page_title: Northern Expedition
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Northern Expedition / Aftermath
caption_attribution_description: 中文: 1928年7月6日，国民党领袖在北京西山碧云寺孙中山陵寝安置处举行孙中山的祭祀典礼，以北伐完成告中山先生在天之灵。前排右至左为何成浚、张作宝、陈调元、蒋介石、吴稚晖、阎锡山、马福祥、马四达、白崇禧。 English: July 6, 1928, the Kuomintang leader Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Beijing Xishan Temple of Azure Clouds placed at the sacrificial ceremony held to Sun Yat-sen, to report completion of the Northern Expedition to Dr. Sun's soul. From right to left is Cheng Jun, Zhang Zuobao, Chen Diaoyuan, w:Chiang Kaishek, Wu Chih-hui, w:Yen Hsi-shan, w:Ma Fuxiang, Ma Sida, w:Bai Chongxi.
context_page_description: The Northern Expedition was a military campaign launched by the National Revolutionary Army of the Kuomintang, also known as the "Chinese Nationalist Party", against the Beiyang government and other regional warlords in 1926. The purpose of the campaign was to reunify China, which had become fragmented in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1911. The expedition was led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and was divided into two phases. The first phase ended in a 1927 political split between two factions of the KMT: the right-leaning Nanjing faction, led by Chiang, and the left-leaning faction in Wuhan, led by Wang Jingwei. The split was partially motivated by Chiang's purging of communists within the KMT, which marked the end of the First United Front. In an effort to mend this schism, Chiang Kai-shek stepped down as the commander of the NRA in August 1927, and went into exile in Japan.
  The second phase of the Expedition began in January 1928, when Chiang resumed command. By April 1928, the nationalist forces had advanced to the Yellow River.
context_section_description: Following the capture of Beijing, Chiang and his administration moved quickly to reorganise the government for peacetime. In July, he and the leaders of the four collective armies met at Beijing to discuss the demobilisation and disarmament of the roughly 2.2 million troops that had come to be part of the NRA. Chiang desired to reduce the size of the army by half, so as to free up government monies for domestic development. The lack of unity in the new administration quickly became apparent, and on 14 July, Feng Yuxiang left Beijing. A general meeting of the KMT was held in Nanjing from 8–14 August. At this meeting, also attended by non-KMT members Feng and Yan Xishan, the primary topic discussion was that of centralisation. Chiang desired to take the power that had been executed through various provincial entities and concentrate it in the central government, in an effort to curtail the provincialist tendencies of the warlord era. Minister of Finance T. V. Soong called for all revenues to be centralised in the national treasury. In the end, though, it was recognised that real centralisation could only occur if the various commanders, the former warlords, relinquished their financial and military power to the national government. While these principles were nominally agreed to by the KMT membership, their exercise in practice was far from assured.
  The new peacetime Nanjing government was launched on 10 October 1928, the seventeenth anniversary of the start of the Xinhai Revolution, with Chiang at its head. The country, however, remained de facto divided into five realms controlled by military leaders. The Nanjing faction controlled the area around Nanjing and Shanghai, while the Guangxi clique controlled Hubei, Hunan, and Guangxi. Feng Yuxiang's Guominjun continued to control Shaanxi, Henan, and parts of Shantung and Zhili, while Yan Xishan controlled Shanxi, Beijing, and the area around Tianjin. Zhang Xueliang continued to control Manchuria as a quasi-independent state, and local warlords in Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou remained as they were before the Northern Expedition.
  Defeated warlord Zhang Zongchang would return to his former territory of Shandong in 1929, where he launched a rebellion against his former subordinate Liu Zhennian, who had defected to the nationalists during the Northern Expedition. While the rebellion was put down swiftly, it demonstrated the Nanjing government's shaky hold on China's vast territory. As Chiang attempted to cut back the military and centralise the power of the nationalist government in Nanjing, the regional warlords, with their military forces largely intact, began to renounce their allegiance to Chiang and form an alliance against the KMT. This struggle for supremacy broke into armed conflict in the Central Plains War of 1929–30. Although Chiang was ultimately victorious in that war, ensuring his status as singular leader of all China, regionalism and warlordism would continue, weakening the country and laying the groundwork for the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War.
caption: The leaders of the Northern Expedition gather on 6 July 1928 at Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum in the Temple of Azure Clouds, Beijing, to commemorate the completion of their mission.
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