CHAPTER 8: REVOLUTIONARY CHINA AND COMMUNISM
3. CCP CONSPIRACIES; CONFLICT BETWEEN CCP AND GMD
CCP machinations commence
CCP members who joined the GMD upon the formation of the First United Front wasted no timein showing their true colors. They immediately began conspiring to fragment and demolish theGMD. To spread Marxist propaganda, they made use of their weekly Guide magazine, books, andother periodicals. The communists also resorted to provocation and disruption, pinning leftist,rightist, or centrist labels on members of the GMD. To sow dissension and antagonism, they
parroted their slogan, “Lean to the left for the revolution!”
Unsurprisingly, it was Borodin, the GMD’s Soviet advisor, who presided over the CCP’s campaign
to communize the GMD. His evil influence extended even to the Huangpu Military Academy. First
Borodin schemed to corrupt the cadets; then he attempted to gain control of the academy. ChiangKai-shek, then its superintendent, recalled those days in the following:
On January 25, 1925, the Communists sponsored a Young Servicemen’s Club fordual-party elements in both the academy and the armed units. They even spread therumor that I, too, had joined the Communist organization. Cadets in the academyand officers and men in the armed forces, who were loyal to the Three People’s
Principles and to the Kuomintang, formed under the leadership of Chen Cheng anopposition body known as the Society for the Study of Sun Yat-sen-ism.1

Early in 1925, only a year after the inception of the First United Front, the CCP drafted a secretresolution entitled “Tactics for Use on the GMD.” The main tactics are listed below:(1) Regard each GMD department as a CCP organization dedicated to group activity. Make aconcerted effort to use these organizations to achieve the objectives of our party.
(2) Approach left-leaning members of the GMD, such as Wang Jingwei and Liao Zhongkai, withcaution. Indoctrinate them gradually until they become genuine CCP members.
(3) Disrupt ties between powerful individuals and the GMD.
(4) Obstruct the establishment of friendly relations between the GMD and any nation other thanthe USSR.
(5) Create an environment within the GMD and in society at large that is skeptical and critical of
the Three Principles of the People.
(6) Infiltrate society’s organizations; subvert contemporary society.
(7) Destroy GMD programs intended to raise workers’ living standards.
(8) Infiltrate student organizations in Beijing and elsewhere; convert them into organizations thatcan be used for CCP purposes.
One look at this resolution and we are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the First United
Front was an illusion. Sensible GMD members thought the communists had ulterior motives. But
1

Chiang Kai-shek, op. cit., 26.

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Sun Yat-sen never lost faith in the CCP. That explains why he launched the First United Front,
which taught us how devastating the consequences of an optimistic stance about communism canbe. In fact, the blind acceptance of communism was the gravest mistake made by fledgling China.
All the ruinous chaos and wars in the Far East during and after the 1920s can be traced to China’s(or Sun Yat-sen’s) blunders.
Sun Yat-sen dies in Beijing
On November 10, 1924 Sun Yat-sen issued his Manifesto on a Northbound Journey, which calledfor the abrogation of unequal treaties and the holding of a national convention. He had then planned
to travel to Beijing in response to requests from northern warlords Duan Qirui and Zhang Zuolin.
His purpose in going there was to broker peace with the Guangdong military government and to
make plans for the peaceful unification of China. What were his true reasons for embarking onthat journey? According to one GMD member, Sun had at that point already abandoned any hopes
for Guangdong. As the saying goes, Sun Yat-sen had rented a garret to the CCP, but the CCP had
taken over his whole house. Some historians maintain that Sun did awaken to the enormity of hiserror in forming the United Front, but not until communism began to penetrate Guangdong. Sun
decided that to reverse that trend, he would make his northward journey in the hope of forming analliance with the Beijing government. When he departed, he was followed by many anticommunist GMD members, presumably because they agreed with him.2
Sun interrupted his journey from Guangdong to Beijing with a 10-day detour to Japan, during
which he delivered his famous speech on Pan-Asianism at Kobe Girls’ High School.3 By the time
he arrived in Tianjin, in the beginning of December, he was very ill. Sun Yat-sen died in Beijing
on March 12, 1925, at the age of 60, after all available medical means had been exhausted. The
cause of death was liver cancer.
The day before he died, Sun signed two wills drawn up by Wang Jingwei. On his deathbed hestated that he wanted to be buried at Purple Mountain in Nanjing.
One of the two wills was intended for GMD members. It ends with the following:
The Revolution has not yet been successfully concluded. Let all our comrades follow
my writings – The Plans of National Reconstruction, the Fundamentals of National
Reconstruction, and the Manifesto of the First Congress of Representatives – andmake every effort to carry them into effect. Above all, my recent declaration in favorof holding a National Convention of the People of China and abolishing the unequal
treaties should be carried into effect as soon as possible.
This is my last will and testament.4
2

Furukawa Gyōson, Kindai Shina gaikō hiroku (Confidential diplomatic records from modern China) (Tokyo:Uedaya Shoten, 1936).
3https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen%27s_speech_on_Pan-Asianism

4

C. Martin Wilbur, Sun Yat-sen, Frustrated Patriot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 278.

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The other was addressed to his family.
Apart from those two wills, a third was publicized after Sun’s death, both in China and the USSR.
Addressed to the Central Committee of the USSR, it expressed his wishes that the association
between the two nations would last for all eternity. It read, in part:I have charged the party to keep in constant touch with you, and I look withconfidence to the continuance of the support that your Government has heretofore
extended to my country.
In bidding farewell to you, dear comrades, I wish to express the fervent hope thatthe day may soon dawn when the U.S.S.R. will greet, as a friend and ally, a strong
and independent China and the two allies may together advance to victory in thegreat struggle for the liberation of the oppressed peoples of the world.5

This third will emerged suddenly on the day before Sun Yat-sen’s death; it was produced byEugene Chen, a left-leaning GMD member and Sun’s secretary for English-language matters.
Soong Qing-ling (Sun’s wife and elder sister of politician Soong Tse-ven) read it aloud. It waswritten in English, and was apparently drafted by Chen and Borodin. But unlike the other two wills,
it was not examined by Sun’s close associates, nor was it signed. The GMD never authenticated it.
It should be viewed as a malicious Comintern deed intended to capitalize on Sun Yat-sen’s death.
CCP commandeers the “whole house”
At around the time when Sun Yat-sen arrived in Beijing, Feng Ziyou and other anti-communist
GMD members who had traveled there from Guangzhou suddenly made a move. They demandedthat Sun expel communists from the GMD. Additionally, in March 1925 right-wing members like
Xie Chi and Zhang Ji, who had gathered in Beijing, joined with other kindred spirits to form theGMD Comrades’ Club.6 The organization issued a declaration demanding the expulsion of CCP
members from the GMD. Here is an excerpt.
The party operates under a prescribed doctrine and platform. Its members arerequired to work together under the same flag to serve our nation. Nevertheless,while Communist Party members deceive Sun Yat-sen, our leader, swearing thatthey are loyal to the GMD, they use the name of our party to benefit their party, andare destroying the GMD. They accept financial assistance from the USSR, corrupt
China’s youth, and mislead laborers. They are doing their level best to transform theGMD into a communist party, to which end they are making a concerted effort tosabotage our party. They have become puppets of the USSR, who now call for therelinquishment of Outer Mongolia. They disrupt party affairs. They slander the great
majority of our comrades, calling them counterrevolutionaries and traitors to the5Wilbur, op. cit., 279-80.

6C. Martin Wilbur, Documents on Communism, Nationalism, and Soviet Advisors in China, 1918-1927:
Papers Seized in the 1927 Peking Raid (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 160.

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party. The day when the Three Principles of the People and communism walk handin hand will never come.7

The aforementioned CCP resolution, “Tactics for Use on the GMD,” clearly corroborates theclaims made in the preceding excerpt. The anti-communist GMD members in Guangzhou adopted
a stubborn stance against that resolution. Then Wang Jingwei and other left-wing GMD members
who had accompanied Sun Yat-sen to Beijing retaliated swiftly by announcing the expulsion ofFeng Ziyou and 320 others from the GMD. It was amidst this left-right conflict in the party thatSun Yat-sen’s life came to an end.
With Sun’s death, the friction between left and right became especially egregious. Communist
elements viewed it as an excellent opportunity to divide the GMD. Spurred on by advice from theComintern and Borodin, they split the party into three factions: rightists, centrists, and leftists.
They then attempted to take advantage of the resulting internecine strife to gain control of GMD
leadership. Their three-stage strategy was as follows:First stage: To overthrow the Rightists by allying with the Leftists and the middleof the roaders.
Second stage:
To isolate the “New Rightists” from among the Leftists.
Third Stage: After the overthrow of the “New Rightists,” to isolate and attack themiddle of the roaders.8

July 1, 1925 marked the inauguration of the National Government. At Borodin’s urging, WangJingwei was installed as chairman of the State Council. The armed forces were renamed the“National Revolutionary Army.” In December of the same year, Lin Sen and other anticommunists gathered at the Biyun Temple at the foot of the Western Hills in Beijing and issued
an anti-communist resolution. This gathering came to be known as the Western Hills Conference,and those who attended it, the Western Hills Group. The resolution included three main items.
1.

Expulsion of nine CCP members, including Tan Pingshan, Li Dazhao, and Mao Zedong,from the GMD
Dismissal of BorodinSuspension of Wang Jingwei’s GMD membership for six months

2.
3.

The GMD was now in crisis, having split into two: the Western Hills Conference faction and theGuangzhou faction. On January 1, 1926 the Second National Congress of the GMD commenced
in Guangzhou. It was dominated by communist members who held sway over the proceedings.
CCP members introduced a resolution calling for the censure of the Western Hills Group, whichwas adopted. Communist members acquired every important party position. As Chiang lamented,

7Ōkubo, op. cit.

8Furuya Keiji, Chiang Kai-shek: His Life and Times, ed. Chun-ming Chang (New York: St. John’s University,1981), 158.

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“CCP members have taken over almost every leadership organization in the GMD. These parasites
have truly advanced from the garret to the main house.”9There was no official mention of the Three Principles of the People during that congress. The
atmosphere was such that anyone who broached the subject would have been accused of hightreason and immorality.
Ascent of Chiang Kai-shek; preparations for Northern Expedition
Chiang Kai-shek first publicly broached his proposal for the Northern Expedition at the Second
National Congress of the GMD. When the congress ended, Borodin was suddenly recalled toMoscow. His duties as head of the Soviet advisory group were taken over by Kisanka (whose realname was Nikolay Kuibyshev). Kisanka insisted that the Northern Expedition was bound to failand began to make efforts to block it. Why did the CCP and the USSR objection to the expedition?
They were afraid that if it succeeded, Chiang Kai-shek’s popularity and reputation would soar. At
the time the CCP had no army of its own. Therefore, the communists were also worried that theGMD would be the beneficiary of any triumphs from the Northern Expedition. The party wouldthen loom so large that the CCP would have a hard time destroying it. Until it had its own armed
forces, the CCP had to do everything in its power to prevent Chiang’s Northern Expedition fromtaking place.10 The campaign to discredit Chiang, which began after the Second National Congress,
was also a campaign to block the Northern Expedition.
The Zhongshan Incident of March 1926 provided the impetus for Chiang to crack down on theCCP, and strengthened his resolve to conduct the Northern Expedition. The incident itself was acommunist plot whose central figure was Li Zhilong, a CCP member and acting director of theNaval Forces Bureau. The idea was to dispose of Chiang Kai-shek by moving the Zhongshan,supposedly under orders from Chiang Kai-shek, luring Chiang on board, and transporting him tothe USSR. Once he got wind of the conspiracy, Chiang declared martial law, arrested Li and othercommunist elements, and recaptured the Zhongshan. He also terminated Kisanka and some of theother Russian military advisers, and sent them home. In May GMD left-wing leader Wang Jingwei
quietly left Guangzhou and sailed for France, supposedly for medical reasons.
In the wake of the Zhongshan Incident relations between Chiang Kai-shek and both the CCP and
the left wing of the GMD grew precipitously acrimonious. Chiang had foiled the communist plot
to seize Guangzhou and leftist leader Wang had gone abroad. Now backed by the military, Chiang
found his status had risen. He proposed the Northern Expedition to the national government, whichapproved it. Now head of the National Military Council, Chiang was appointed commander inchief in June. Plans for the Northern Expedition moved forward rapidly. On July 1, 1926 theNational Military Council issued the mobilization order. Eight armies comprising 100,000 men
made preparations as they awaited their marching orders.
9Shō Kaiseki (Chiang Kai-shek), Shō Kaiseki hiroku (Confidential records of Chiang Kai-shek) (Tokyo:Sangyō Keizai Shinbunsha, 1974-76).
10

Kayanuma Hiro, Chūgoku kakumei 40 nen (Forty years of revolution in China) (Tokyo: Fukumura Shoten,1954).

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