Wuhan Government

*This article is a work in progress and has not been completed by its author(s). This content is not final.*

*See: China Timeline 1927-1931*

**Wuhan Nationalist Government** is the legitimate government of the Republic of China recognized by the Kuomintang (KMT) leftists, CPC, and other left-wing powers. It is usually abbreviated to **Wuhan Government**, but will be referred to as **Wuhan** if mentioned together with the Nanjing Nationalist Government. Its control range includes all of the Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hunan provinces, most parts of Hubei (except Shihe), Henan (except Yubei, Heluo, Kaifeng), Anhui (Yingzhou, Luzhou, Anqing) provinces, and the southern part of Fujian (Longting, Xiazhang).

## Brief History

The history of the
Nanjing Government can be traced back to the '''Guangzhou
Nationalist Government''' (the predecessor of both Nanjing and Wuhan), which
was established by Sun Yat-sen in 1925. With the development of the National
Revolution and the Northern Expedition, Guangzhou Nationalist Government moved
to Wuhan in January 1927.

On April 12, 1927, the
KMT rightists headed by Chiang Kai-shek launched the 4.12 coup. They announced in
several places like Shanghai that they will “Purge the Party” and “Purge the
CPC”, imposing persecution and massacres to the leftists. On April 18th,
the Nanjing Nationalist Government announced its establishment. Since then, the
Wuhan Nationalist Government and the Nanjing Nationalist Government didn’t
recognize each other’s legitimacy, accused the other of betraying the party,
and expelled the other fraction’s leader from KMT. However, due to the urgency
of the Northern Expedition and those subsequent unsolved internal problems, Nanjing
and Wuhan are currently unable to either eliminate or persuade the other side
to complete the reunification. Thus, the situation of “Nanjing-Wuhan split” has
continued to this day.

## Ideology

The Wuhan Nationalist Government officially adopts the Three Principles of People. However, since Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of People leaves enormous space for various interpretations and he is not interested in foreign ideologies, it is hard to define the official ideology of the Wuhan Nationalist Government with one specific ideology.

In general, in order to
distinguish itself from the completely right-wing Nanjing Nationalist Government, Wuhan Nationalist Government tries to adopt left-leaning revolutionary policies within its control range. But in fact, there are many disputes within the Wuhan Government about the scale of these revolutionary policies. With the increasingly sharp political struggles brought by policies like land reformation, how long and to which scale Wuhan Government can maintain its left-wing policies are still unknown.

At present, although the cooperation between the KMT left-wing and the CPC is continuing, heating debates exist everywhere: outside of the two parties, between the two parties, and within the two parties. Those increasingly aggressive debates are about whether to cooperate, cooperate with what, and how to cooperate between parties. Within the KMT, if some members of KMT—represented by Song Qingling, Tan Pingshan, and Deng Yanda—are only dissatisfied with the actions of Wang Jingwei Regime, then
the hostility of the military power led by He Jian to peasants and workers is
really worrying. On the CPC side, Peng Pai, who managed to organize many peasant movements, and his students from Peasant Movement Training Institute are being
increasingly exposed to antagonism from He Jian and the Hunan Military Association he led. What’s more, it is also worrying that in the Communist Party of China’s Sixth National Congress in 1931, after Chen Duxiu insisted on maintaining the cooperation by power after making no agreements on the congress, Mao Zedong and Li Lisan were so angry that they left the meeting. At the end of 1931, Wang Jingwei announced that he would read the highest instructions on New Year's Day the following year. If he could not settle the disputes within the Wuhan government in 1932, then it would inevitably face a huge crisis from both inside
and outside in the foreseeable future.