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Republic of China - 1919-1928

In 1917 Sun Yat-sen had become commander-in-chief of a rival military government in Guangzhou in collaboration with southern warlords. In October 1919 Sun reestablished the Kuo Min-tang to counter the government in Beijing. The latter, under a succession of warlords, still maintained its facade of legitimacy and its relations with the West. By 1921 Sun had become president of the southern government. He spent his remaining years trying to consolidate his regime and achieve unity with the north. His efforts to obtain aid from the Western democracies were ignored, however, and in 1921 he turned to the Soviet Union, which had recently achieved its own revolution.

David Strand notes that "... the picture of a strong state dominating a weak or compliant society ... distorts the actual relationships between state and society and higher and lower elites prevailing during the Republican period.... the Nationalists added to the factionalism and immobilism of the early Republic a remarkable capacity to lead popular rebellions against themselves and punish natural allies among the monied and propertied classes. Local elites who looked to Republican regimes for authority and guidance were rewarded with contradictory displays of power and impotence, advancing and collapsing government agencies, and support for and attacks on the existing social order. ... Republican regimes, in short, showed "the combination of power and fragility" that distinguishes the contemporary third world state. Power based on modern military organization and bureaucracy was sufficient to intimidate domestic challengers who lacked these assets. Yet both Beijing and Nanjing succumbed to foreign threats and to active and passive resistance by domestic forces. Under these circumstances, local elites, although rarely in a position to challenge higher-level political authority directly, were often able to blunt or parry that power."

At the Washington Naval Conference (1921-1922), attended by the ROC, the world's major powers-the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan among them-agreed to respect China's sovereignty, independence and territorial and administrative integrity; to give it the space necessary to develop a stable government; to uphold equality of commercial opportunity in China for all nations; and to refrain from seeking exclusive privileges there. They separately agreed to respect China's tariff autonomy and to work toward abolishing extraterritorial privileges dating as far back as 1689.

The Soviets sought to befriend the Chinese revolutionists by offering scathing attacks on "Western imperialism." But for political expediency, the Soviet leadership initiated a dual policy of support for both Sun and the newly established Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Soviets hoped for consolidation but were prepared for either side to emerge victorious. In this way the struggle for power in China began between the Nationalists and the Communists.

In 1922 the Kuo Min-tang-warlord alliance in Guangzhou was ruptured, and Sun fled to Shanghai. By then Sun saw the need to seek Soviet support for his cause. In 1923 a joint statement by Sun and a Soviet representative in Shanghai pledged Soviet assistance for China's national unification. Soviet advisers -- the most prominent of whom was an agent of the Comintern, Mikhail Borodin -- began to arrive in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the Kuo Min-tang along the lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CCP was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the Kuo Min-tang, and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their party identities. The CCP was still small at the time, having a membership of 300 in 1922 and only 1,500 by 1925. The Kuo Min-tang in 1922 already had 150,000 members.

Soviet advisers also helped the Nationalists set up a political institute to train propagandists in mass mobilization techniques and in 1923 sent Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi in pinyin), one of Sun's lieutenants from Tongmeng Hui days, for several months' military and political study in Moscow. Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader, was born in Fenghua, Chechiang province on October 31, 1887. Chiang's father was a local merchant who died when Chiang was eight. Having spent a year in a Chinese military academy, in 1907, Chiang went to Tokyo to attend the Japanese Army Military State College. While in Japan, Chiang took part in revolutionary activities led by Sun Yat-sen. After Chiang's return from Moscow in late 1923, he participated in the establishment of the Whampoa (Huangpu in pinyin) Military Academy outside Guangzhou, which was the seat of government under the Kuo Min-tang-CCP alliance. In 1924 Chiang became head of the academy and began the rise to prominence that would make him Sun's successor as head of the Kuo Min-tang and the unifier of all China under the right-wing nationalist government.

Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in Beijing in March 1925, but the Nationalist movement he had helped to initiate was gaining momentum. During the summer of 1925, Chiang, as commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, set out on the long-delayed Northern Expedition against the northern warlords. Within nine months, half of China had been conquered.

By 1926, however, the Kuo Min-tang had divided into left- and right-wing factions, and the Communist bloc within it was also growing. In March 1926, after thwarting a kidnapping attempt against him, Chiang abruptly dismissed his Soviet advisers, imposed restrictions on CCP members' participation in the top leadership, and emerged as the preeminent Kuo Min-tang leader. The Soviet Union, still hoping to prevent a split between Chiang and the CCP, ordered Communist underground activities to facilitate the Northern Expedition, which was finally launched by Chiang from Guangzhou in July 1926.

In early 1927 the Kuo Min-tang-CCP rivalry led to a split in the revolutionary ranks. The CCP and the left wing of the Kuo Min-tang had decided to move the seat of the Nationalist government from Guangzhou to Wuhan. But Chiang, whose Northern Expedition was proving successful, set his forces to destroying the Shanghai CCP apparatus and established an anti-Communist government at Nanjing in April 1927. The Nationalists turned on the Communists, executed many of its leaders, and driving the survivors underground. Chiang unleashed "the Green Gang" mobsters against the growing Communist movement. Thousands of workers in Shanghai were slaughtered. Escaping into the mountains of eastern China, Mao and other Communist leaders began to form peasants and workers into a Red Army guerilla force.

There now were three capitals in China: the internationally recognized warlord regime in Beijing; the Communist and left-wing Kuo Min-tang regime at Wuhan; and the right-wing civilian-military regime at Nanjing, which would remain the Nationalist capital for the next decade.