China in Disintegration by James E. Sheridan

Author:James E. Sheridan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1975-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The End of the Coalition

The expansion and militance of the mass movement frightened landlords, businessmen, and moderate and conservative politicians and military officers. Officers of the National Revolutionary Army, many of whom came from well-to-do rural families, found reports of rural disorder disquieting and ominous. And this fear of the mass movement nourished fear and suspicion of the Communist Party.

The burgeoning mass movement presented the Communists with a dilemma. If they encouraged the peasants, and provided them with leadership and support, it would doubtless bring to an end the Communist coalition with the Kuomintang, to whose members such radicalism was unacceptable. If, on the other hand, they tried to maintain the coalition, they would be in the awkward position of attempting to restrain a revolutionary movement that they had earlier encouraged. Advice from the Comintern was not very helpful because it advised doing both: “[support] all the economic demands of the peasant masses,” but “stay in the Kuomintang and intensify … work in it.” 10 But despite what Comintern directives said, the real thrust of Russian desires was to maintain the KuomintangComnmunist coalition, and to that end the Communists deplored peasant “excesses” and generally tried to hold the agrarian revolution in check.

Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek again came in conflict with the Kuomintang Left, which the Communists supported. After the capture of Wuhan in the fall of 1926, party leaders, including Chiang, decided to shift the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee from Canton to Wuhan to create a political center of gravity sufficiently strong to preclude unilateral action by T’ang Sheng-chih, the Hupei warlord recently turned revolutionary Kuomintang general. Also, a central rather than a southern location seemed more appropriate for a government that purported to govern the entire nation, and expected soon to have the power to do precisely that. In December a Joint Council composed of Communists and leftist Kuomintang members of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee and the Nationalist Government was formed at Wuhan. It was to make preparations for the arrival of the government from the south, and to exercise governmental authority while the main body of the government was making the long move.

By the beginning of 1927, however, Chiang was having second thoughts about Wuhan as the revolutionary capital. Tang Shengchih not only seemed to have a good deal of influence with the Joint Council, but had shown signs of hoping to replace him as commander in chief. The leftist political cast of the council made it suspect to Chiang in any event, and this feeling was strengthened by the fact that the council seemed to be uncooperative about providing money and supplies for his army. And if a left-dominated Joint Council, cozying up to a rival general, were not enough to deter the switch to Wuhan, it was also true that Hunan-Hupei was proving to be the heart of the booming mass movement. Whether or not the choice of Wuhan as a capital was originally related to plans to continue the Northern Expedition from Hankow north along

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.