SDHF Newsletter No.410 The Road to the Greater East Asian War No. 29 Ch.9-1

THE ROAD TO THE GREATER EAST ASIAN WAR
Nakamura Akira, Dokkyo University Professor Emeritus
(English Translation: Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact)
Part 29, Chapter 9: Contending with Attempts to Communize China-I

September 3, 2024

Immediately after the untimely death of Sun Yat-sen, the contradictions inherent in the United Front came to light. As they surfaced, Chiang Kai-shek was gaining prominence and military strength. He was eager to move forward with the Northern Expedition, maintaining that it would help unite China. He prevailed, and the NRA (National Revolutionary Army), with Chiang as its commander in chief, marched out of Guangdong in July 1926, completing its mission two years later, in August 1928, in Beijing. During the expedition NRA troops committed numerous unlawful acts against the persons of Japanese and other foreign residents, as well as their property and interests. The CCP was responsible for most of those crimes. The Manchurian Incident of 1931 was not spur of the moment; the path to it was paved with historical developments, among them violent anti-Japanese acts with telltale signs of communist terrorism.

Once it became clear that the Northern Expedition would come to pass, the CCP did an about-face, prompted by the Comintern. Borodin issued strict orders that the CCP members were to establish and expand the party’s political strength after each NRA victory. NRA campaigns met with spectacular success. In September Nationalist forces occupied Hanyang and then Hankou, and on October 10, Wuhan fell. When Wuhan was defeated, the CCP refused to obey Chiang Kai-shek’s orders to attack Nanchang. Instead, the communists formed an alliance with Tang Shengzhi, the most powerful warlord in the Wuhan region, their objective being to establish Wuhan as a base for CCP and left-wing GMD members. On February 21, 1927 GMD headquarters announced that the government had been moved to Wuhan.

Chiang was dismissed as commander in chief, but he ignored the demotion and continued with his mission. By the waning days of March 1927, his forces had occupied the environs of Shanghai, as well as Hangzhou and Nanjing. Chiang’s forces gradually assembled in Nanjing, and friction between the Nanjing and Wuhan factions intensified.

On March 24 NRA troops entered Nanjing, holding their blue-and-white GMD flag high, and burst into the defenseless Japanese consulate. They plundered the consul’s residence, stealing everything in sight. The women there were forced to undergo innumerable, agonizing ‘physical examinations’. The NRA also looted the British and American consulates, and schools and offices. To rescue their civilians, both nations shelled the city of Nanjing from battleships on the Yangzi for about an hour. But Japanese battleships held back, fearing that their participation would trigger a massacre. A total of seven foreign nationals died in the Nanjing Incident, including one Japanese.

Consul Morioka reported that the attack was a systematic, xenophobic uprising planned and perpetrated by CCP officials and junior officers in the NRA Army, in concert with members of the Nanjing branch of the CCP. On April 6, not long after the Nanjing incident, Zhang Zuolin, now the commandant in Beijing, raided the Soviet Embassy, confiscating documents that revealed communist maneuvering, among them secret directives. It became increasingly clear that the events in Nanjing were part of Stalin’s plan to communize the world. Chiang Kai-shek’s anticommunist sentiments had solidified. On April 12, he conducted a huge anti-CCP purge, and immediately proceeded to establish a government in Nanjing.

In early June, the Comintern sent a secret telegram to Manabendra Roy, a leading Indian communist operating in Hankou, ordering him to organize an armed peasant uprising. Roy showed the telegram to Wang Jingwei and his leftist cronies. Wang, at long last, awakened to the fact that the CCP was planning not the realization of the Three Principles of the People, but a communist revolution.

In July 1927 the Wuhan government announced that the United Front had been dissolved. Cooperation with the CCP ceased, and Borodin and his staff of Soviet political and military advisers were sent packing. Wuhan government head Wang Jingwei proposed uniting the two governments, and in response Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nanjing government, consented and announced the merger. On September 6, an agreement was signed, and the two GMD governments became one, with its seat in Nanjing.

URL: 　 https://www.sdh-fact.com/book-article/2224/
PDF: 　 https://www.sdh-fact.com/CL/Road29E.pdf

MOTEKI Hiromichi, Chairman
Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact