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Revolution and Civil War, episode 8

Sun's Heirs

With Sun Yat-sen dead, his party in Guangzhou is led by Wang Jingwei, the revolutionary who once tried to assassinate a Qing prince regent and stood at Sun's deathbed, while Chiang Kai-shek builds its army, and in the summer of 1925 police in Shanghai fire on protesters and nationalism floods the cities. The episode follows Wang and Chiang from the May Thirtieth killings and the great strike against Hong Kong, through the murder of the party's left-wing leader Liao Zhongkai and the right wing's call to expel the Communists, to March 1926, when Chiang puts Guangzhou under martial law and Wang leaves the country, and asks whether Chiang's coup was the first move against the Communists. It hears the Nationalists in their own insider history, written by a man close to Wang, alongside scholars, the British writer Putnam Weale and the Beijing government's diplomatic notes.

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Transcript

A Chinese nationalist party propaganda poster after the May 30th Movement, 1925
A Chinese nationalist party propaganda poster after the May 30th Movement, 1925. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Sun Yat-sen died. He died of cancer of the liver, in Beijing, on 12 March 1925, far from the southern city where he had built his party and his army. Before he died, his disciple Wang Jingwei read him a testament that told the party the revolution was unfinished, and Sun approved it. His last words, his followers said, were peace, struggle, save China. And the party declared that Sun's writings were never to be contradicted. A struggle for power followed at once, and the party's left won it, with Wang at its head. Chiang Kai-shek, who ran the party's new military academy at Whampoa, was not even on its inner committee, and few people counted him a contender. So this is the story of Sun's heirs. Wang, who had his words. And Chiang, who had his soldiers. In 1925 they were not yet rivals. Wang was the orator, the civilian, the man who chaired the meetings. Chiang was the soldier, and in public he talked like a man of the left, full of praise for the Soviet alliance and the coming revolution of the masses. Plenty of people in Guangzhou took him at his word. Keep an eye on whether they were right. If you are just joining us, here is where things stand. Sun's party was the Kuomintang, the National People's Party, and its members called themselves the Nationalists. It held one great southern city, Guangzhou, and not much else. The rest of China was carved up among generals, the warlords, and the government in Beijing was whatever the strongest of them said it was. In 1923 Sun had accepted a united front with the young Chinese Communist Party, letting its members join his own one by one, and that year the Soviet Union began sending him money and arms. With Soviet money, he had founded an academy at Whampoa, to train officers for an army that would answer to the party, with Chiang Kai-shek at its head. And now Sun was dead, and the alliance he made was in the hands of the men he left behind. Let me show you what China looked like a few months after Sun died, before I tell you how it got there. That summer, China's cities rose against the foreigners. Shanghai was China's biggest city and its busiest port, and much of it was not run by China at all. Foreigners ran its richest districts under their own laws, and foreign owned mills, docks and banks employed hundreds of thousands of Chinese. In Shanghai, the workers walked out of the mills. And then, during the strike, even the police joined them, and the men who carried away the night soil, and the servants in foreign houses, and the cooks. Night soil, if you have not met the phrase, was human waste, collected by hand from the city's houses every night and carried out to the fields. When the night soil carriers stop, a city notices. In Beijing, the students marched on the Legation Quarter, the walled district where the foreign diplomats lived under the guard of their own troops. We have a witness to those marches, and I will lean on him in this episode. He wrote as Putnam Weale, a British journalist who had spent most of his life in China. In his telling, the students' movement ran parallel to the Communists' efforts, and then foreign Communism and Chinese nationalism were suddenly joined, like the guilty lovers in Dante's Inferno, condemned to journey to the end bound together. He watched the students circle the walls of the Legation Quarter. For several hours, he wrote, dense columns of marchers shouted "destroy the British and Japanese bandits" and similar abusive cries, and "demonstrated and sought to rush the entrances." All through the summer, he wrote, the marches went on, and the capital was plastered with placards that anywhere else would have led to a break in diplomatic relations. He even had his own theory of who started it. The whole chain of events in Shanghai, he insisted, had been set in motion by orders from the students' union in Beijing, and the Beijing students' fury afterwards came partly from guilt, for having urged on a protest that got fellow students killed. The journalist was baffled, and a little frightened, by how fast it all spread. How was it possible, he asked, for young men in schools and colleges to gain such a hold over the government and over workmen, so that tens of thousands downed their tools? Part of his answer was a foreigner's sneer, that the Chinese were very susceptible to suggestion. But part of it was sharp. The students, he saw, had learned new methods of organisation from foreign books, and with the telegraph, the telephone, the post office and the newspaper, they could touch countless places at once. In his eyes it created only the illusion of a united national front. He was sure, too, that the students had secret help from Chinese officials, who were happy to let them act as agents of the nation. And he thought the Beijing government was too tangled in its own troubles even to grasp the insult the marchers were offering the foreign powers. It took the stern measures of the Manchurian warlord, Zhang Zuolin, elsewhere, to shame Beijing into quelling the storm. He ended with a worried question. "What then is to be the future of a movement which strikes at the very existence of law and order"? But an illusion that brings a whole nation into the streets is a strange kind of illusion. So what lit it? One account of that strike put it simply. "When people heard that the foreigners had killed one of us Chinese they were furious and felt that we must resist." The one of us was a man named Gu Zhenghong. Gu worked in a Japanese owned cotton mill in Shanghai. The great Japanese mills were among the biggest employers in the city, and in early 1925 their Chinese workers had been striking over pay, beatings and the firing of union men. Gu was a worker and a Communist, and on 15 May he was killed by a Japanese foreman in a scuffle at the mill. The mill had locked its workers out, and Gu was among a crowd of them who pushed their way in to demand work and their pay. The Japanese staff met them with guns, and Gu was shot. He was about twenty years old. On 24 May, the day of Gu's funeral, tens of thousands of people held a demonstration against the Japanese. A dead worker had become a martyr. Within a week, there would be many more.

Nanking Road, Shanghai, just after the Nanking Road Incident, 30 May 1925
Nanking Road, Shanghai, just after the Nanking Road Incident, 30 May 1925. Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On 30 May 1925, under Communist auspices, a demonstration was held in Shanghai's International Settlement. The International Settlement was the heart of the city: a district run not by China but by a council of foreign residents, most of them British, with its own police force and its own courts. Most of the people who lived there were Chinese, and they paid its taxes, but they had no seat on the council that ruled them. About two thousand students gathered on Nanjing Road, in the centre of the Settlement. They had come to protest Gu's killing, and the arrest of students who had spoken out about it. The police arrested some of them, and an angry crowd gathered outside the police station on Nanjing Road, demanding that they be let go. The officer in charge at that station was a British inspector named Everson. As the crowd pressed in, the journalist wrote, the inspector fell back from the main road, and ordered all the reserve police, Indian and Chinese, to load their carbines. The Settlement police were Chinese constables, led by Sikh officers from India, under British command. Then he panicked. He snapped, and ordered his men to fire into the crowd. Two sharp volleys were heard, forty-four shots in all. The police killed thirteen people and injured more than fifty, most of them workers. But it was the deaths of unarmed students that sent shock and horror across China. Within an hour, the journalist wrote, word ran through an inflammable population that there had been a massacre of Chinese on the city's main street. The next day found Shanghai an armed camp, with the situation getting worse by the hour. Most of the Settlement's foreign residents stood by their police. As they saw it, a handful of constables had faced a mob at the door of their station, and had saved the Settlement from being overrun. The foreign residents called out their own volunteer militia, and sailors and marines came ashore from the foreign warships in the river. On the Chinese side, the students called for a triple strike: workers would leave their jobs, merchants would close their shops, and students would leave their classes. And a boycott of British and Japanese goods spread from city to city. In Beijing, professors at the national university asked the question many Chinese were asking. "Would any right-minded person regard these boys and girls as rioters and treat them with bullets and rounds of machine guns?" The foreign authorities did not back down. The Beijing government protested at once, in a note of 1 June, and later complained that, instead of putting things right, the Settlement's authorities had declared a state of emergency. That state of emergency, in the Chinese government's words, "resulted in the subsequent shooting of many more innocent Chinese for the several days after June 1." In new clashes, 41 more Chinese were killed and 120 wounded. The diplomats did send delegates to Shanghai to look into the killings and talk with China's delegates, but the talks were moved to Beijing and stalled, while Britain insisted on a judicial inquiry first. The Beijing government protested that the delay was not its fault. In the end, the foreign diplomats said that the chief of police of the International Settlement would be suspended from his duties while the question of who was responsible was settled, and offered more talks, on the Settlement's court and on a share for Chinese in running it. The police chief and the inspector were eventually eased out of the force, but nobody was ever put on trial for the killings. A few volleys on one street had done what years of speeches had not. Now the strike spread. In Shanghai, more than 200,000 workers from 200 businesses walked out. In Beijing, 30,000 students left their classes to demonstrate on 3 June. In the river port of Hankou, far up the Yangtze, British machine guns killed eight Chinese demonstrators on 11 June. In city after city, students, merchants and workers held street lectures, rallies and memorial services, with mourners wailing for the dead. Blood was smeared on flags, to stand for the martyrs. By the end of that summer, the journalist admitted, there was hardly a soul among China's four hundred millions who had not heard of what had happened. It could not last forever, and in Shanghai it did not. When the foreign owned electricity companies cut off power to the Chinese parts of the city, the Chinese businessmen turned against the general strike. The strike was finally called off in September. The workers won a few economic gains, and not one of their political demands. But something had changed that a settlement could not change back. The May Thirtieth Movement, as it came to be called, fuelled the rapid growth of both the Nationalists and the Communists. At the start of 1925 the Communist Party had about a thousand members. By the end of the year it had about ten times as many, most of them workers and students. Sun had died just in time to miss it. His heirs would have to ride it.

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

The wave reached Guangzhou in June, and here it met the party's own army. On the afternoon of 23 June, a mass meeting gathered on the city's East Parade Ground, to protest the killing of Chinese students and workers by British police in Shanghai. Afterwards the crowd marched through the streets, with posters and handbills. Workers marched in front, then farmers and merchants, then boy and girl students, and at the back, closing the procession, came cadets from Whampoa and regular soldiers. About 60,000 people marched. The party had put its whole revolutionary coalition on the street, in order of march, with its own soldiers bringing up the rear. Their route ran along the waterfront to a street called Shaji. Across a wide canal from Shaji lay the island of Shamian, the Anglo French concession in Guangzhou. And across that canal, the British and French had spent the two days before the march preparing for a show of force. As three quarters of the procession, with the first of the students, had passed the West Bridge to the British concession, the firing began. In the Chinese account, a Lewis gun team from the British gunboat Tarantula, and French marines, suddenly opened fire on the procession. A Lewis gun was a light machine gun, the kind the British army had carried in the trenches of the First World War. British troops killed at least 52 demonstrators and wounded 117. Among the dead were twenty of Chiang's Whampoa cadets. Think who those cadets were: the young men who were to be the officers of the party's own army. Chiang was beside himself. "The stupid British," he wrote, "regard Chinese lives as dirt." From the Chinese side came more charges. Apart from the cadets and soldiers at the back, the marchers had carried no weapons, and medical evidence seemed to show that the British had used dumdum bullets, the soft nosed kind that spread inside the body, which the laws of war forbade. Here the sources disagree, and it matters, because the whole quarrel turned on it: who fired first? The British consul general, Sir James Jamieson, insisted that he had seen with his own eyes that the firing was opened from the Chinese side, and he refused to let any Chinese official or commission question his word. The journalist, as you might guess, blamed the Bolsheviks. A miniature battle followed shots fired by Bolshevik orders, he wrote, and the marchers' losses ran into hundreds. On the other side, German merchants in the city, and the American teachers at a Christian college in Guangzhou, expressed horror at what they had seen, and were convinced that the blame lay with the authorities on Shamian. To this day, nobody knows for certain who started the firing. What is not in doubt is who did the dying. Guangzhou never forgot it. The waterfront road at Shaji was later renamed for the date of the killing, the Twenty Third of June Road. For Chiang, it was personal. He took to writing a new saying against the British every day, such as "How can we emancipate mankind if we cannot annihilate the English?" Whatever he thought of Moscow, from this day on he had reasons of his own to hate the British empire. And for Guangzhou, Shaji turned a protest into a war of a different kind.

Deng Zhongxia
Deng Zhongxia. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The war was a strike. Even before Shaji, on 19 June, workers in Hong Kong had come out in support of the workers in Shanghai, and two days later so did the Chinese workers on Shamian. The strikes were brilliantly led by Deng Zhongxia, with the help of the Nationalists' left wing. Deng was a Communist labour organiser from Hunan, a former student at Beijing University and one of the party's early members, and he had been organising railway men and seamen for years. He would pay for his skill. Eight years later the Nationalists caught him, and executed him. But in 1925 he was their ally, and he knew what a strike could do in Hong Kong. Three years before, the colony's seamen had struck for higher pay and won, and the lesson had not been forgotten on either side. After Shaji, the walk out became an exodus. From Hong Kong, some 250,000 Chinese, about 45 percent of the colony's Chinese population, left for Guangzhou or their home villages around Guangdong province. And there they stayed, for the next sixteen months of strikes and boycotts. Think of it. Nearly half the Chinese in a British colony simply packed up and left. Now picture what that meant in Guangzhou. Tens of thousands of strikers poured into the city from the colony, angry, idle and organised. The British answered in kind. The governor of Hong Kong blamed the government at Guangzhou for the walk out, and ordered a blockade of the city. Guangzhou answered with its own. The Nationalists declared a blockade of Hong Kong and Shamian. In practice, the strike committee in Guangzhou became a power of its own, with some two thousand armed pickets of its own patrolling the waterfront to stop goods going to Hong Kong, and its own courts and jails. Some in Guangzhou called it a second government. In Hong Kong, the governor who had answered the strike with a blockade was replaced that autumn by a new one, a scholar of Chinese who spoke Cantonese, and who would spend months looking for a way to talk the strike to an end. The strikers needed somewhere to live, and the government found room for them in public buildings, temples and old gambling halls, and fed them from public kitchens. In Hong Kong, trade collapsed, shops and firms went bankrupt, and the colony's government had to borrow from London to stay afloat. It cost money. At its height, from June 1925 to March 1926, keeping the strikers fed and housed cost the government about 300,000 dollars a month. Between that and the British blockade, the strike gave the young government serious problems that threatened its very existence. But in the eyes of Sun's followers it was worth it. The strike, one of them wrote, delivered one of the most severe blows to British prestige and prosperity in the East. And the merchants of Guangzhou, who had fought the party only the year before, came to see the struggle not as a war between classes, but as a fight for national pride against foreign aggression. The strike would outlast nearly everyone's patience. In October 1926 the government finally called off the strike and boycott, largely on the advice of Borodin, the Soviet adviser. By then it had other uses for its money and its men: the great march north, and the move of the government to the city of Wuhan. But that is getting ahead of ourselves. That summer, the strike was the party's great weapon, and it needed a government to wield it.

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

On 1 July 1925, the Kuomintang proclaimed a National Government at Guangzhou. The ceremonies were held in public, in the open air, in a park in the city, before thousands of people. It called itself the National Government, though it governed one province, and not all of that. The name was a claim. The party's line was that it spoke for China, and that the warlords in Beijing did not. The new government was a set of councils, in the Soviet style, with no single president, and Borodin sat with its leaders as their adviser. Wang Jingwei was elected chairman of its ruling political council. The idea behind it was the one Sun had taken from Moscow: the party ruled the government, and the government ruled the army. The councils decided, and the generals obeyed. Wang believed in that idea more than anyone. Remember it, because before this episode is over, it will be tested. He was made chairman of the military council as well, which put him over the army. So who was Wang? If you heard last time, you already know him: the revolutionary who as a young man had tried to kill a Qing prince regent with a bomb, and the disciple who read Sun his testament. Wang nearly did not take the job. He at first refused to join the government or the military council, on the ground that ever since 1912 he had resolved never to become a government official. That was a real vow. After the revolution of 1911, Wang and a circle of high minded friends had founded a society whose members swore off, among other things, gambling, concubines, and holding government office. He even announced that he was leaving for the north to resume his work in Beijing, and that he had already booked his passage. The meeting would not hear of it, and he was persuaded to stay. Keep that in mind about Wang. Again and again in this story, when he does not get his way, he books a passage somewhere. One man was not satisfied with the new arrangements: Hu Hanmin. Hu had been with Sun since the revolutionary days in Tokyo in 1905. He was a classical scholar and a fierce journalist, proud, prickly and sure of his own place as Sun's natural successor. When Sun went north, he had appointed Hu to act for him as generalissimo, the title Sun had used as head of the government. Now that post was gone. Liao Zhongkai, the most left wing of the party's senior men, backed by Wang, by the general Xu Chongzhi and by Chiang, had moved to abolish it. They wanted to put an end to Hu's ambitions, which they believed would breed endless intrigue. Hu was handed the foreign ministry instead. He felt it a degradation, and he held a grudge against Wang, his unwilling rival. A proud veteran with a grudge, in a city full of guns and rumours. You can probably guess that this will not end with a polite letter of complaint. And Chiang? Chiang declined a seat on the political council. It was improper, he said, for a soldier to take part in running a government. He had something else in mind. At his suggestion, every military unit in the party's camp, including those of the allied warlords, was now simply to be called the National Revolutionary Army. It began with six corps. The name was meant to say whose army it was: not any general's, but the revolution's. On paper it was one army. In fact, each corps still belonged to the general who had brought it in: Hunanese troops under their own commander, Yunnanese under theirs, Guangdong men under theirs. Only one of them was really Chiang's, the First Corps, built from his own cadets. Liao had been doing the unglamorous work that made all this possible. As finance minister he took back the city's taxes from the hired generals who had been pocketing them, and brought the money under the government's control. By then those cadets had already been tested twice. Early in 1925 they had marched east against Chen Jiongming, the general who had turned on Sun in 1922, and beaten his army. Their Soviet advisers had helped plan that campaign, and in its hardest fight the cadets held their ground against far larger numbers. And in June 1925, when the hired armies from Yunnan and Guangxi tried to seize Guangzhou for themselves, Chiang's cadets had crushed them too. Those were the same mercenary armies that had brought Sun back to the city two years before, and had lived off it ever since. In a few days of fighting, the party was rid of them. The Doll's Army, as its rivals once called it, was no longer a joke. So now you can see the shape of things. Wang chairs everything. Liao runs the money and the left. Hu sulks in the foreign ministry. Xu, the top general, has the biggest army. And Chiang has his cadets. By the autumn, one of those men would be dead, and two of them would be gone.

Liao Zhongkai on his deathbed after being shot, with family around him, 1925
Liao Zhongkai on his deathbed after being shot, with family around him, 1925. The original uploader was Peterpan at Chinese Wikipedia ., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, a quarrel over Sun's words had begun, exactly as you would expect. In the summer of 1925, the party's leading theorist, Dai Jitao, who had headed the political department at Whampoa, published pamphlets arguing that Sun's ideas grew out of China's own Confucian tradition, not out of Marx. The Communists, he wrote, were a party inside the party, loyal to another master, and the Kuomintang would never be whole until they left. Chiang was outraged. Dai and other old friends, he lamented, had become "decrepit and behind the times". The quarrels in Guangzhou did not stay polite. A relative of Hu Hanmin's, Hu Yisheng, had organised a secret society with a single purpose: to raise opposition to Wang Jingwei, Chiang Kai-shek and Liao Zhongkai. He ran a newspaper too, and through it he spread the rumour that the three of them were really Communists. The paper attacked Liao for holding so many offices: minister of finance, head of the party's labour and peasant department, party representative in the army. It predicted that Liao would die soon. It was even blunter about Wang. In his twenty years of on and off party work among the Chinese of Malaya and Singapore, Wang had earned the nickname the Saint, because he had always led an exemplary moral life. The paper never named Wang. It just ran editorials about a certain Saint who had done this or that, and the editorials always ended the same way: "the Saint must die". Anyone who knew Wang's history knew who the Saint was. But since he was never named, and since the editor was a relative of the foreign minister, the government did nothing. Anonymous handbills went round the city openly, urging the murder of Wang, Chiang and Liao. About the middle of August, Wang, Liao and Chiang made their own private inquiries. They found that Hu Yisheng's society was made up of his own followers and of officers from Xu Chongzhi's Guangdong army, and that there was a plot to kill the three of them. Beyond that they learned nothing. They took few precautions. Apart from Chiang now and then, the members of the government went about unguarded, and the small bodyguards they now took on proved quite inadequate. On the morning of 20 August 1925, Liao Zhongkai and his wife, He Xiangning, drove with a colleague, Chen Qiulin, to the headquarters of the party's central executive committee. He Xiangning was a revolutionary in her own right, who had joined Sun's movement in Japan two decades before. She had been one of the witnesses to Sun's will. Six or seven men were waiting for them, hidden between the front door of the building and the inner door. Liao went in first. He was shot in three places, and fell at once. Chen was wounded, but managed to get inside to call for help. A shot was fired at He Xiangning, and missed her. One of Liao's bodyguards was hit, but another shot down one of the assassins, who was taken alive. The rest got away. The news brought the party's leaders running: Wang, Hu Hanmin, Chiang, Xu and Borodin. A man close to Wang recorded the scene. He wrote that "at the look of Liao's body, Wang and Chiang wept bitterly and loudly. So did Borodin." Hu Hanmin and Xu Chongzhi, he noted, did not show any emotion at all. Liao died on the way to the hospital. Chen died the next day. His widow did not retire into mourning. He Xiangning took up his place on the party's left, and became one of its loudest voices. Hold on to her; she has one more scene in this episode. Liao was the man, more than anyone else, who had made the Soviet alliance and the party's work among workers and peasants happen, and he was one of the best financial brains the party had. Ten years later, his body would be laid to rest on Purple Mountain outside Nanjing, close to the tomb of Sun himself. His finance work passed to a young banker trained at Harvard, T. V. Soong, the brother of Sun's widow. Remember that name. Soong would become one of the most powerful men in China. That night Chiang wrote in his diary that the British must have been behind the murder. The captured assassin said that Hong Kong merchants had spent a great deal of money on the plot, though he did not know whether they were Chinese or foreigners. But the trail led much closer to home. A prime suspect was Hu Hanmin's cousin, and he fled Guangzhou before he could be questioned. The party set up a special committee to deal with the crisis, with full powers. The inquiry turned up an alleged plot by conservatives in the party and in Xu's Guangdong army to wipe out the left in Guangzhou, and several of Xu's senior officers were executed. And suddenly Chiang Kai-shek, who when Sun died had not even been on the inner committee, was the junior member of the party's top three. As suspicion closed in, Hu Hanmin sensed the alarm and disappeared through a back door. What to do with him? Wang and Chiang came up with a solution with a certain wit. They sent Hu, the anti-Communist, on a mission to Moscow. The Russians received him politely, and he spent months there, far from Guangzhou, which was the point. Then came Xu Chongzhi, the general whose officers had been in the plot. Xu was no small rival. Chiang had one division, at Guangzhou and Whampoa. Xu had three. On 20 September 1925, Chiang ordered his Whampoa cadets to disarm Xu's three divisions. Xu, finding his position untenable, asked for leave to go to Shanghai, and was allowed to go. Chiang's demand had been that the general, still on paper his superior, leave Guangzhou for three months. So in one month, the murder had taken away the party's left wing leader, and pushed out its senior veteran and its strongest general. And the department Liao had run, for workers and peasants, found no fit successor, while the quarrel inside the labour movement between Communists and Nationalists grew worse after his death. The plot, the investigators said, had been aimed at the left. Instead, the murder only weakened the right. Wang made the mood plain with a slogan. "Those who wish to make revolution should move toward the left!" And the real winner was the man who had wept beside Wang at the body, and who now commanded the only army in Guangzhou that mattered.

The Western Hills meeting at Biyun Temple, 23 November 1925
The Western Hills meeting at Biyun Temple, 23 November 1925. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The party's right wing did not take this lying down. But it was no longer in Guangzhou. In November 1925, a group of the party's old guard gathered in the Western Hills outside Beijing, in the temple where Sun's body lay waiting for its tomb, and held a conference before his coffin that lasted about a fortnight. They called their meeting the fourth plenum of the party's central executive committee. A plenum is a full meeting of a committee, and this was nothing of the sort, only the part of it that agreed with them. They voted to expel the Communists from the Kuomintang, to fire Borodin, and to dissolve the political council in Guangzhou. They charged Wang with putting off the party's second national congress, which Hu Hanmin had promised on his own authority for August, and with surrendering completely to Borodin. And they suspended Wang's membership of the party for six months. Their slogan was the most interesting part. "Ally with Chiang to overthrow Wang". Think about that. Already, the party's right saw Chiang as a man who might be turned against the left, and against the Communists. Remember Sun's promise at the party congress the year before, that if the Communists ever betrayed the party he would be the first to propose their expulsion. Here were veterans of his own party voting for it, before his coffin. Chiang was not interested, or not yet. He was in the field, finishing off the army of Chen Jiongming, the general who had turned on Sun in 1922. Camped at Shantou on the east coast of Guangdong, Chiang heard about the Western Hills conference, and denounced the malcontents and their slogan. In private he blamed the revolution's failures so far on just the sort of arrogance and corrosive jealousies the Western Hills Group had shown. In Guangzhou, the party's central executive committee declared the Western Hills Group an illegal organisation, in secret alliance with Duan Qirui, the chief executive in Beijing. And the left answered with an appeal to the whole party: between revolution and counterrevolution, it said, there was absolutely no neutral ground in the middle. Two of the meeting's moving spirits were veterans who, at the congress of 1924, had disagreed with the turn to Russia, but out of habit obeyed Sun and never dared object in public. Now Sun was in his coffin, and they said so. They went on to set up their own party headquarters in Shanghai, and for a while the Kuomintang had two. Among those old comrades was a quiet veteran named Lin Sen. A few years later, when the party made peace with its right, he would become the head of state of Nationalist China. These men were beaten for now, not finished. In the end, nothing came of the Western Hills conference. In January 1926 the party held its second national congress in Guangzhou, dominated by the left and the Communists. It condemned the Western Hills men, and elected Chiang to the central executive committee for the first time. One of the busiest men in Guangzhou that winter was a young Communist from Hunan named Mao Zedong. Like the other Communists, Mao was also a member of the Kuomintang, and he was standing in for Wang as head of the Nationalists' propaganda department, writing and editing for the party, and taking a growing interest in the peasants. He is one of the people this season follows, and he will come into his own soon enough. Keep an eye on him. The old guard had tried to split Wang from Chiang, and failed. For now, the two men stood together against them. Authority in the party now lay with two men, Wang, the civilian leader, and Chiang, the military chief under him. Both seemed to stand firmly on the left, and they looked like partners. They were partners for about two more months.

Chiang Kai-shek in 1926
Chiang Kai-shek in 1926. Unknown author. Cover credit: International., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By that spring, Guangzhou was tense in a new way. At Whampoa itself, the cadets had split into two camps. The Communists and their friends had their own association of young soldiers, and the cadets on the right had formed a society for the study of Sun's teachings. The two groups argued, and sometimes came to blows. And Chiang had fallen out with the Soviet advisers. He wanted to launch the march north against the warlords soon. Their chief adviser in Guangzhou thought the army was nowhere near ready, said so, and made Chiang feel he was being managed. Chiang began to suspect that the Russians meant to push him aside. In March 1926, Wang fell ill. On 17 March he took to his bed, and for three days he could not attend to his work. Those were the days that changed everything. The trouble began with a gunboat called the Zhongshan. Zhongshan was the name Chinese knew Sun Yat-sen by, and the boat had been renamed in his memory. It was the same gunboat, once called the Yongfeng, on which Sun had hidden in 1922 and Chiang had joined him. Now it belonged to the party's little navy, and its captain was a Communist. His name was Li Zhilong. A man named Ouyang Ge, who had lost his post in the navy's political department when Wang dismissed him, had been spreading a rumour that the Communist who replaced him, Li Zhilong, had ordered the gunboat to manoeuvre against Chiang. After midnight on 18 March, a member of the Communist Party's own central committee, a man from Chiang's home province of Zhejiang, passed Chiang a secret warning: the Communists and the Russians were plotting to oust him. And the Zhongshan made movements, reported to Chiang, that he thought suspicious. On 19 March, as his secretary Chen Lifu told it, Wang twice called to ask about Chiang's plans for the day, and Chiang began to fear a trap. He drove out to a camp of his loyal First Corps, and on the way he resolved to fight. At four in the morning on 20 March 1926, Chiang struck. He put all of Guangzhou under martial law, and arrested the captain of the Zhongshan and about fifty other Communists, among them Zhou Enlai. Zhou was the young Communist who had run the political teaching at Whampoa, under Chiang. Chiang's troops surrounded the homes of the Soviet military advisers. Borodin himself was away in the north that month, and the Russians in Guangzhou woke up to find soldiers at their doors and no one to tell them why. Here the sources disagree, and this time the question is the heart of the story: was there a plot at all? On one side, the gunboat under its Communist commander may really have been part of a plot to kidnap Chiang, as he later charged. The story Chiang told was that the boat was meant to carry him off as a prisoner to Soviet Russia. On the other, Chiang may have decided on his own to strike first, and make his military power in Guangzhou secure. One account goes further, and says Chiang provoked the whole affair himself, by ordering Li Zhilong, the Communist commissar of the Zhongshan, to bring the vessel to the Whampoa academy. Whichever it was, the result was the same. He Xiangning, Liao's widow, burst into Chiang's headquarters. "Have you gone mad?" she asked. "Or do you want to capitulate to imperialism?" And Chiang bent across the desk and wept like a child. Then he backed off, fast. In the afternoon of that same day, he withdrew his troops from the Soviet compound and sent an apology. He released most of the Communists he had detained, Zhou Enlai among them. But he did not take them back. The Communist political officers were pulled out of the army corps Chiang commanded himself, and Zhou Enlai lost his place in it. That afternoon he also went to Wang, and explained that the steps he had taken were not aimed at Wang personally. Wang, from his sickbed, proposed an inquiry into the case of Li Zhilong, the Communist at the centre of the rumour, and Chiang and another senior party man were named to carry it out. He also asked the council for leave, and for someone to act in his place. The council refused, but Wang was bedridden, and the question was left open. Wang did not see it that way. He was the chairman of the military council, and nobody had asked him. To Wang, whether the arrests were needed or not was beside the point. Chiang had gone over the heads of the party and the government. And Wang saw the trap he was in. If Li Zhilong was found guilty, then Wang, as chairman of the military council, was responsible for the whole affair. If Li was innocent, then Chiang had taken drastic action on a mere rumour. For years Wang had fought for one rule: that every important action must first be approved by the party's councils. In Wang's eyes, Chiang's single act had destroyed the whole of his work. A man close to Wang put it this way. "For Wang felt that a great principle was at stake, namely the entire subordination of the military to Party authority." "As soon as the military authorities, however exalted, ceased taking orders from the Military Council, the way to military dictatorship was open." And then Wang did what Wang did. Pleading sudden illness, he left Guangzhou, for Shanghai and then France. His friends said he was truly ill, and that he went because he would not let the Western Hills men set him and Chiang against each other; one of them had to go, and he chose himself. He hid first in a village near Guangzhou, and in May he sailed for France, where he was operated on that September. Whatever his reasons, he left the field to Chiang. The Western Hills Group were delighted. They sent Chiang telegrams congratulating him on what they imagined was his return to sanity. They were premature. On 3 April, Chiang issued a manifesto saying the alliance with Russia was as strong as ever. But he collected his price. The party's executive committee approved everything he had done, including his takeover of Wang's chair at the head of the military council. He demanded a limit of one third on the Communists' seats on the party's central executive committee, and on its provincial and city committees. And he was proclaimed commander in chief of the National Revolutionary Army. Think how far he had come. When Sun died, Chiang had not even been on the party's inner committee. Now, a year later, he commanded its army and held its military council, and the man who had chaired everything was gone. In May the party's central committee went further. Communists could no longer head any of the party's central departments, and their party had to hand over a list of its members who belonged to the Kuomintang. So Mao, among others, gave up his post in the propaganda department. What did Moscow do? It gave way. Stalin was ready to compromise rather than risk Chiang carrying out his threat to break off the alliance. Moscow sent home the advisers Chiang disliked most, sent Borodin back to Guangzhou to smooth things over, and the Communists swallowed it. And so the alliance went on, with Chiang now at the top of it. So was this Chiang's first move against the Communists? You can make the case that it was not. Chiang struck on a rumour and a secret warning, fearing a trap. He apologised the same day. He freed most of his prisoners. The Russian advisers he had quarrelled with were replaced by others, but he kept the alliance, and within weeks he was telling Whampoa that China's revolution was part of the world revolution. And you can make the case that it was. He took the party's top military post from its civilian chairman, cut the Communists' share of the party's committees, and learned that Moscow would bend rather than lose him. Looking back, it is hard to see it any other way. When Chiang staged his half coup in 1926, it proved to be only a dress rehearsal for the real purges a year later. But at the time, nobody could be sure of that. Chiang had wept, and apologised, and let his prisoners go, and kept the Russian alliance. What he had shown, to the Russians and the Communists and to himself, was that the army could move without asking the party, and that nobody would stop it. Sun had left two kinds of power behind: his words, and his soldiers. Wang had the words, and he was on a ship to France. And the Communists? From about a thousand members at the start of 1925, they had grown to some thirty thousand. They were still inside the Nationalist party, and they had just learned exactly how far its general could be trusted. Some of them wanted to hit back, or to leave the alliance altogether. Moscow told them to stay where they were, and keep their heads down. That decision, to stay inside the house of a man who had just shown he could lock the doors, would cost them dearly. Next time: Chiang does what Sun never could. With Wang gone and the army his, he finally gets the war he has been asking for. Before the summer is out, he leads the National Revolutionary Army north out of Guangzhou, to destroy the warlords and unite China by force. And we will catch up with a young Communist named Mao Zedong. That's next time, on The Making of Modern China.

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