected radicals. Women with bobbed hair, a sure sign of radical tendencies, were arrested. Women activists were accused of sexual immorality rather than any political crime, and the bodies of executed women were sometimes mutilated and put on show as warnings. Over the following weeks, Communists and anyone suspected of being one were hunted down all across Shanghai. In the first two days alone, Chiang's soldiers and the gangsters executed more than five thousand people and arrested about as many. Many thousands were killed within days, some kidnapped and tortured first. In later years, Chen Lifu admitted it. "It was a bloodthirsty way to eliminate the enemy within. I must admit many innocent people were killed." By his count, sixteen thousand Communists crossed over to the Nationalist side. Chiang did not mention the purge in his diary. On the fourteenth of April he wrote only that he would take advantage of the change in the political situation to make the south of the Yangtze secure. The party he was purging had grown fast. From a thousand members at the start of 1925 the Communist Party had reached fifty eight thousand by April 1927, most of them workers in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Those numbers, and the skill of its organisers, may well have doomed it in Chiang's eyes. In one stroke he got rid of a major rival and showed the party how much it needed him. He reassured the foreign powers, won the money of China's bankers and industrialists, and told the landowners in the countryside that the Nationalists were on their side. Not everyone in the party liked the killing, but a good part of its leadership wanted the Communists gone. Cai Yuanpei, the old radical of 1911 and former president of Beijing University, backed the purge, and so did Wu Zhihui, the anarchist friend of Sun Yat-sen. The killings put a sudden end to the alliance between the Nationalists and the Communists. On one reckoning, the Chinese civil war, which would last twenty two years, began in Shanghai in the early hours of that morning. One person the news reached in Moscow was Chiang's own son, a student there since 1925, who had become a fierce follower of Trotsky. The day after he heard, he denounced his father in public as a traitor and a murderer. He would stay in Russia another ten years, and for all that time he thought of his father as a traitor to the Chinese people.

Chen Duxiu
Chen Duxiu. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Shanghai was only the beginning. On the fifteenth of April came news of an anti Communist coup in Guangzhou. The generals there had chosen Chiang's path. Similar purges followed in Guilin, Ningbo, Xiamen and other cities. The Communists hit back where they could. In Wuhan the leaders ordered the execution of eight veteran union men who had resisted Communist control, and in Changsha a Communist firing squad shot thirty or forty Chinese businessmen with foreign connections. But the real killing was in the countryside, and it came as revenge. In the countryside, crowds stirred up mostly by the Communists had pillaged and killed, the innocent and the guilty alike, and the men they struck were mostly the small and middling landlords whose sons were leading the Nationalist armies. Now the officers struck back. Backed by the village militia and by secret societies that had changed sides, they carried out the cruellest measures, dreaming only of revenge. A white terror, no less deadly than the red one, shook China. In Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Guangdong and the other Nationalist provinces, rivers of blood flowed. In the counties of Xiangtan, Mao Zedong's native place, and Changde, ten thousand people were executed. In Xiangtan the executioners beheaded the chief of the labour union, kicked his head about, and burned his body. In Hubei, peasants from rich clans wiped out whole villages with the help of Nationalist troops, and the tortures they used do not bear repeating. In just three Hubei counties, thousands were killed in the first weeks. Later that year a Nationalist general whose father had been arrested by a peasant union sent soldiers to Mao's home village to dig up his parents' bones and scatter them, which by old belief would ruin Mao's fortunes. The soldiers did not know where the grave was. The villagers refused to help, and when they were threatened, one of them led the squad to the grave of a local landlord's ancestors instead, and they dug that up. The great peasant movement collapsed almost without a fight. The weak, badly armed peasant unions fell apart at the first blow. Many peasants had joined them out of fear of the roughs who ran them, and they had no wish to fight Nationalist armies for someone else's cause. At the first chance they threw down their pikes and ran. The unions of many millions turned out to be paper tigers. In the countryside, as the radicals were hunted down, the peasant associations either fell apart or were crushed by force. Wang Jingwei's camp later laid much of the blame for the killing on the generals from Guangxi, Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi among them, holding them responsible for the persecution and massacre of thousands of peasants, workers and students in what Chiang called the Purification Movement. The man who had to answer for all this was Chen Duxiu. Chen Duxiu had founded the Communist Party and led it since 1921. Before that he had been a professor, and the editor of New Youth, the magazine that taught a generation of young Chinese to throw off Confucius. After Chiang's coup, the party's Central Committee moved to Hankou, one of the three cities of Wuhan. But Wuhan itself was threatened from all sides, and the situation there was growing more complicated all the time. Most of the Central Committee felt as if they were, in one leader's words, "lingering in a leaky house with a rain-storm raging at night." In the end the Chinese Communist Party was nearly wiped out by the crackdown of 1927 and 1928, and it would take three or four more years of fighting among its own leaders before it found a policy that worked.

In Wuhan, Wang Jingwei had arrived full of plans. Wang Jingwei was forty three. As a young man he had tried to assassinate the Qing prince regent with a bomb, and had been Sun Yat-sen's closest disciple, taking down his testament at his deathbed. He believed himself Sun's true heir. When he reached Hankou on the tenth of April, he found the committee there had already agreed to move the party's headquarters and the government down the river to Nanjing. He had proposed a new full meeting of the party's executive committee, with Chiang and the rest, to revise the decisions of the last one and keep the party united, and now it had every chance of being accepted. He set to work at once. Then, on the thirteenth, the news from Shanghai arrived: Chiang had arrested the Communist leaders, massacred several thousand workers, and begun what he called the Purification Movement. On the fifteenth Wang learned that Chiang had gone to Nanjing with Wu Zhihui, Cai Yuanpei, Hu Hanmin and others, to set up a party committee and a National Government of their own. "Wang considered this to be a breach of faith in addition to an open rebellion against the lawfully constituted authorities." Some said afterwards that Chiang had first cabled Wang and the others to come to Nanjing at once to deal with the emergency in Shanghai, and had set up his own government only when they did not come. Wang's friends did not believe it. Chiang had broken faith with Wuhan expecting Wang to help him against it, they said, and once Wang went to Wuhan instead, Chiang knew he could no longer count on him. On the eighteenth of April Chiang proclaimed his rival government at Nanjing. Its chairman was Hu Hanmin, one of Sun Yat-sen's oldest lieutenants. Hu had been forced out of the party's leadership after the murder of the left wing leader Liao Zhongkai in 1925, when suspicion fell on his family, and had only just come back from Russia. Hu, like Wang, thought himself far above Chiang, whom he saw as a provincial upstart. But in the name of the new government he praised Chiang's loyalty and courage. Then he ordered the arrest of Borodin and two hundred Communists, among them Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Mikhail Borodin was the Soviet adviser Moscow had sent to Sun Yat-sen in 1923, and he was still the most powerful foreigner in the Nationalist camp, now at Wuhan. Wuhan had already struck back. On the seventeenth, with Wang in the chair, its committee expelled Chiang, Wu Zhihui and everyone else who had joined the Nanjing coup from the party, and stripped them of all their posts. It charged Chiang with twelve crimes, among them the massacre of the people and oppression of the party, and offered two hundred and fifty thousand taels of silver for his capture, or a hundred thousand if he was killed. A tael was the Chinese ounce of silver, a little more than an English ounce, and the old unit that sums of money were counted in. Now there were two Nationalist governments, each claiming Sun Yat-sen, each calling the other traitors. Some tried to stand between them. The finance minister, T. V. Soong, resigned rather than take Wang's side against Chiang or Chiang's against Wang. Wang's own camp had its explanation for what Chiang had done. The party's old reactionaries had long worked to drive Wang and Chiang apart, and now they were afraid the two would make up. To make that impossible, they played on Chiang's new hatred of the Communists and pushed him into the massacres of workers in Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou and elsewhere. And Chiang, wanting to break with Wuhan, needed allies, so he made terms with his old enemies on the right. He was helped by the resentment many Nationalists felt at Borodin's grip on the Wuhan committee, and at the personal attacks some of its members had made on Chiang. But Chiang had his own reasons. After the purge, the warlords thought better of him. He could now count on Zhejiang and Fujian, on Shanghai and Nanjing, and on parts of Anhui and Jiangsu. And he had the bankers. For the rest of his career, Chiang kept a tight grip on the bankers and merchants of Shanghai, Ningbo and Nanjing, and milked them for money when he needed it, with quiet help from Du Yuesheng's gang through threats, wrecked property and even kidnapping. For the next ten years he also drew large sums from taxes on growing and smoking opium, under a system officially meant to wean the country off the drug, in which Du Yuesheng would hold an official place. Then Chiang sent his best troops back across the Yangtze to carry on the Northern Expedition, and soon they held most of northern Jiangsu. In his diary he changed his daily motto. It now read: still, the rebels and the great world powers are not eliminated. And Mao? On the very day of the Shanghai coup, the twelfth of April, he was in Wuhan, speaking to the party's Land Committee and calling for an agrarian revolution at once. "The so-called confiscation of land," he told them, "simply means not paying rent, that's all." In Hunan and Hubei, he said, the peasants had already stopped paying rent and taken power. Make the revolution real first, and write the laws afterwards. The news from Shanghai only poured oil on the fire. Mao began drafting a resolution to settle the land question. But Wang Jingwei, Tan Yankai and the general He Jian wanted to avoid excesses in the peasant movement, and they killed it. All the committee's work came to nothing. Mao summed it up bitterly. The Nationalist leaders, he said, covered their complete unwillingness to meet the peasants' demands with empty, puffed up phrases. That spring, before it all went wrong, he had climbed the Tower of the Yellow Crane, not far from his home, gazed out over the Yangtze, and written a poem. "Nine vast rivers rush through central China", it begins, "an iron line plunges north to south". And it ends with Mao lifting his cup of wine to the pouring river, his heart's tide surging wave high.

Wang Jingwei
Wang Jingwei. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In Wuhan, the left had a government and very little else. It ruled, shakily, over three provinces: Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi. When Wang arrived, he found the Nationalist members of the committee had lost control to the Communists. Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Ching-ling, told him that things were very bad, and that her stepson, Sun Ke, had become a complete tool of Borodin. The foreign minister, Eugene Chen, told him the same. The Communists had been let into the party to help it fight the warlords and imperialists. Now they were its co rulers, and would soon be its masters. Wuhan's economy was collapsing. Almost every factory had closed. Wuhan's three hundred thousand workers were all on strike, and shopkeepers and their assistants were fighting almost every day. Business was paralysed. Prices spiralled, and inflation grew. In May the Communist run party branch in Hanyang seized fifteen private factories and set up workers' councils to run them. It was a complete failure, and it left the government in serious financial trouble. Wang pushed through measures to protect commerce and industry, since without them there would be no revenue at all. Then there was the land. In the government's council the Communists proposed seizing the land and trying it first in Hunan. Wang objected fiercely, and the majority voted it down. In the villages, the Communists had already put out slogans like Down with the Landlords, and set bands of vagrants loose to seize whatever land they could. Another of their slogans ran "All Land Owners are rowdies and all Gentry criminals". Wang's camp saw the countryside differently from Mao. In a Chinese family, they argued, the very rich and the very poor were often kin, and the vagabonds who seized the land were mostly the landlords' own poor relations, living on their charity. Land seizure served them, not the farmers who actually worked the fields. To Wang the danger was plain. Most of the junior officers in three of Wuhan's armies came from the landowning gentry of Hunan and Hubei. Seize their families' land, and the army would turn. One of the first things he asked Borodin was, "on what grounds do you justify this policy of land seizure in Hunan?" It had never been put before the party's national congresses. Borodin denied the movement was his doing. He blamed his colleague M. N. Roy, who he said had Stalin's complete confidence, even more than he did. M. N. Roy was an Indian revolutionary, the Comintern's new envoy to China. He had reached Hankou in early April and at once began pressing radical ideas on Borodin and the Chinese Communists. The Comintern was Moscow's headquarters for the world's Communist parties, and the Chinese Communists took their orders from it. What, Wang asked, did Borodin propose to do? All Borodin could suggest was to tone the movement down. The Communists were stirring up trouble with foreigners too. In Hunan foreigners were openly molested and their property put in danger, with the provincial authorities egging them on. Wang took it to the government's council, which told local officials that the Nationalist Party was against imperialism, not against foreigners, and that foreigners' lives and property must be protected. Behind it lay a quarrel between Eugene Chen and Borodin. Britain had just handed back its concessions at Hankou and Jiujiang, and Chen wanted to keep on reasonable terms with the British. Borodin wanted an armed peace with Britain, and an understanding between Russia, China and Japan. Stalin, Wang was told in Moscow on his way home, said the same. To Chen and Wang, who both knew Japan well, the idea of an alliance with Japan was sheer moonshine. Wang had studied there. And Tanaka, long one of China's very worst enemies, had just formed a new cabinet in Japan. Wuhan was also fighting for its life. In May its armies marched north into Henan against Zhang Zuolin, the warlord of Manchuria, whose troops were far more numerous and better armed. The Wuhan soldiers knew what they were fighting for. Regiments were cut to pieces and kept on fighting. At that very moment, the commander of Wuhan's own garrison upriver at Yichang, Xia Douyin, went over to the enemy and marched on Wuhan itself. He got within ten miles before the city realised the danger. People began fleeing into the foreign concessions. The committee decreed that any official who joined them would be dismissed on the spot. Mao Zedong, who was running a peasant training institute in Wuchang, organised its students into armed self defence units and joined the city's defence. Xia Douyin was beaten off. In Henan, after what Wang's camp reckoned the bloodiest battles in modern Chinese history, the Wuhan armies won, but they lost about thirteen thousand killed and wounded out of some seventy thousand men. Feng Yuxiang, the northern warlord who had joined the Nationalists from the left, broke through from the west at the same time and took Luoyang, for the loss of some fifty men. On the twenty eighth of May, Zhang Zuolin ordered all his armies back north of the Yellow River. The war in Henan was over by the second of June. Chiang, for his part, took the railway junction of Xuzhou on the first. And while the armies were away, Changsha exploded. On the twenty first of May, Xu Kexiang, the commander of one of the regiments stationed in Changsha, rose against the peasant unions and the Communists in the Hunan capital. The rising is remembered as the Horse Day Incident, because in the old telegraph code each day of the month had a character, and the twenty first was the character for horse. The officers, whose own families had suffered from the red terror in the villages, were bound to rise sooner or later. Xu had only a thousand troops, but the peasant unions collapsed, and he took the whole Changsha region. In the twenty days after his coup, more than ten thousand people were killed in Changsha and the country around it, many local leaders of the Communist Party and the peasant associations among them. In Wuhan, Borodin and the Communists wanted the committee to order an attack on the rebel troops and punish their officers. Wang refused. The officers who had tolerated the revolt should answer for it, he said, but so should whoever was responsible for the land seizures that had provoked it. To him the rebels had acted under grave provocation. The general Tang Shengzhi, who governed Hunan, was sent to Changsha to look into it and restore order. He came back sure there had been a Communist conspiracy against the Nationalist Party, and he advised throwing the Communists out of the party at once. To Wang's camp, Changsha was the sign that the time had come for the two parties to separate. The killing spread from Changsha to other counties of Hunan, and then to Hubei and Jiangxi. In Nanjing, Chiang watched with satisfaction, and very likely he had a hidden hand in it.

News of Changsha reached Moscow, and Stalin lost his temper. He demanded the impossible. The Chinese Communists were to get the Nationalist left to launch an agrarian revolution in every province, raise eight or ten divisions of revolutionary peasants and workers to guard Wuhan, and convince Wang's people that if they did not learn to be revolutionary Jacobins, they would perish. "Without an agrarian revolution victory is impossible", he wrote. The land was to be seized from below, and the Nationalist leadership refreshed with new leaders from among the peasants and workers. "We must end our dependence on unreliable generals", the instructions went on. "It is time to act. We must punish the bastards." The Jacobins were the most ruthless faction of the French Revolution, who had sent their enemies to the guillotine. In all, Stalin wanted a new army of seventy thousand revolutionary workers and peasants. When one of the telegrams was read to the Chinese party's leaders, one of them recalled, nobody knew whether to cry or to laugh. How could they talk at a time like this of getting rid of unreliable generals? Chen Duxiu could only shake his head. "Earlier Zinoviev ordered us to help the bourgeoisie, and now Stalin tells us to carry out an agrarian revolution in the next twenty-four hours." Zinoviev had run the Comintern until Stalin pushed him aside the year before. Mao saw where it was all heading. He gathered his brothers to talk it over. So as not to upset his wife, they pretended to be playing mahjong. Mao could see that Wang Jingwei would soon go the way of Chiang Kai-shek. "We cannot wait around until they kill us", he said. They must either go with the army or go home to Hunan. They decided the family would leave Wuchang for Changsha as soon as possible. And Mao asked the party to send him back to Hunan, to save what he could. On the twenty fourth of June he left. But by then the decisive meeting had already happened, in a flat in Wuhan. On the first of June, M. N. Roy asked Wang Jingwei to come and see him for an important conversation. In Roy's flat, he asked Wang a question. "There is a telegram from Stalin addressed to Borodin and me. Has Borodin shown it to you?" Wang said, "No." Borodin did not like to show it to him, Roy said. But Roy thought Wang should know what was in it, and was quite sure Wang would approve. And he handed over the original Russian text with a Chinese translation. Think about what was happening in that flat. Through Borodin and Roy, Stalin told the Chinese Communists to push the seizure of land right across the territories Wuhan held, while leaving the property of Wuhan's officers and soldiers alone so as not to turn them, and on no account to give way to the Nationalists over the land. They were to remake the party's executive committee with more reliable Communist leaders of workers and peasants, build a regular army of twenty thousand men made up only of Communists, and pick fifty thousand peasants and workers for detachments to use against the loyal Nationalist forces. And they were to press the Nationalist leaders to set up revolutionary courts, for the sole purpose of dealing with anti Communist officers. Wang was astonished. He told Roy at once that the Nationalists could never accept such conditions. They argued for some time, to no purpose. As he was leaving, Wang asked whether he might have a copy of the translation. Roy hesitated a moment. Then he said yes, he would send one the next day, once one or two words had been changed. The copy arrived, and Wang showed it at once to Soong Ching-ling and Eugene Chen. Eugene Chen went pale. That, he said, meant war between the Nationalists and the Communists. The day after, Roy saw Wang again. He was glad, he said, "that I have shown you the telegram, which you can take as an ultimatum." If Wang accepted it and helped carry it out, Moscow would go on working with him. If not, it would have nothing more to do with the Nationalists. Wang told him the terms laid down when the alliance was made in 1923 were nothing like these. It was not the Nationalists who were refusing an agreement, he said. It was Moscow that had broken one. They cared only for the conditions they had agreed to before. Wang understood the telegram as a Soviet plan to purge the Wuhan government of its non Communist leaders. Moscow's own envoy had made the mistake of showing it to him, and it frightened him. Why had Roy done it? Roy seems to have believed the Nationalist left could only survive in alliance with the Communists, and so they ought to be told what Stalin wanted. He even told Wang that he did not agree with Borodin's conditions or his policy. Borodin knew better. He knew the left was stronger than Roy thought, and that if its leaders saw the resolution they would break with the Communists at once. So he had kept it to himself. He was furious with Roy, and cabled Stalin asking him to recall him. Most of the Chinese Communists sided with Borodin, and they drove Roy back to Russia. And why had Stalin sent it at all? He had backed the alliance with the Nationalists all along, and he had no great faith in the Chinese peasants. But his China policy was falling apart just as the Russian Communists were fighting over who would lead them. If he could set off a great rebellion in China, however hopeless, his policy might look a success just long enough to secure his own power. The orders were probably meant to stay secret. Once Wang had seen them, they made the Communists look untrustworthy, and the Nationalist left, which liked orderly peasant associations but not armed risings against landlords, turned against them.

Wuhan government leaders in 1927: Eugene Chen, T. V. Soong, Wang Jingwei, Borodin
Wuhan government leaders in 1927: Eugene Chen, T. V. Soong, Wang Jingwei, Borodin. Louis Fischer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Wang's first move was to make sure of the generals. On the fourth of June he went north to Zhengzhou, in Henan, with the government's other leaders, to warn Tang Shengzhi, Zhang Fakui and the other commanders of what the Communists were planning, call them back to Wuhan, and tell them to disarm the Communists in their armies. Henan, just won from Zhang Zuolin, was handed to Feng Yuxiang, and he too was told what the Communists had been doing. While they were still at Zhengzhou, a telegram warned them that Chiang Kai-shek was preparing to attack Wuhan. They hurried back, reaching Wuhan on the thirteenth. Feng Yuxiang now held the balance between Wuhan and Nanjing. He controlled Shaanxi, Gansu and parts of Henan and Inner Mongolia, and had a new arsenal of Soviet weapons. He was so alarmed by what he had been told about the Communists that he asked at once to meet Chiang. On the nineteenth of June Chiang and his commanders waited for him on the platform at Xuzhou, in their dress uniforms with ceremonial swords dangling at their waists, and a military band ready to play. Feng's special train pulled in. They peered in the windows and saw only a few waiters in uniform, who pointed to the boxcars at the back. Through an open boxcar door Chiang saw a very tall, burly soldier in a shabby uniform, sitting on the floor. As the train stopped, the soldier stood up and walked out. "Where is Commander Feng?" Chiang asked. The soldier smiled. "I am Feng Yuxiang." The band played, and Feng shook hands all round. The two men had a great deal in common. Both talked like leftists, both had taken large amounts of Soviet military aid, and both had children in Moscow. And both now saw the Communists and the Soviet Union as grave enemies. By the end of the meeting they agreed on everything. Chiang now had the loans of China's big banks and the opium tax, so he could promise Feng two million Chinese dollars a month, far more than Wuhan had been sending him. Feng went back to Zhengzhou and at once ordered the Communists in his ranks expelled, and some of them shot. One who barely escaped was a twenty five year old political commissar who had studied in Paris and Moscow. His name was Deng Xiaoping. Deng Xiaoping would one day rule China himself, half a century later. When he heard what Feng had done, the warlord of Shanxi, Yan Xishan, who had been flirting with every side, came out for Chiang and hunted down what few Communists he could find in his cities. In Wuhan the left argued about when, not whether. Soong Ching-ling and Eugene Chen opposed the Communists' grip on the party and wanted the alliance ended in the end. But not yet. Chiang should be dealt with first, they said, or Wuhan's forces would be split and powerless against him. Many in the party agreed that the moment had not yet come, because a break would mean crushing the labour leaders, and with them losing the instinctive mass support that had made up for the Nationalists' poor weapons. Wang thought they underrated the Communists. They were strong not only in the unions and peasant movement but in the army, above all in Zhang Fakui's. Wait until Chiang was beaten, and the Communists would be so dug into the army that they could never be thrown out without courting defeat. Some of Zhang Fakui's commanders were in fact secret Communists, and so were many of his junior officers. One of his army commanders had joined the party without Zhang even knowing. After about ten days of secret meetings at Wang's house, the decision was taken: the Communists would be expelled. For now it was kept secret. Tang Shengzhi at once dismissed every officer under his command known to have Communist ties. There were not many. Even Xu Qian, the Wuhan minister once called the reddest of the red, had turned. He was making violent anti Communist speeches to Feng's soldiers, and then stayed on with Feng, afraid that the Communists in Wuhan were after him. Deng Yanda, who ran the Wuhan military academy and followed the Communists' line though he was a Nationalist, heard of the secret decision, resigned all his posts, closed the academy and left for Moscow. For Chen Duxiu, there was worse to come. On the fourth of July, his eldest son, Chen Yannian, was executed by the Nationalists in Shanghai. Chen Yannian had been running the party's underground in the Shanghai region. After that, one of his comrades wrote, Chen faced "an expanse of darkness," and there was nothing left for him but to give up his post to more capable men. Under pressure from Moscow, he stepped down on the twelfth of July. That same month, Stalin wrote to his colleagues in Moscow that there was not a single Marxist mind in the Chinese party's Central Committee. Chen would carry the blame for years. The party's own histories made him the scapegoat, and he was later thrown out of it. Mao's time in Hunan was short. Ten days after the party voted to reorganise its Hunan committee under him, Chen Duxiu summoned him back to Wuhan, afraid, Mao said later, that his radical moves would push Tang Shengzhi into a rising of his own. Chen called an enlarged meeting of the party's leaders at Borodin's house in Hankou to try to hold things together. It was all in vain. Three days after Chen fell, Wang Jingwei moved. On the fifteenth of July, after a full month of preparation, he formally proposed in the government's council that the Communists be expelled from the Nationalist Party. The Communist members did not come, and neither did the Nationalists who disagreed. But there was a quorum, and the motion passed unanimously. Wang's government threw the Communists out of Wuhan and disarmed the workers' pickets. Some Communists caught in the city were executed. At first the break was meant to be peaceful. The committee offered to recognise the Communist Party as a political party, though not a governing one, its members keeping their full rights as citizens, so long as they kept out of the Nationalists' affairs. It did not last. On the sixteenth of July documents were found showing that the Communists had decided to pull their members out of the government but not out of the Nationalist Party, and to keep secret cells inside it to stir up trouble and destroy it. On the twenty first, Wang wrote that the party was now under attack from two sides, from the corrupt reactionaries and from the Communists, and that both had to be fought. Communists were dismissed from the government and the army as fast as they could be found. And the defeat of the Chinese Communist Party, and with it of Stalin's whole line on China, was complete. So who betrayed whom? Here the sources disagree. In the Nationalist account, the Communists had joined the party on its own terms, accepting Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People as their basis and the party's sole right to govern China, and then changed their minds, and set out to turn the party Communist or destroy it. The Three Principles of the People were Sun Yat-sen's creed: nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood. In another view, the main cause of the Communists' defeat was that the Chinese party was tied hand and foot to Moscow, and had to follow orders from men who barely understood China. Every question, large or small, went to Moscow or its envoys. One of the Chinese leaders wrote that they resented it, but accepted it with silent resignation. And by a third, the alliance was always going to break under the strain of its own success, because the two parties wanted different things. On that view, the real blame lies less with any Chinese leader than with Stalin, who kept the Communists disarmed inside the alliance right up to the moment it turned on them.

Mikhail Borodin
Mikhail Borodin. Unknown author, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

That left the Russians. Wang took care to protect the Soviet advisers, and he pretended the turn of events need not trouble relations with the Soviet Union. But the Russians knew their China strategy was in ruins, and they decided to go. Roy left first, across the Gobi desert, in a dusty convoy of three big touring cars with cans of petrol lashed to the running boards. Borodin had wanted to resign weeks before, but he could not leave. Northern warlord troops had captured his wife and were holding her in Beijing, and as long as they had her, his going might cost her life. In the end she escaped, dressed as a nun, and Borodin was free to go. On the fifteenth, at the same meeting that expelled the Communists, Wang's government accepted Borodin's resignation. The party's committee wrote him a letter thanking him for his great services to the National Government and for Russia's help to the revolution. It regretted that, because Russia had changed its policy, close cooperation was no longer possible. Borodin left Hankou with full honours. He went first to rest at Lushan, the resort above the Yangtze, though it was found afterwards that he had held secret meetings there with Communists who were preparing a rising. On the twenty seventh of July he took the train north to Luoyang, spent three days as Feng Yuxiang's guest, and then set off with his wife on the long road across the Gobi to the safety of Mongolia, and on to Russia. Soong Ching-ling and Eugene Chen, the two who had argued for waiting, went to Russia too, to their colleagues' puzzlement. Nor were things going well for Chiang Kai-shek. The northern warlord Sun Chuanfang beat his army badly at Xuzhou. Chiang insisted on leading the counterattack in person. It failed miserably, and his whole force of several corps fell back to the Yangtze. On the fifth of August he came back to Nanjing unshaven and unwashed, furious, and had the general who led the advance executed. Privately he admitted that he had underestimated the enemy. So Chiang had his new National government in Nanjing, Wang Jingwei had Wuhan, and Chiang had just been beaten at Xuzhou. The Communists had been hunted down by Chiang in Shanghai and thrown out of Wuhan by Wang. Their leader had resigned, their Russian advisers were gone, and their peasant unions had melted away. But Mao had already told the party what he thought it should do. On the fourth of July, back from Hunan, he had proposed that the peasant unions go to the mountains, where it would be possible to set up a military base. Without armed forces of their own, he warned, the Communists would be powerless the moment the situation changed. Next time, the Communists stop asking for allies and pick up the gun.

Sources