Revolution and Civil War, episode 9

The Northern Expedition

In July 1926 Chiang Kai-shek leads the Nationalist army north from Guangzhou to unite China by force, and within months it holds Wuhan, while ahead of it Communist organisers raise peasant associations of millions and Mao Zedong reports that a tornado is rising in the Hunan countryside. The episode follows Chiang and Mao through the expedition's first year, as the government moves to Wuhan, crowds overrun the British concession at Hankou, Zhou Enlai's workers rise in Shanghai, and Wang Jingwei comes home to lead the party's left, and asks whether the alliance could survive its own success. It leans on scholars and the Nationalists' own history, with the British journalist Arthur Ransome as outside witness.

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Transcript

Last time, at four in the morning on the twentieth of March 1926, Chiang Kai-shek put Guangzhou under martial law and arrested the captain of a gunboat and about fifty Communists, Zhou Enlai among them. By that afternoon he had pulled his troops back, sent the Russians an apology and let most of the prisoners go. Wang Jingwei had hoped to rally the generals against him, but they would not come, and Chiang took over his chairmanship of the Military Council. Pleading sudden illness, Wang left for Shanghai and then for France. The coup, it turned out, was only a dress rehearsal. The real thing was a year away. This time, the march north. In one year an army that set out from the far south of China reaches the Yangtze, and the alliance that built it begins to tear itself apart over what to do with the victory. Start with the man leading it. Chiang Kai-shek was thirty eight years old in the summer of 1926. He had trained as an officer in Japan, joined Sun Yat-sen's revolutionaries as a young man, and since 1924 had run the party's military academy at Whampoa, on an island below Guangzhou. The party was the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party that Sun Yat-sen had founded, and its people are the Nationalists. Sun had died the year before, leaving them a cause, a set of Soviet advisers and no single heir. Since 1923 the Nationalists had been in an alliance with Soviet Russia and with China's young Communist Party, whose members joined the Nationalist Party as individuals while keeping a party of their own. That alliance was called the United Front. After the gunboat affair the party's committee refused to punish Chiang and instead entrusted the revolution to him. On the fifth of June he was named commander in chief of the National Revolutionary Army and of the Northern Expedition, and the Western papers began calling him what they had called Sun: the Generalissimo. The Northern Expedition was Sun Yat-sen's old dream: the party's troops marching out of Guangdong to destroy the generals who held the rest of China and unite the country. Since the death of the strongman Yuan Shikai in 1916, China had been carved up by warlords, generals who ruled provinces with their own armies and fought each other for the government in Beijing. It was Wang Jingwei, before he left, who had put the war to the party. One province could not go on feeding so large an army, and as long as the rest of China belonged to the northern militarists, Guangdong was never safe. So in January 1926 the party's council adopted his proposal for war on Wu Peifu and the other northern warlords. Wu Peifu was the general who held the middle of the Yangtze, the great river that cuts China in two. Wang did the diplomacy too. In February he went to Wuzhou, on the Guangxi border, and brought the Guangxi generals, Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi among them, over to the National Government. There too he patched up an old feud that had kept a Hunan general named Tang Shengzhi from coming over, and Tang pledged to fight Wu Peifu. On the twenty fifth of February the government denounced Wu Peifu and Zhang Zuolin, the master of Manchuria, as puppets of the foreign imperialists, and called on the whole nation to rise and overthrow them. It was a declaration of war in all but name. The odds were absurd. The National Revolutionary Army had eighty five thousand soldiers and about sixty thousand rifles. The warlords it was marching against could claim ten times as many troops. Chiang was confident that spirit and commitment would still win the day. Stalin was not. From Moscow he opposed an early start, because he still feared how Japan would react and because he knew the Chinese Communists needed time. Chiang went anyway. He reckoned that a run of early victories would bring China's politicians, intellectuals and businessmen over to him, and that the Russians and the Communists, who thought him a man just out of obscurity, would have no choice but to back him once he had started. He had three corps to do the hard fighting, the First, the Fourth and the Seventh, and all but the First had begun life as warlord armies. His plan was to take Hunan, seize the Wuhan cities three hundred miles to the north on the Yangtze, join hands with Feng Yuxiang, a northern warlord who had turned to the left and was famous for baptising his troops with a hose, and then march on Beijing. A week before the march, the party's council gave Chiang emergency powers for as long as the expedition lasted, on the advice of Mikhail Borodin. 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. The Russians were paying for much of it. Six Soviet ships ran regularly into Guangzhou with oil, weapons and even aircraft in pieces, and the Soviet mission boasted that it acted as the army's general staff. "The Kuomintang as it now exists," its report said, "was created by us". Most Chinese Communists would probably rather have left the Nationalist Party than help its generals conquer China. Their own work was with workers and peasants, not military unification. But in Moscow, China had become part of Stalin's fight with Trotsky for Lenin's place. Stalin held that China's revolution must for now be a national one, led by the Nationalists, and he made the Chinese Communists put the alliance first. Trotsky said the Chinese middle class was too weak and too tied to foreign money to lead anything, and wanted the Communists to push on with a revolution of workers and peasants, even if that meant defying Chiang. On the ninth of July 1926, the Northern Expedition began. How was it supposed to work? Money came first. Chiang got it from Russia and from Guangzhou's revenues, which the party had squeezed so hard that one onlooker said the city looked "like a squeezed lemon," with all the juice and flavour gone. The party sold bonds as well. Then officers. More than seven thousand had graduated from Whampoa by now, and they were the backbone of the army. Then the people. Warlord armies simply seized villagers to carry their supplies. Nationalist officers swore off forced porters, and they did not need them: thousands of striking workers from Shanghai and Guangzhou were released by their strike committees to carry the army's loads. Peasants told the army where the warlord troops were moving and helped it lay traps, and workers wrecked the railways the warlords needed. In return the soldiers were under strict orders not to move into people's homes or take food without paying a fair price. Much of that work among workers and peasants was in Communist hands. And last, the warlords themselves. Chiang was counting on them never uniting against him, and on a good many of them being willing to change sides. The army set out in three prongs. One went up the east coast through Fujian and Zhejiang toward Hangzhou. One went straight north through Jiangxi toward Nanjing. And the third went north through Hunan and Hubei toward Wuhan, on the Yangtze. Women marched with it. They did little of the fighting, but hundreds served as nurses, propagandists, spies and porters, perhaps most of them Hakka women, from a southern people whose women had never bound their feet. One became famous for dragging a wounded soldier off the field under fire. The first door opened before Chiang even arrived. In June, Tang Shengzhi, who commanded the largest division in the army of Hunan's warlord, went over to the Nationalists with his troops, and his men became the army's Eighth Corps. Hunan was in pieces. An American missionary doctor in its capital, Changsha, wrote home that the province was divided into many little kingdoms, each with its own military chief and hordes of loafing soldiers. In fact there were twenty three separate warlord units in Hunan, and as the army advanced, every one of them either withdrew or joined the Kuomintang. Chiang's officers reported there was "no one to fight." On the eleventh of July the National Revolutionary Army marched into Changsha, followed by a long procession of students. That doctor, Phil Greene, a surgeon at the Yale in China hospital in Changsha, got a closer look at the new master of Hunan than he expected. One day in August a summons came from army headquarters: "Send dentist at once to attend the Generalissimo." The hospital's dentist had long since fled to Shanghai, so Greene went himself. After several hours of waiting, in came a man in an ordinary white shirt, gray trousers and Chinese shoes. Greene took him for an orderly, and asked his name. The patient said simply, "Chiang." Greene explained that he was not a dentist, but that he could take the tooth out. "Then take it out," Chiang said. Three days later the Generalissimo opened a new two hundred bed army hospital across the street. Greene let himself hope that the dream was coming true: a sovereign China, its dignity restored, welcoming foreigners who wanted to help. Hold on to Dr Greene. We will see him again before the winter is out, and under rather different circumstances. On the march, Chiang rode a horse or was carried in a sedan chair, because there were almost no trucks. Wherever he was, he rose at five, shadowboxed through the slow old exercises, and breathed deeply. And before each day's problems he asked himself what his heroes would have done: the Confucian statesmen Zeng Guofan and Wang Yangming, and the ancient strategist Sun Tzu. He trusted almost none of his generals, so he managed everything himself, sometimes writing straight to regimental commanders, and once personally doling out four trench mortars, a hundred artillery shells and four hundred hand grenades. With so little to go round, where four mortars went was a political question too. Every allocation made someone jealous. The Russians had their own view of him. A confidential Soviet report that spring called him "by nature a self-conceited, selfloving, reserved and ambitious man, with some ideas of European progress". Handle him well, the report advised, and much could be got from him. Praise him in a delicate manner, meet him as an equal, and never show that you want "to usurp even a particle of his power." As a worker, the report went on, he was little different from other Chinese generals of middling quality. He grew enthusiastic easily and crestfallen just as easily, and lacked coolness and firmness of character. As the army moved, it collected allies. In Fujian and in Zhejiang, local warlords quickly declared for the Kuomintang, and Chiang dutifully made them commanders in the Revolutionary Army. Success bred success. The Nationalist armies grew by taking whole surrendering armies into their ranks, with no time to teach them the party's ideas and not enough money to pay them. It was a habit Chiang would keep all his life: win the war with allies of convenience, and leave the political problems they brought for later. Sun Yat-sen had done the same. It would come back to haunt him.

From Changsha the road ran north to the Yangtze and the prize of central China. In mid August Chiang met Tang Shengzhi and they split the army in two. Tang would take the western column to Wuhan. Chiang himself would lead the eastern column toward Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi. On the seventeenth of August the advance resumed. Wuhan was three cities on the Yangtze: Hankou, the great river port where the foreigners had their concessions, Hanyang with its factories, and Wuchang, the capital of Hubei province, across the water. It sat where the Yangtze, running west to east, crossed the railways running north to Beijing and south to Changsha. Roughly a million and a half people lived there. Whoever held Wuhan held the middle of China. In the battles for the three cities, Chiang was at the front. Li Zongren, the commander of the Seventh Corps and no admirer of his, marvelled that Chiang calmly stood out in exposed places as bullets screamed past them in the dark. On the sixth of September Hanyang fell. On the seventh, Hankou. Wuchang held out longest, and fell only on the tenth of October, Republic Day. Republic Day marked the rising at Wuchang on the tenth of October 1911 that brought down the last dynasty. Fifteen years on, the city fell to the party that claimed that revolution as its own. The campaign against Wu Peifu was over in all but name. Hunan and Hubei were in the Nationalist camp, and Wu Peifu, who had held central China, was the great loser. In Beijing, Zhang Zuolin had taken over the government. He let it be known he wanted to be emperor, offering sacrifices to Confucius in person and having yellow dust sprinkled on the roads he travelled. Yellow was the emperor's colour, and no one else was allowed to use it. Zhang was pleased enough to see his old rival Wu Peifu beaten. When in November he called off a large army that was about to march south, many concluded that he and Chiang had come to some sort of deal. The Nationalists dealt with beaten generals in a new way, and not everyone liked it. The way it had always worked, a Chinese general who saw defeat coming was expected to resign in good time, slip into a foreign concession, and sail for Japan with a decent fortune, and his enemy would let him go, expecting the same courtesy one day himself. Two of Wu Peifu's generals had held Wuchang through a long siege. The Nationalists kept them prisoner and later put them on trial under a code of offences against the revolution. People felt it was a Western innovation, and rather inhuman. The charge was, in effect, that they had not played the game: they had dragged out a pointless siege, prolonged the people's suffering, and got good soldiers killed long after they should have courteously absconded. Four other generals, the Nationalists simply killed, promptly, after little more delay than was needed to give them a polite first class foreign style dinner. That seemed to bother nobody. Down by the river the coolies noticed the change in a different way. At Hankou, after Wu Peifu's defeat, their wages rose from six shillings a month to fourteen, after eight years of hardly moving at all. How had an army outnumbered ten to one done it? Here the sources disagree. Arthur Ransome was a British journalist who had reported the Russian revolution, and who came out to China early in 1927 to write for the Manchester Guardian. In Hankou, he found, you could not talk for five minutes with any member of the Nationalist government without being reminded that it was a revolutionary one. The journalist thought the answer was the people. Rousing the peasants of Guangdong and the workmen of Guangzhou, he wrote, had done far more than military efficiency to carry the army to the river. But the Chinese and Western papers of the day described the help civilians gave the army as unorganized, mostly spontaneous and passive, and on that reading the victory against ten to one odds was above all a military one, won by an army far better disciplined than its enemies. Both things were probably at work. Better trained and better motivated troops beat bigger armies in real battles, and the wages, decent treatment and good name of the Nationalist army helped it recruit as it went. The eastern column had a harder time of it. Sun Chuanfang, who called himself overlord of five provinces on the lower Yangtze and the coast, felt the threat, declared for Wu Peifu, and so the Nationalists declared war on him too. Sun Chuanfang was rich and well armed, and easy victories alternated with heavy defeats. Chiang's own troops did badly. He had very few men under his personal command, chiefly one division that for some reason was always losing, and in the fighting in Jiangxi he himself was nearly captured. By common consent the man who came out best was Zhang Fakui, the Iron General, who won every battle he fought. Tang Shengzhi came next, and Chiang's own troops came last. Still, in November Nanchang fell, and Chiang moved his headquarters there. Fujian fell in December. Casualties ran into the thousands. But by the end of 1926, Chiang held the middle of the Yangtze, and the army paused for the winter. From the Vietnam border north to the Yangtze at Wuhan, and from Sichuan, whose warlords had officially joined the revolution, east to northern Fujian, it was now, at least on paper, Nationalist China. And somewhere in all this, a courtship had begun. In June, back in Guangzhou, Chiang had called on the three Soong sisters, and three days later he went back alone to see the youngest, Soong Mei-ling. Her sister Soong Ching-ling was Sun Yat-sen's widow, and the Soongs were a wealthy family. They had started writing to each other, and after Wuhan fell, she sent him her congratulations.

Now leave the army, and go out ahead of it, into the villages. That summer, while the army marched, a Communist from Hunan named Mao Zedong was in Guangzhou, teaching. Mao was thirty two, the son of a farming family in Hunan who had become a schoolteacher, an organiser, and one of the founders of the Communist Party. At the party's Peasant Movement Training Institute he gave twenty three hours a week on what he called the peasant question. He lectured the Whampoa cadets, took students out into the Guangdong countryside, and preached one idea to anyone who would listen. "The peasant problem is the central problem of the national revolution," he said. If the peasants did not rise against the landlords, the warlords and the foreign powers could never be beaten. He still called for overthrowing the whole landlord class, even though landlords' sons were leading the armies of the Northern Expedition. In November the party sent him to Shanghai to head its new Committee on the Peasant Movement. The countryside he cared about was already on fire. In Hunan, during the first weeks of the expedition, the peasants were passive and did little to help the army. Once the new government was in place, the movement exploded, and it exploded largely because the Communists lit it. Toward the end of 1926, some hundred and ten Communist organisers were working in the Hunan countryside, against only twenty from the Nationalists. As the army moved through, it often took the local militia with it, the armed guards the gentry and landowners paid for. So in many places the old local officials lost control to the new farmer associations the Communists had set up behind the army. The numbers grew like nothing anyone had seen. In July 1926 Hunan's peasant associations had four hundred thousand members. By December they had more than one point three million. Whole villages joined at once, poor clans included. To see why that mattered, you have to know how a Chinese village was divided. The deepest line did not run between landlord and tenant. It ran between those who had land, rich or poor, and those who had none, the ragged men who tramped the roads. Even a poor tenant felt himself a world above them, so landless tenants usually lined up with the landholders against them. Villages were bound together by clan, everyone sharing a surname, and guarded by militia the village leaders paid for. The associations had always barred vagrants and men of no known trade, the rural poor the villagers most feared. Now the bars came down. And many associations were taken over by bandit secret societies, the Red Spears and the Elder Brother Society, the kind of men respectable villagers had always dreaded. A peasant association under Communist control boasted that the out of work were its bravest vanguard. They attacked the oppressing classes, it wrote, "such as wearing high hats, parades, fines of money, fines of food and drink, beating, and settling accounts." Rough men led bands of the poorest farmers in killing landlords and others branded class enemies, and trials of local bullies and evil gentry were held at mass rallies. Banditry spread across the provinces the army held. Poor clans and rich clans fought each other, and in some of those fights whole villages were slaughtered. Peasants seized grain stores, rewrote land contracts by force, and stopped merchants shipping rice out of their districts, so the cities ran short. And Nationalist officers began to complain that their own families were being stripped of their land. In the army's wake, counties and towns formed women's associations. Nationalist and Communist women went out into the countryside urging women to unbind their feet, cut their hair short, divorce bad husbands and go to school. The warlords fought back. As the army moved north, women activists were among those the warlords executed, their heads hung from city walls beside the men's. In Guangdong, the peasant associations of Peng Pai, the best known organiser of peasants in the province, came back to life and even raised militia, and in those districts the old gentry and merchant families fled. Christian missions were attacked and looted. Several of Phil Greene's missionary friends escaped into Changsha with their clothes, their skins and little else. In late January, the American consul in Changsha told the Greenes to slip away at night to a tugboat. With the help of their medical students, the doctor, his wife and their four children made a midnight escape down the river to a British steamer. So much for the hopeful summer. The Communist leadership was frightened. At a stormy meeting in Wuhan on the evening of the thirteenth of December, with Borodin and Moscow's other envoy present, the party's general secretary, Chen Duxiu, warned of an extremely serious danger of a split with the Nationalists. He wanted the class struggle toned down, in town and countryside alike. Workers should be told not to ask too much, and the peasants should fight for lower rents and interest, not for the land itself. That was Moscow's line that autumn, and Chen, whose own views were on the left, was carrying it out. Mao flew into a rage. He spoke up for the delegates from Guangdong and Hunan who wanted to mobilise the masses, and they were voted down. Four days later Mao arrived in Changsha, his home province's capital, for Hunan's first peasant congress, and he was given a hero's welcome. More than three hundred people crowded into a little theatre to hear him, and he was introduced as the leader of the Chinese revolution. But with a Soviet representative sitting on the platform, Mao gave the party line. The time, he said, "for us to overthrow the landlords has not yet come". Rents and interest should come down, but the land would not be taken yet. The Soviet representative was pleased. The Hunanese Communists, who had come to hear a call to share out the land, were plainly disappointed. Meanwhile the generals were moving the other way. Soviet officers in Hunan were alarmed by the attacks of destitute farmers on the gentry and on the army itself, and many corps commanders quietly replaced their Communist political officers, crushed poor farmer risings and handed seized land back.

That was the speech. What Mao did next was another matter. From the fourth of January to the fifth of February 1927 he toured five districts of Hunan, talking to what he called experienced peasants and comrades in the peasant movement, and gathering a mountain of material. He wanted arguments to convince his party's leaders, and if he could, Stalin himself, that the retreat before the Nationalist right was a mistake. He wrote it up in Changsha, in a small wooden house on a hill looking across the Xiang River to Yuelu Mountain, while a nurse looked after the children. His wife, Kaihui, helped him work up the material. Yang Kaihui was the daughter of Mao's old teacher in Changsha. They had married in 1920. The result was his Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. It opens, "I saw and heard many strange things of which I had hitherto been unaware". And then it roars. "In a very short time, several hundred million peasants in China's central, southern and northern provinces will rise like a tornado or tempest", Mao wrote. It would be "a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it." Every revolutionary party, he wrote, would stand before the peasants to be tested, accepted or rejected by them. And then he asked his comrades to choose. "To march at their head and lead them? To stand behind them, gesticulating and criticizing them? Or to stand opposite them and oppose them?" The peasants he meant were the very people the villages had always despised: the men in worn out shoes with broken umbrellas, who gambled and had no standing, and who had now dared to lift their heads and take power. "They tether the bad gentry with ropes, crown them with tall paper hats, and parade them through the villages", he wrote. That, he said, is what people mean by turning things upside down. He did not hide how far it went. Some associations called anyone owning fifty mu of land a local bully, about eight acres, and anyone who wore a scholar's long gown evil gentry. A mu is the Chinese measure of farmland, about a sixth of an acre. Mobs fined the rich, beat men who rode in sedan chairs, slaughtered their neighbours' pigs and ate their grain. In one county, women swarmed into their clan's ancestral temple, sat themselves down and joined in the eating and drinking, while the venerable elders had to let them. Mao's verdict on all of it: it is fine. Give the democratic revolution ten points, he wrote, and the city people and the army had earned three. The other seven belonged to the peasants. Then came the lines he would be remembered for. A revolution, he wrote, "is not like inviting people to dinner, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery". It was an uprising, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. "To put it bluntly, it is necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror in every rural area." To right a wrong, he wrote, you must go past the proper limits. Back in Wuhan, on the sixteenth of February, Mao told the party's Central Committee that every action of the peasants against the landlords was correct. "Even if there are some excesses, they are still correct." What happened to the report next is told two ways. Here the sources disagree. On one telling, it broke with the party's official line, and the party suppressed it. On the other, most of the party's leaders praised it. The party journal printed its first two chapters in March, a Hankou publisher put it out as a pamphlet, and Moscow welcomed it; in May, Bukharin, then Stalin's closest ally, praised it before the Comintern. The Comintern was Moscow's headquarters for the Communist parties of the world, and the Chinese party took its orders from it. Either way, Mao's timing was lucky. While he was out in the villages, Moscow had changed its mind, and Stalin now wanted the land question put at the front of the revolution. And in the countryside the movement burst all bounds. One of the Communist leaders who distrusted Mao's report said the peasant movement had reached a stage of madness. In Changsha the riffraff arrested and fined the son in law of Tan Yankai, the head of the Nationalist government. Even the father of Tang Shengzhi, the general the Wuhan left counted as its bulwark, was persecuted. Tang visited Changsha in February. Over an informal conversation with the Japanese consul, he let slip that the Communists and their strife would be dealt with, their excesses curbed, and their regime ended. The new orders from Moscow were plain. The Chinese Communists were to arm the workers and peasants, turn the village committees into organs of power, and drive the Nationalist right out of its leading posts. The party must not act as a brake on the mass movement. In March a Central Peasant Training Institute opened at Wuchang with Mao among its leaders, and more than eight hundred students, three times as many as in Guangzhou. At a conference in Hankou in late March he was made head of organisation of a new All China Peasant Association, joining peasant unions from seventeen provinces, and there he called for a widespread redistribution of land. Nobody objected. On the second of April the Nationalist Party put him on its Land Committee, to work out how to transfer the land to the peasants. For Mao, that spring, everything seemed to be going his way. In April his wife gave birth to their third son, and he named the boy Anlong, the dragon who reaches the shore of socialism. By the dragon he meant the peasant movement.

While Mao was in the villages, the Nationalist government was on the move. In November the party's leaders voted to move the government and the party's headquarters from Guangzhou to Wuhan, closer to the fighting and among friendly unions. A month later some of the ministers set out, most of them from the party's left, and with them came Borodin. China's size and its awful roads were never clearer. Though they moved as fast as they could, the journalist wrote, "they were nearly a month on the way, travelling all the time. A great part of that journey had to be made on foot." On the first of January 1927, Wuhan was proclaimed the capital of Nationalist China. But it was a capital set up partly against Chiang. Already in October, the party's committee, where the left and the Communists now had the upper hand, had passed resolutions quietly criticising how much power Chiang had gathered into his own hands. The liberals on the party's committee, Soong Ching-ling and her brother T. V. Soong among them, feared that a general with Chiang's prestige would end by making himself a military dictator. In Wuhan, on Borodin's initiative, a joint assembly of party and government took over all power in the Nationalist provinces in mid December. Posters went up everywhere: Increase the Authority of the Party, and Welcome Wang Jingwei's Return to China. Nobody seemed bothered that Wang had not returned. And the old posters reading We Support Commander in Chief Chiang came down. One of the Communist leaders summed up the mood in Wuhan as the beautiful dusk, all left wing slogans and none of the real power. Tan Yankai and the conservative ministers who did not want to go to leftist Wuhan, went to Chiang at Nanchang instead. On the third of January Chiang and his people set up a rival council of their own. Now there were two centres of the revolution: Wuhan, with the left, the Communists and Borodin, and Nanchang, with Chiang and the army. On the eleventh of January, Chiang went to Wuhan himself, to talk the committee into moving to Nanchang. At a banquet given in his honour, Borodin made several biting remarks about dictators and power hungry militarists, and turned the whole room against him. Chiang went back to Nanchang feeling insulted and swore never to set foot in Wuhan again. Almost at once Borodin feared he had gone too far. Soon afterwards he sent word to Li Zongren, suggesting that Li replace Chiang as commander in chief. Li, who loathed the Communists, refused, and very likely told Chiang. Chiang could not sleep. Over the next few days, four times, he wrote that he had thought of killing himself, to arouse the whole country to the danger. In February he asked Moscow to recall Borodin. He even wrote that he had made up his mind to move the government to Wuhan after all, but not while Borodin, whose iniquity he called beyond description, was still in the country. The left had another weapon, and it was a man. For months the left wing of the party, in the unions and in the army, had wanted Wang Jingwei back. People felt that Chiang's authority had taken the place of the party's. Chiang had always blocked it, since Wang's return would mean his own fall from the top. When officers asked to demonstrate for Wang, he refused them. Badly beaten in a counterattack by Sun Chuanfang after Nanchang fell, Chiang asked Zhu Peide, commander of the Third Army, for reinforcements. About to leave for the front, Zhu told him, "I have some parting words to say to you. You must request Wang to return to resume his posts". It hit Chiang like a thunderbolt. Zhu was no friend of Wang's. He was speaking for the rank and file. The Communists took up the cry with a slogan of their own: "Welcome Wang to overthrow Chiang". So Chiang changed course. From January he cabled Wang again and again to come home, and even threatened to resign if he stayed away much longer. He wanted Wang back to win him the party and the army, and to drive Borodin out. He was not yet strong enough to defy the Wuhan committee openly. That would have to wait until Shanghai was his. So on the seventh of March he called on every party member to support the committee. "The history of the Revolution is not made up of stories of personal glories," he declared. At Lushan, a resort high above the Yangtze, the anti Communist Nationalists met and agreed to Chiang's plan: not north to link up with Feng Yuxiang, as Wuhan and the Russians wanted, but east, to Shanghai and Nanjing, for a capital, for Shanghai's money, and probably for foreign recognition. On the tenth of March the party's committee met at Wuhan. Chiang refused to come. It stripped him of all his top party posts, and it offered two ministries to Communists. The idea was Borodin's: to get Wang back but strip him of his powers, so that he could be used as a tool to oust Chiang. As soon as word came that Wang was on his way home, the meeting abolished the chairmanships he had held and put committees in their place. A Communist became minister of the peasantry, in a post made specially for him, and a strike and trade union leader from Hong Kong became minister of labour. And it went further. Right after the meeting, the Wuhan leaders sent a secret order to one of their generals, Cheng Qian, to arrest Chiang Kai-shek at the first opportunity. Chiang probably heard of it. It was very likely then that he made up his mind that the Communists would have to be purged.

Meanwhile Wuhan had taken on the British Empire, and won. The man in the middle of it was the Nationalists' foreign minister, Eugene Chen. Eugene Chen had been born in Trinidad, in the British West Indies, and trained there as a lawyer. English was his first language, and he spoke little Chinese. He had argued China's case for revising the treaties at the Paris Peace Conference, been kidnapped by northern troops in 1925 and nearly shot, and become foreign minister in 1926. He had come north with the government after Hankou was taken. A concession was a district of a Chinese city leased to a foreign power and run under that power's laws, with its own police. Hankou had several. The British concession at Hankou ran right up to the Chinese city. Just outside it stood the customs house, with high steps that made a perfect platform for orators. For weeks the concessions had made a show of being outposts in hostile country, with sandbags, barbed wire and armed men behind them. In the first days of January 1927, a big meeting at the customs house spilled over into concession ground. British marines were landed. Stones were thrown at them. No shots were fired, but in a scuffle two Chinese were bayoneted, and one marine was stabbed with his own bayonet after the crowd took it from him. Many men were hurt by stones. The crowd grew violently excited, and only the marines' withdrawal stopped a serious fight. The British consul general handed the job of keeping order to the Chinese authorities, and the crowd tore down the hated barricades, ripped the metal plaque off the war memorial, and wandered aimlessly through the concession. On the fourth of January the Nationalist government took control of the British concession. The women and children were evacuated, and in the end the foreigners went down the river to Shanghai. Each side told its own story. The journalist reached Hankou while the talks over the concession were still going on, and set out to find what had really happened. "The Chinese spoke of a massacre by British marines", he wrote. "There was no massacre. Not one man was killed." The British spoke of an organised attack, he went on, but "the chief characteristic of the attack was that it was utterly without organisation, in that it had excitement without objective." He thought the marines had behaved with a restraint impossible to admire too much, and the consul general had been wise not to declare war on China with a handful of marines and some volunteers. Wuhan's own statement, issued by Eugene Chen later in January, told it the other way. The trouble came, it said, from "the landing of armed British marines under circumstances which inevitably must act as provocation," which had brought a bloody clash with a crowd of Chinese civilians. What struck the journalist most was how fast things calmed down. The concession was quiet after the seventh of January, and Englishmen walked about without the slightest trouble. But the British community stayed shut up in the Asiatic Petroleum Company's building until near the end of the month. Chinese who knew English played on the building's initials and called it the Admiral's Prison Compound. By the time he came, crowds with paper lanterns were following dragons through the streets. The foreigners played golf, the races were run, and the cinemas were packed. The most exciting event of each day was a Nationalist pilot looping the loop low over the town, giving the whole population a crick in the neck. He was, the journalist found, a Russian. Hankou's employers, British, American, Japanese and Chinese alike, were struggling in a snowstorm of demands from the new unions, whose members were intoxicated to find they could force wages up. Meanwhile Hankou's workers were discovering what a union could do. Among the newest were the laundrymen, who left a polite letter in English at the door of every room in his hotel. "We organize a association which will do you no harm except asking you a favour", it read. The favour came to about a fifty per cent rise. The journalist, who did not live in Hankou, said he was ready to pay it, if only on account of the washing man's politeness. The real business was done across a table. Through January, Eugene Chen negotiated with the British diplomat Owen O'Malley, and Borodin proved very useful in getting China the best terms the British would give. The journalist met Chen during the talks: a man of forty nine, small and slight, with longish dark hair, a small black moustache, spectacles and a quick, rather nervous manner. Chen had no patience with anyone who pretended Beijing still had a real government. It was fictitious, he said, with no power but what generals lent it, generals who would not dream of obeying it. And he insisted that being against imperialism did not mean being against the British. "We are against British institutions in China that are unjust to us," he said, "not against Englishmen as such in China or elsewhere." In that same statement, on the twenty second of January, Chen set out the government's line. The protection of foreigners in China could no longer rest on foreign bayonets and machine guns, because Chinese nationalism had its own weapon, the economic one, more powerful than any weapon of war the foreigners had. Yet the government did not want war with the powers. It would rather settle everything by negotiation. The result was an agreement under which Britain handed back its concessions at Hankou and at Jiujiang, further down the river. In Hankou, the news was received quietly. All but a few diehards in Shanghai, the journalist found, saw that a change between the British and the Chinese had come. The British businessmen, he wrote, had been "jerked in a few months from the Victorian era to the present day." They were a little breathless, but already admitting it would have been futile to stand against the tide. They were not the only ones looking at Shanghai. On the twenty third of January Britain sent an expeditionary force there, and it arrived in February.

Shanghai was the richest city in China and the biggest prize on the river. Its heart was the International Settlement and the French Concession, run by foreigners. Around them lay the Chinese city, held by Sun Chuanfang's troops, with the largest industrial working class in the country. The Communist leader in the city was Zhou Enlai. Zhou Enlai was not yet thirty. He came from an old family of officials, had studied in Japan and in France, and had run the political teaching at the Whampoa academy. On the nineteenth of February 1927, Shanghai's workers went out on a general strike under Communist leadership. Within three days the strike had become an armed rising against Sun Chuanfang. It was crushed two days later. But it seemed to everyone that the whole country had turned sharply to the left. Zhou led a series of massive strikes through February and March that wore the warlord regime down. The second rising came as the Nationalist army closed in. On the twenty first of March, some eight hundred thousand workers struck the entire city. Thousands of armed workers began patrolling the city's key buildings. They seized the police stations, the military depots and the railway stations. Many of the warlord's troops simply walked away from their posts. But there was fierce street fighting, and at least two hundred workers were killed. This time it worked. The rising brought down Sun Chuanfang's rule in Shanghai. The rebels were careful not to harm the foreigners. And it had help from some unlikely friends. The Communists, the Nationalists, the merchants and the Green Gang all worked together. The Green Gang was the largest criminal organisation in the city. It gave money, spied on the warlords, and protected activists who needed to work inside the foreign concessions. On the evening of the twenty second of March, the National Revolutionary Army marched into a Shanghai that the workers' militias had already freed. At the end of March a new city government, made up of all these groups, took over the Chinese city.

So who had taken Shanghai? It depends where you were standing. On the twenty second of March, the warlord garrison commander went over to the Kuomintang, and so did the Fujian fleet, which gave Chiang control of the Yangtze. The troops of the Nationalist general Bai Chongxi marched into the city that same day. Shanghai had been won for Chiang Kai-shek without his army firing a shot. Next day, Nanjing fell too. There it went wrong. Nationalist soldiers looted the foreign consulates and killed several foreigners. British and American warships answered by shelling the city. Chiang reached Nanjing on the twenty fourth on one of his newly acquired warships. The general holding it was Cheng Qian, the man Wuhan had ordered to arrest him. Cheng ignored the order, and almost certainly told Chiang about it. Chiang had stayed at Nanchang through most of the campaign. Now he rushed east to direct the attack on Shanghai himself. The reason lay in his own camp. The armies that had won the big victories were not his. He had almost no troops of his own, and he had no foothold in Hunan, Hubei or Jiangxi. But he was a native of Zhejiang and knew Shanghai. He could count on Zhejiang's local forces and on Shanghai's secret societies, which he had known in his younger days in the city. The provinces Sun Chuanfang had ruled had heard little of the party's propaganda. There, he had only to speak against Communism to bring the gentry and the rich merchants over, and he expected little trouble from the workers. Through the first three months of 1927, Chiang talked with Shanghai's leading businessmen, the Green Gang and men from the foreign firms, trying to calm the foreign powers, raise money from Chinese merchants, and win his fight with the party's left. When he came back to Shanghai from Nanjing, he found workers and students rallying every day to demand that the foreign concessions be seized. Many Westerners doubted he had either the will or the power to control them. The alliance had been enormously successful, but one side wanted to unify the nation, and the other wanted a revolution of workers and peasants and called the businessmen today's ally and tomorrow's enemy. Without Moscow acting as marriage broker, the two would never have joined at all. The Communists had thrown themselves into organising labour, and in China, the journalist wrote, joining that party meant less signing up to Marx or Lenin than "proclamation of a readiness to do or die." Now the bankers and businessmen who had backed the Nationalists against the warlords were crying out that labour leaders were hardly better for business than warlords. The British settlers in Shanghai were not reassured. They armed themselves against what they feared would be leftist marauders, and some of them called Chiang "the little red general." His entry into Shanghai, at the end of March, marked the beginning of the end of the United Front.

And then the man everyone had been asking for came home. Wang Jingwei was forty three. As a young revolutionary in 1910 he had tried to blow up the Qing prince regent, and had been sentenced to life in prison for it. He had been Sun Yat-sen's closest disciple, and had taken down his last testament at his deathbed in Beijing. After Chiang's coup in Guangzhou he had left for France, where he had an operation and meant to take a long rest, thinking that with Wuhan taken all was well in China. Then the news from China turned bad, and in December he set out for home overland through Siberia. In Berlin he fell ill again and was laid up for two months. In Moscow the Soviet leaders had helped him on his way, hoping he would strengthen the left of the Nationalist Party. On the first of April 1927 he landed in Shanghai, where the public gave him a warm welcome, and he stayed at the house of the finance minister, T. V. Soong. Chiang called on him at once, with Wu Zhihui and a few others. Wu Zhihui was an old anarchist, a revolutionary since before 1911, and one of the party's most respected elders. The Wuhan committee had attacked him, Chiang told Wang, and he could not work with it, and wanted to separate. He said he was ready to take Wang's orders. But he asked Wang to back two things. Keep the friendship with Russia, but send Borodin back to Moscow. And stop letting Communists into the party, since they were doing all they could to destroy it. Most of the Nationalist leaders in the city, Chiang among them, wanted Wang to stay in Shanghai, take the lead of a united Kuomintang, expel Borodin and restrain the Communists. Wang asked how that could be done, when the committee and the government were at Wuhan. Chiang's answer was blunt: "The Central Executive Committee and the National Government are now controlled by the Communist Party." He was not against them, he said, "but we only want to expel Borodin and the Communists." How, Wang asked again. Wu Zhihui answered for Chiang: let the party's supervisory committee decide it, and tell the generals to carry it out. Wang objected that by the party's constitution that committee could only supervise. Its decisions had to go through the executive committee first. Wu Zhihui's answer was short: "Yes, but we don't want any constitutions." To Wang, that was the whole danger. Let a committee of elders work hand in hand with the generals, around the party's own organs, and the road lay open to a military dictatorship. They argued for three days and agreed on nothing. On the third of April, without asking Wang, Chiang sent a telegram to all the armies announcing that Wang was back and would now run all political and party affairs, and that he himself would obey Wang absolutely. Wang felt uncomfortable. Chiang had no right, he thought, to hand him politics and the party while keeping the army for himself. Wang did not rule out a break with the Communists one day. But it had to be prepared with care and decided properly, by a full meeting of the party's executive committee. Then Chen Duxiu, the Communist leader, arrived in Shanghai. Wang asked him straight out whether the Communists meant to overthrow the Kuomintang, and Chen denied it. On the fifth of April the two men published a joint statement denying that the Communists meant to subvert the army or destroy the Nationalist Party. They admitted the two parties wanted different things in the end, but for now, they said, the front must hold against the militarists and the imperialists. Wang declined to stay. A matter so serious, he said, needed a full meeting of the executive committee at Wuhan. On the sixth of April, in Beijing, Zhang Zuolin's police stormed the Soviet embassy, arrested Russian diplomats and Chinese Communists, and carried off truckloads of documents. Among those taken was Li Dazhao. Zhang had him strangled, with nineteen others. Li Dazhao was a Beijing professor who had founded the Communist Party alongside Chen Duxiu. And then Wang and Chen Duxiu boarded a steamer in secret and sailed for Wuhan. Had he stayed and moved against the Communists himself, he might well have pulled most of the left back into the fold, and Chiang's rise to lead the party might have been put off for a long time, perhaps for good. Instead, he left Chiang the leader of every anti Communist force in the army and the party. On the tenth of April Wang reached Wuhan. In Shanghai, two days later, at four in the morning, the guns began. Next time: Chiang's reckoning with the Communists, the white terror, and a revolution with two governments, each claiming to be Sun Yat-sen's true heir.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 159-161, 161-162, 165-166, 166-167, 167-168, 170-171, 171-172, 172-174, 174-175, 175-176, 176-178
• Arthur Ransome, The Chinese Puzzle (1927), pp. 49-51, 51-53, 53-56, 72-74, 89-92, 122-124, 162-165, https://archive.org/details/chinesepuzzle00rans
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 54-55, 55-56, 56-58, 58-60, 60-61, 61-63, 63-65, 65-66
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 229-231, 232-234, 234-235, 236-237, 237-238, 238-239, 241-242, 275-277
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)
• T'ang Leang-li, The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution (1930), pp. 239-241, 254-256, 256-258, 260-262, 262-264, 264-266, 266-268, 274-276, 335-337, 368-370, https://archive.org/details/innerhistoryofch0000unse