During the Northern Expedition the outnumbered southern forces were infused with revolutionary spirit and fought with great élan. They were assisted by propaganda corps, which subverted enemy troops and agitated among the populace in the enemy’s rear. Soviet military advisers accompanied most of the divisions, and Soviet pilots reconnoitered the enemy positions. The army was well-financed at the initial stages because of fiscal reforms in Guangdong during the previous year, and many enemy divisions and brigades were bought over. Within two months the National Revolutionary Army gained control of Hunan and Hubei, and by the end of the year it had taken Jiangxi and Fujian. The Nationalist government moved its central headquarters from Guangzhou to the Wuhan cities of the Yangtze. By early spring of 1927, revolutionary forces were poised to attack Nanjing and Shanghai.

The political situation, however, was unstable. Hunan and Hubei were swept by a revolt marked by violence against landlords and other rural power holders. Business in the industrial and commercial center of the middle Yangtze—the Wuhan cities—was nearly paralyzed by a wave of strikes. Communists and KMT leftists led this social revolution. In January Chinese crowds seized the British concessions in Hankou and Jiujiang. The British government had just adopted a conciliatory policy toward China, and it acquiesced in these seizures, but it was readying an expeditionary force to protect its more important position in Shanghai. Foreigners and many upper-class Chinese fled from the provinces under Nationalist control. The northern armies began to form an alliance against the southerners.

Conservative Nationalist leaders in Shanghai mobilized against the headquarters in Wuhan. There was a deep rift within the revolutionary camp itself; the leftists at Wuhan, guided by Borodin, pitted themselves against Chiang and his more conservative military supporters, who were also laying plans against the leftists. Resolutions of the CCP’s Central Committee in January 1927 showed that committee members were apprehensive about a counterrevolutionary tide against their party, Soviet Russia, and the revolutionary farmers and workers’ movement; they feared a coalition within the KMT and its possible alliance with the imperialist powers. The central leadership resolved to check revolutionary excesses and give all support to the KMT leadership at Wuhan. Others within the CCP, notably Mao Zedong, disagreed; they believed the mass revolution should be encouraged to run its course.

Expulsion of communists from the KMT

The climax of the conflict came after Nationalist armies had taken Shanghai and Nanjing in March. Nanjing was captured on March 23 as Beiyang troops evacuated it, and the following morning some Nationalist soldiers looted foreign properties, attacked the British, U.S., and Japanese consulates, and killed several foreigners. That afternoon, British and U.S. warships on the Yangtze fired into the concession area, allowing some of the foreign nationals to flee, and others subsequently were evacuated peacefully.

In Shanghai a general strike led by communists aroused fears that Chinese might seize the International Settlement and the French concession, now guarded by a large international expeditionary force. Conservative Nationalist leaders, some army commanders, and Chinese business leaders in Shanghai encouraged Chiang to expel the communists and suppress the Shanghai General Labor Union. On April 12–13, gangsters and troops bloodily suppressed the guards of the General Labor Union, arrested many communists, and executed large numbers. Similar suppressions were carried out in Guangzhou, Nanjing, Nanchang, Fuzhou, and other cities under military forces that accepted Chiang’s instructions. The KMT conservatives then established a rival Nationalist government in Nanjing.

Wang Ching-wei had returned to China via the Soviet Union. Arriving in Shanghai, he refused to participate in the expulsions and went secretly to Wuhan, where he again headed the government. In July, however, the leftist Nationalist leaders in Wuhan, having learned of a directive by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Borodin to arrange for radicals to capture control of the government, decided to expel the communists and compel the Soviet advisers to leave. The leftist government thereby lost important bases of support; furthermore, it was ringed by hostile forces and cut off from access to the sea, and it soon disintegrated.

The CCP went into revolt. Using its influence in the Cantonese army of Zhang Fakui (Chang Fa-k’uei), it staged an uprising at Nanchang on August 1 and in October attempted the “Autumn Harvest” uprising in several central provinces. Both efforts failed. In December communist leaders in Guangzhou started a revolt there, capturing the city with much bloodshed, arson, and looting; this uprising was quickly suppressed, also with much slaughter. Between April and December 1927 the CCP lost most of its membership by death and defection. A few score leaders and some scattered military bands then began the process of creating military bases in the mountains and plains of central China, remote from centers of Nationalist power.

The now-more-conservative KMT resumed its Northern Expedition in the spring of 1928 with a reorganized National Revolutionary Army. In the drive on Beijing it was joined by the National People’s Army under Feng Yuxiang, part of the Guangxi army, and the Shanxi army of Yan Xishan. In early June they captured Beijing, from which Zhang Zuolin and the Fengtian army withdrew for Manchuria. As his train neared Mukden (present-day Shenyang), Zhang died in an explosion arranged by a few Japanese officers without the knowledge of the Japanese government. Japan did not permit the Nationalist armies to pursue the Fengtian army into Manchuria, hoping to keep that area out of KMT control. By the end of the Northern Expedition, the major warlords had been defeated by the Nationalists, whose armies now possessed the cities and railways of eastern China. On October 10 the Nationalists formally established a reorganized National Government of the Republic of China, with its capital at Nanjing; Beijing was renamed Beiping (Pei-p’ing), “Northern Peace.”