The Northern Expedition
The Northern Expedition
The Northern Expedition in China caused a showdown between the KMT Left and the KMT Right
Last time, I mentioned that Chen Duxiu, first Chairman of the Communist Party of China, opposed Communists remaining within the Nationalist Party on the eve of the Northern Expedition. He didn’t trust its commander Chiang Kai-shek, known in China as Jiang Jieshi. Mikhail Grusenberg (Borodin), the Comintern representative, had doubts about the timing of the military campaign. He thought that a delay was preferable.
But Jiang (Chiang) pushed ahead and, as Commander-in-Chief, had sufficient authority to do so.
The campaign began in late June 1926 when Guangxi allies moved north into Hunan. One of Jiang’s first moves had been to win them over to his side.
The National Revolutionary Army, led by Chiang, followed. At the beginning, it was far less experienced than the armies of the other warlords who had been fighting amongst themselves for years. Yet, within about a month, by the end of July 1926, Hunan was under the Nationalists’ control. By the end of August, they were further north into Hubei, outside the walled three cities that now make up Wuhan. The Jade Marshal, Wu Peifu had been battling the Christian General further north and had left insufficient troops in Hubei. Wu intervened too late. The cities of Hankou and Hanyang of Wuhan were taken quickly. But Wuchang, where the 1911 Revolution had begun, resisted siege for a few weeks and finally fell on October 10, 1926, on the 15th anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising that was so important in the end of the Qing Dynasty. The important city midway up the Yangzi River was now controlled by the Nationalists. The Northern Expedition had started well.
With the southern end of the Hankou-Beijing railway under the National Revolutionary Army (the NRA) control, Grusenberg recommended following it north to attack the capital.
Chiang Kai-shek rejected the recommendation and instead followed the Yangzi River south and east to first take out Sun Chuanfang, who controlled the provinces of the lower Yangzi. For a while, this seemed like a poor choice as the advance was slow. The defending troops had an advantage of artillery over the attackers, who locals called the Cantonese. Sun had kept his troops protecting his territories, rather than advancing them into the centre of China as Wu Peifu had requested. Sun might have hoped that the Nationalists would weaken as they attacked Wu. He certainly wanted to protect his rear. He feared that if he moved his troops west, away from the coast, that the Japanese allied Manchurian Warlord would occupy the port cities behind him.
The Nationalists under Chiang (Jiang) captured the city of Nanchang, then lost it and then captured it again. That is where Sun was focusing his defending troops. Sun executed Communists in Shanghai, fearing they would ally with the invading army. At this time, the international settlements were afraid of the Bolshevik army headed their way and handed known Communists over to the warlord Sun.
Jiang called in some reserves from the south and KMT troops also advanced north from Guangdong through Fujian province. In February 1927, the Nationalists had captured the beautiful city of Hangzhou, a bit southwest of Shanghai. By March 1927, they had Shanghai too and Sun was forced out of his region. The great and prosperous trading cities along the Pacific coast where in the NRA’s hands.
This had been helped by the defection of the governors of two provinces and Sun’s Commander of the Fleet. They weren’t that loyal to Sun because, although Sun controlled the lower Yangzi, he was not from there. Sun was from Shandong and was considered an outsider. When the first governor defected, Sun had turned his troops to fight this rebellion. He was able to kill the rebellious governor, whose head was put on a spike. But this internal strife by the defenders only helped the attacking Nationalists. By the summer of 1927, the Nationalists could claim all of China south of the Yangzi River. Their numbers had swollen. Despite the fighting, the National Revolutionary Army was now perhaps three times as large as when it had begun, thanks to alliances and recruiting along the way.
In some places, especially Shanghai, citizens did take over control before the Nationalist troops even arrived. This was a case where organized workers helped pave the way for the army through mobilization and propaganda. Zhou Enlai, the future People’s Republic Premier, had been active in Shanghai before the army’s arrival. His band had secured key positions in the city like the police headquarters, an arsenal and the train station.
Communists and Communist friendly writers stressed the role of propaganda teams riding ahead of the army to energize the masses to welcome the army. But at least as often and perhaps more often, the successful troop movements allowed the political organizers to follow them unmolested and then to spread their message. Mostly, they worked symbiotically. Each side, military and political, assisted the other with transportation, spies and communication.
Here is one example written in a book in 1930. “Prior to the arrival of the Kuomintang in the Wuhan center in the fall of 1926, the labor unions in that region were inactive and reactionary, because they had long been under the suppression of the military authorities, especially since the unsuccessful strike of the Peking-Hankow railway workers in 1923. But within three months after the Kuomintang government was established in September 1926, about two hundred unions sprang up in Hankow, Hanyang, and Wuchang, following a series of prolonged and uncompromising strikes in the principal trades and industries there.”
By the Spring of 1927, about 9 months into the Northern Expedition, the Communist Party’s membership had grown by a factor of 57 in the last 2 years. Even if the Communists had been cool on the campaign, they were benefiting from it. In particular, the Communist presence and enthusiastic support for them, could be seen in major cities like Wuhan and Shanghai. By the end of 1926, the Wuhan area had about 300,000 union members. In Shanghai, within 3 weeks of its capture by the Nationalists, 75 new unions were founded.
By early 1927, China’s Communist-led national labour organization, the All China General Union, could claim hundreds of thousands of industrial workers and over a million handicraft workers and shop employees.
Likewise, peasant organizations exploded. Before the Northern Expedition reached Hunan, about 200,000 peasants were part of organizations. By the end of 1926, that number had grown by a factor of 7. It grew further and by February 1927, was ten times as large as before the campaign. Similar growth could be seen in Hubei, where Wuhan is.
By the spring of 1927, it was believed that not fewer than 15 million peasants were organized throughout China into peasant associations. The growth in organized farmer and worker groups was astounding.
Some of the numbers were recorded by Mao Zedong himself. He had followed the army north to his native Hunan province. He was active in its capital of Changsha and then in rural areas. He gave a speech in the provincial capital on December 20, 1926. His introduction said, “Mr. Mao is a leader of the Chinese revolution, and he has paid particular attention to the peasant movement.” In late 1926, Mao wrote about them: “Three hundred and ninety five million people: unite!” In January 1927, he went to the countryside for a month and spent a lot of time in the two counties where his mother and father were born. Mao wrote up a detailed forty-page report. He recounted with pride the land confiscations, humiliations of landlords and violence righting ancient wrongs. It was both passionate and statistical. He wrote that his mother’s birth county was the most radical and had 190,544 peasant association members in 499 village groups. His father’s county was fourth with 120,460 members. Mao summed it up: “If your revolutionary viewpoint is firm and if you have been to the villages to look around, you will undoubtably feel thrilled as never before”. Mao also made a prediction. “In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation".
Strikes became far more common. Workers demanded higher wages. Peasants insisted on lower rents and interest rates. Sometimes, they refused to pay at all. In some cases, they even confiscated land. Landlords could be found in some places being paraded in dunce caps and in other places being executed. Such actions would lead to reactions.
As the Nationalist Armies advanced, some warlords and elites decided it was better to join with Chiang then fight him. They accepted Nationalist claims to be the national government and tried to preserve their authority and dominion under Chiang. This helped with the Northern Expedition’s advance but posed a new threat. How big could the Guomindang’s tent get? Was it big enough to contain nationalists, communists, the Comintern, landlords and independent minded warlords?
Difficult choices were going to have to be made, not only by the KMT, but by Communists too. The Comintern’s instructions to the Communist Party were unhelpful. They were to support “all the economic demands of the peasant masses, but “stay in the Kuomintang and intensify…work in it.” The Soviets prioritized maintaining the alliance with the KMT. Chen Duxiu, the head of the Communist Party, agreed and tried to follow this line.
Mao Zedong disagreed with these compromises. Revolution, he said, “is not inviting guests to dinner.” With respect to mass movements, Mao wrote, “There are three alternatives. To march at the head and lead them? To trail behind them gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in the way and oppose them. -... Every revolutionary party and revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide.” Mao considered fear of mass dynamics and action to be counterrevolutionary. But some of Mao’s other comments would sow fear. “A revolution is not “writing an essay, or painting a picture.” “A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” “Proper limits have to be exceeded in order to right a wrong, or else the wrong cannot be righted.” Mao was explicitly praising violence and condoning excesses.
The Nationalists chose at the end of 1926, the move their capital north from Guangzhou (by Hong Kong) up to Wuhan, closer to the middle of China. This was in part to manage the Hubei warlord Tang Shengzhi, who had recently come over to the Nationalist side. Even before the government could relocate from the south, left-leaning KMT members and Communists formed a provisional government and were exercising power in the party’s name.
The Wuhan government cozied up to the local warlord Tang, were not forwarding funds to Chiang’s army and were contemplating making Tang the new Commander-in-Chief. Of course, that worried Jiang who was battling for control of the lower Yangzi River then.
Chiang began arguing that Nanchang, on the Yangzi, would make a better capital. By then, it was becoming clear that Wuhan was a labour hotspot and that the provisional government there was pro-communist. They had set up holidays and 11 of the 22 days off either celebrated the labor movement, or Communism, like the anniversary of Lenin’s death, Marx’s birthday and the proclamation of the Paris Commune.
The previous leader of the KMT, Wang Jingwei, had now returned to China from Europe, via Moscow. He became active in the Wuhan government. It was beginning to look like a repeat of early 1926, when Wang and the Communists had control of the Nationalist Party.
Once again, Chiang Kai-shek took action. This time, his purpose was not hidden. He came out strongly against the communists. He had already taken a few tentative steps in early 1927, such as executing several Communist labour leaders and dissolving at least two trade union councils. But on April 12, 1927, the gloves came off.
Soldiers and gangsters in Shanghai razed labour group headquarters throughout the city. Some workers and guards fired but were killed or captured. Executions then followed and by nighttime, probably several hundreds had been killed. The next day and for weeks, the white terror continued and expanded to other cities. Communist Party leaders and labour organizers were eliminated and organizations shut down.
Some Communists were able to ride out the crackdown in the International Settlements of Shanghai. Judges there refused to turn over the Communists to Chiang’s government. Zhou Enlai was one of the Communists who managed to escape. I don’t believe the Communist Party of China has ever acknowledged western judges and the rule of law for protecting its members at this moment, when their lives were in danger.
The government in Wuhan branded Chiang as a counterrevolutionary and stripped him of his roles in the KMT. He responded by proclaiming a national government in Nanjing on April 18th, 1927. Chiang had the support of the Guangxi Army, which was anti-communist, as well as business interests in Shanghai. The KMT now had two competing governments. One allied with the Communists in Wuhan. Another anti-communist one in Nanjing.
The Nationalists had split in two, between those favourable and hostile to communism.
Many Communists, including Leon Trotsky in Moscow, believed the Communists needed to leave the Nationalist Party. Trotsky attacked the Comintern, and by extension Stalin, for having stuck with Chiang this long. It had cost many Communists their lives. He argued that the Communist Party needed to go its own way, form soviets, and arm the peasants under the leadership of the workers.
But Stalin and the Comintern said that the Communist Party members should remain within the KMT, even after these purges, and to follow the Wuhan government. It was considered the legitimate authority in China.
Stalin, like other leaders after him, notably Mao, did not like being criticized. Stalin would have his revenge on Trotsky years later for this challenge. Stalin had Trotsky assassinated in Mexico in 1940, where Trotsky had moved after finally leaving the USSR and living in exile abroad. Real or imagined Trotskyites were also purged from the Soviet Union’s Communist Party in the 1930s and many paid with their lives. Years later, Mao’s critics were targeted in China’s Cultural Revolution.
Stalin’s faith in the new Revolutionary Centre of Wuhan was misplaced. Wang Jingwei was never one who relished a fight and the Hubei warlord Tang Shengzhi, who was that capital’s muscle, was not a revolutionary.
Grusenberg and his Comintern colleague MN Roy of India, disagreed whether to continue the Northern Expedition to Beijing or to support an agrarian revolution. Wuhan was unsure. The peasants were acting without their leadership. In Hubei and even more in Hunan, farm workers were canceling loans and rents, fining and imprisoning landlords and their toughs. Sometimes they set up cooperatives, in some places took and divided land. The Wuhan government deplored these “excesses” and tried to restrain them…through speeches and decrees. Wang Jingwei was a gifted speaker and was handsome. But that seems to have been the extent of his political talents.
Wuhan thought it better to deal with Nanjing from a position of strength. So, they continued the Northern Expedition towards Beijing along the Hankou-Beijing railway line. There was fierce fighting as the Wuhan led group approached Zhengzhou. The Manchurian Warlord, Zhang Zuolin,’s troops were resisting fiercely. Just as the Wuhan group was making progress, the Christian Warlord, Feng Yuxiang, who had been receiving Soviet weapons, swept in from Xian in the west and assisted the Nationalists. In the end, Feng controlled that important city and railway junction.
He Jian, was one of the subordinates of the Hunan warlord Tang, who was supporting the left KMT regime in Wuhan. He was against radical agrarian policy since many military officers were landowners. On May 19th, 1927, he warned that labour and peasant movements in Hunan were sabotaging the Northern Expedition. Two days later, his troops brutally followed up. Starting at 11pm, the soldiers went into Communist dominated organizations, including the provincial headquarters of the General Labor Union and Peasant Association and schools and ransacked them and shot or arrested anyone they found in them. Peasant associations were smashed and hundreds killed. The Wuhan government responded by….sending in the warlord Tang. His report said that his own subordinate actions were "animated by a passion for justice."
So, both the anti-communist and the pro-communist regimes were condoning killing revolutionary peasants.
At that moment, the Comintern was meeting in Moscow. They sent the following instructions by telegram. Land was to be confiscated and redistributed to peasants. But land belonging to military officers was to be left alone. The Communist Party was to restrain the peasants from excessive action. The Communist Party should form its own army with 20,000 party members and 50,000 workers and peasants. They should then set up a revolutionary court to try counterrevolutionaries. If this wasn’t difficult enough, they were ordered to acknowledge the leadership of the Wuhan government and avoid ruptures with it. Grusenberg and the others in China realized there was no practical way to follow these orders from Moscow.
MN Roy, the Comintern representative from India, showed the telegram to Wang Jingwei, who made a copy. Now Wang Jingwei, and other KMT officials, were beginning to have doubts about keeping up the alliance with Communists. Maybe it was better to reconcile with Chiang and Nanjing.
Since the Christian Warlord, Feng Yuxiang, controlled the important railway junction and city of Zhengzhou in Henan, about equal distance from Wuhan and Nanjing, both KMT capitals were negotiating with him for support. Feng met with both leadership groups. Now the same Christian Warlord who had received Soviet aid, called on Wuhan to purge Communists and Russians! Wuhan agreed and now both wings of the KMT had rejected the Communists.
This ended the Wuhan government. Borodin and the Russians started their journey home. The KMT left was purged of Communists and now a reunification of the KMT was inevitable. There were still some negotiations and jockeying for positions over the next few months. But the direction was clear. Wang Jingwei publicly admitted he was wrong in allying with the Communists and…left again for Europe. Jiang and the anti-communists had won the ideological battle within the KMT.
Why had this happened to the Communists? To me, the Comintern instructions were an element. They prioritized cooperation with the Nationalists. This handicapped the Communists from building their own army or fully pursuing agrarian reform. Stalin’s instructions were not appropriate for the situation in China. Obeying Moscow meant resisting social revolution. And the Communists and left KMT members allied with warlords, who resisted mass action even more. Finally, those allies of the Communists pushed them out. It was also a factor that Chiang Kai-shek was a more decisive leader than his rival in the KMT Wang Jingwei or the Communist Party leader Chen Duxiu. Chiang understood the tension and in the 1920s, moved on his terms and in his ways. He kept the Communists close when he needed them. And he turned on them when that suited him better.
Zhang Zuolin, the Manchurian Warlord, controlled Beijing at the time and launched his own anti-communist campaign around the same time. In March 1927, Zhang’s troops entered the Soviet embassy in the capital and ransacked it. 36 Chinese there were arrested and later executed by the Manchurian troops. Those Communists killed included Li Dazhao, one of the early intellectual leaders of the party and attendees at the First Congress of the Communist Party. It was Li who had first written about Marxism in the New Youth journal in 1919. He had been selected to head Communist propaganda efforts at the first Congress of the party. Now he was a martyr for the revolution, dead on the orders of the Manchurian Warlord.
Chen Duxiu was removed from Communist Party leadership by a vote of the Emergency Conference of the party. The man who had led the Communist Party of China since its inception, was out after 6 years. He was blamed. Although, in my view, many of those who condemned him had followed the same policies without objection. I believe the party’s problems were partially an over reliance on Moscow and partially because of an excessive focus on Marxist dogma. Neither the Comintern nor Duxiu took Chinese characteristics sufficiently in mind. The Comintern missed the signs that the KMT was becoming anti-communist. Chen Duxiu saw it earlier and wanted to end the United Front when Jiang first took action against Communists in March 1926. But Chen was also an intellectual, well read in Marxist literature and theory. He wasn’t a man of action. He, like his brethren in Moscow, assumed that the urban workers needed to be the leaders of the revolution. Mao Zedong and some others could see that in China, the largest and most revolutionary masses were in the countryside and not in the urban factories.
The Congress of the Communist Party of China that year was held not in China, but in Moscow. A new Chairman of the party was elected. One who was more favourable to mass movements and one who had the Comintern’s support. That was not Mao Zedong. His time would come years later.
Mao Zedong of course survived this anti-communist purge by the KMT. After his work in Hunan province, he had gone to Wuhan. He was an alternative member of the Guomindang Central Committee and as part of the Comintern’s policy, he was asked by the Communist Party to tone down the peasant activities. But once the left KMT turned against the Communists too, he was then ordered to inflame the peasants again. But much had changed. The change in policies, crackdowns and the lack of government support made it much tougher going. In February 1927, he had counted 1,367,727 peasant association members in his province of Hunan. But in August 1927, he was only able to raise a few thousand. In August 1927 he wrote a report saying that the Communists had been mistaken in thinking the Guomindang belonged to others. They should have seized it, he wrote: “it was an empty house waiting for people to move in.” He said that his Hunan report had its effect in Hunan, but not in the center. The Party’s guidance was not revolutionary. “From now on, we should pay the greatest attention to military affairs. We must know that political power is obtained from the barrel of the gun.”
By mid September 1927, Mao and his diminished peasant forces were in eastern Hunan. He hoped to take the provincial capital Changsha and requested that Communist regiments join him. But the idea of a popular uprising in the midst of a crackdown was unrealistic. It failed. The timing was wrong. By early October 1927, Mao was trapped at the border of Hunan and Jiangxi provinces. He began discussions with secret society leaders. They came to an agreement and Mao and his small group moved south to that secret society territory and a mountain hideout.
Mao did learn something from the unsuccessful uprising around the autumn harvest of 1927. In 1927, his policy was to confiscate all land, including that of small landlords and self-sufficient owner cultivators. By 1928, he considered that a mistake and believed the middle peasants were what we might now call the “swing voters” of the rural revolution. The landless peasants and the agricultural workers were definitely revolutionary. The large landowners who made income from rents were definitely counterrevolutionary. It was the intermediate farmers that grew their own food and neither paid rent nor received rent that were intermediate in their politics, Mao observed. He learned that, for success, he needed to convince the middle peasants to side with him. And that meant, not confiscating their land and building an alliance with them. He learned this the hard way in Jiangxi. When all land was confiscated, those middle peasants hid information, sided with the anti-Communist army and tried to convince the poor peasants to fear the Communists. Unlike Chen Duxiu, Mao was paying more attention to experience than to theories in books. We’ll return to Mao Zedong hiding out in the rural mountains next episode or so.
Back to Jiang. After almost a year’s delay in Nanjing, Chiang was finally able to continue his Northern Expedition without internal resistance. It began again on April 9, 1928. The Nationalists crossed into southern Shandong, with the support of the Christian Warlord Feng Yuxiang and the Model Governor Yan Xishan of Shanxi. The Manchurian Warlord Zhang Zuolin resisted and fought hard, but two months later, the KMT had taken Beijing with Yan’s troops. Chiang Kai-shek had fulfilled the Nationalist’s long-held dream of forming a national government. They did the last part without Communist support but using an alliance with some key warlords.
Jiang had tried to avoid foreign interference during the Northern Expedition. Some intrusions on foreign concessions had been made by his troops in Nanjing and Wuhan in 1927. But Jiang and his party’s foreign ministers made clear statements that such incursions were not acceptable and that foreign lives were to be protected.
Japan took no chances and sent troops to Shandong, which it considered in its sphere of influence. It did that before the Nationalists arrived. There were battles between the southern and northern armies, including competing armoured trains. Those had wagons with rotating heavy guns in the middle and armoured cars to protect the commanders. While the National Revolutionary Army was in Shandong, pushing out soldiers affiliated with the warlords Sun Chuanfang and the Shandong General, there were skirmishes with Japanese soldiers who were trying to control rail lines being used by evacuating northern troops. The Japanese were allied with the northern government, since both the Chinese Prime Minister and the Manchurian Warlord received funds from Japan. The exact details of who shot first are murky. Each side had stories. And the Japanese destroyed the Chinese wireless station so only the Japanese version was communicated at the time. What is clear is that there were battles and killings and mistreatment on each side. Japan then occupied a Shandong city for about a year before negotiations finally succeeded in having Japanese troops withdraw. This would not be the last time Jiang had to deal with an aggressive Japan sending troops to China.
Chiang won the national leadership after twice being vulnerable in 1926 and in 1927. But the way he took Beijing was very different than the way he had started the Northern Expedition. The social revolution had been cut halfway along. Now Chiang was closer to warlords than ever before and looking like one himself. He did it as much through diplomacy as by fighting. By convincing other armies that it was better to join him, than to resist him. This seems to be a particular Chinese way of strategy. A quote from Sun Zi (Sun Tzu)’s The Art of War says, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Jiang followed that Chinese Art of War as much as he could during the Northern Expedition.
It's noteworthy that the KMT had serious internal debates during the Northern Expedition, but its members never left the Party to join a warlord outside of the Nationalists. Warlords joined them and allied with them. But the Nationalists never left their Party. Not even when the KMT split in two. The left side and right side always kept their identity as Nationalists, even if they disagreed on the exact social and political meaning of that identity and how best to follow Sun Yat-sen. Then they came back together, in opposition to communism.
Jiang had won the war with a successful two-part Northern Expedition. But would Jiang win the peace?
Please join us next time as we explore the consequences of Jiang’s successful Northern Expedition.
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