Northern Expedition

• 1. Introduction

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  The Northern Expedition set out to stitch a fractured country back together, and it nearly tore itself apart in the process. In the summer of 1926, the National Revolutionary Army marched north from Guangzhou with a mission that seemed almost impossible: to defeat the Beiyang government in Beijing and the patchwork of regional warlords who had carved up China since the 1911 Revolution. What followed was two years of pitched battles, shocking massacres, covert Soviet influence, Japanese assassination plots, and political betrayals that reshuffled the leadership of the revolution itself. The man at the center of it all was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. He would win the campaign, lose his command, go into exile, return to power, and then discover that reunifying China on paper was far easier than holding it together in practice. How did a coalition of nationalists, communists, and warlords manage to roll up hundreds of thousands of enemy troops? What drove Chiang to turn his guns on his own allies? And when Beijing finally fell in 1928, what exactly had been won?

• 2. A Fractured Nation

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  Sun Yat-sen died in March 1925, leaving behind a party that controlled little more than the city of Guangzhou and its surroundings. In the early 1920s, the Beiyang government in Beijing was the internationally recognized government of China, but its writ barely extended beyond the north. Warlords divided the rest. Wu Peifu held the central provinces of Hunan, Hubei, and Henan. Sun Chuanfang controlled a swathe of coastal and interior provinces stretching from Fujian to Jiangxi. Zhang Zuolin, the most powerful of the three, commanded Manchuria, Shandong, and Zhili from his perch at the head of the Fengtian clique, and would eventually assemble a broad alliance called the National Pacification Army to stop the nationalist advance.

  On the 30th of May 1925, a demonstration by Chinese students at the International Settlement in Shanghai turned deadly when British-operated police opened fire on the crowd. The outrage that followed fueled recruitment drives across China, particularly for the Communist Party. Those same tensions, though, also strained the coalition. The Canton-Hong Kong strike that began on the 18th of June 1925 throttled foreign trade and threatened the Guangzhou government's finances, which depended heavily on that commerce. To clear the path for the northern campaign, Chiang launched a bloodless purge on the 20th of March 1926 known as the Canton Coup, removing hardline communists from the Guangzhou administration while making enough conciliatory gestures toward Moscow to keep Soviet aid flowing. The fragile four-way coalition of KMT rightists, centrists, leftists, and the CCP held together just long enough to launch the expedition.

• 3. Marching North

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  Chiang Kai-shek formally accepted command of the National Revolutionary Army on the 9th of July 1926, and KMT forces had already been in motion. The opening strategy was devised largely by Soviet advisors Mikhail Borodin and Vasily Blyukher: knock out Wu Peifu first, avoid provoking Sun Chuanfang, and ignore Zhang Zuolin for the time being. Changsha fell on the 11th of July, less than two days after Chiang's ceremony.

  Wu Peifu made a critical error. Most of his troops were tied down at Nankou Pass near Beijing, fighting a breakaway faction sympathetic to the KMT. He refused help from the Fengtian clique, fearing northern warlords would undermine his position if they entered his territory. At a military conference in Changsha on the 11th and the 12th of August 1926, Chiang addressed his generals and declared the struggle was not just against warlords but for the freedom and independence of the Chinese nation, invoking the Three People's Principles as the cause at stake. The NRA then bypassed Sun Chuanfang's stronghold of Nanchang and drove straight at Wu's base of Wuchang, following the historic route of the Taiping Rebellion.

  On the 29th of August, Wu launched a counterattack at Heshengqiao Bridge that collapsed by noon the next day. He lost 8,000 troops in that short period, at least 5,000 of them taken prisoner along with their rifles. By the 2nd of September the city was nearly surrounded. Wu fled north to Henan; his remaining garrison held out over a month before surrendering on the 10th of October 1926. His failure shattered his reputation and his forces slowly disintegrated. Six months after the campaign began, the nationalists controlled seven provinces with a population of roughly 170 million people, and the NRA had grown to 700,000 soldiers.

• 4. Sun Chuanfang and the Defections

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  Sun Chuanfang had been offered a non-aggression pact but refused to subordinate himself to KMT rule. Chiang crossed the Jiangxi border on the 4th of September 1926, and within two weeks both Jiujiang and Nanchang had fallen, accelerated by the defection of one of Sun's own generals, Lai Shih-huang. Then Sun arrived from Nanjing with reinforcements on the 21st of September, retook most of the lost territory, and demonstrated his authority by executing hundreds of students, teachers, and suspected KMT members, mounting their severed heads on spikes in public places.

  The NRA's supply problems were resolved in part on the 10th of October 1926, when the Canton-Hong Kong strike was finally called off after weeks of British negotiations, freeing up manpower and opening trade routes. On that same day, Wu Peifu's last defenders at Wuchang surrendered.

  Sun's grip on the coastal provinces began to come apart through a cascade of defections. Zhejiang's civil governor Xia Chao broke with Sun on the 16th of October 1926, declaring provincial independence. Sun crushed that rebellion by the 23rd of October, executing Xia and hundreds of his troops, and massacring thousands of civilians at Xia's former headquarters. He also pursued NRA forces deep into Fujian, where He Yingqin's First Army was advancing up the coast toward Fuzhou. By the 9th of December, He entered Fuzhou unopposed. Two days later, Zhejiang commander Zhou Fengqi announced his defection. Sun rallied his forces with protection from the National Pacification Army at his rear, but at Lanxi and Jinhua in late January 1927, a fierce battle destroyed his position in the province. His commander at Hangzhou fled by train on the 17th of February with 20,000 troops. The NRA suffered 20,000 casualties in the final push on Nanchang alone, yet the toll on Sun's forces was catastrophic, and they abandoned substantial equipment as they retreated.

• 5. Shanghai, Nanjing, and the Split

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  Bai Chongxi's forces marched into Shanghai on the 22nd of March 1927, completing a two-pronged assault that had severed the Shanghai-Nanjing railway, induced the defection of Sun's navy, and driven a communist general strike through the city. The Fengtian support operation was later described as a costly operational disaster for the northern warlords. The strike itself caused the deaths of 322 people and wounded about 2,000 more before Bai ordered it stopped on the 24th of March.

  Nanjing fell without resistance the next day when Shandong Army commander Zhang Zongchang withdrew on the 23rd of March. Almost immediately, mass anti-foreigner riots broke out in a disturbance called the Nanjing Incident. British and American naval forces bombarded the city to evacuate their citizens, leaving at least forty people dead. Chiang's faction blamed Lin Boqu, a member of both the CCP and the KMT who had been serving as political commissar of the Sixth Army.

  Meanwhile, the nationalist government had relocated from Guangzhou to Wuhan, a merged city formed from Wuchang and two other nearby cities, and the Wuhan administration drifted steadily into a Soviet-backed leftist orbit. On the 1st of April 1927, the Wuhan government issued edicts stripping Chiang of authority in foreign affairs, finance, and communications. The orders had no practical effect because Wuhan had almost no military power. Between the 12th and the 14th of April, Chiang ordered the arrest and killing of hundreds of communists in Shanghai, engaging the Green Gang underworld to kill trade unionists and party members. This event, called the Shanghai Massacre, ended the First United Front. Wang Jingwei, who had returned from exile in Europe and been offered a power-sharing deal by Chiang, condemned the purge and formalized the break between the Wuhan and Nanjing factions. While KMT leftists established their capital in Wuhan, KMT rightists built their government in Nanjing, and Zhang Zongchang's artillery bombarded Nanjing's waterfront from across the Yangtze at the ceremonies meant to celebrate the city's elevation to China's capital.

• 6. Exile, Return, and Final Offensive

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  By late August 1927, Chiang's military situation was dire. The National Pacification Army had retaken Xuzhou on the 24th of July and pushed NRA forces south of the Yangtze by the 9th of August. Wang Jingwei demanded Chiang's resignation as the price of reconciliation between Wuhan and Nanjing. Chiang resigned his command on the 12th of August 1927 and went into exile in Japan.

  Sun Chuanfang attempted a crossing of the Yangtze at Longtan on the 26th of August, rallying at the Shanghai-Nanjing railway station with thousands of troops including White Russian mercenary units. The surrounded NPA was forced to abandon Longtan station on the 30th of August. Sun launched a counteroffensive with his 40,000 remaining troops on the 31st and was crushed, losing more than 10,000 of those troops in the battle. The Wuhan government was dissolved on the 15th of September, with a joint government established in Nanjing under Guangxi clique generals.

  Chiang was officially invited to resume command on the 1st of January 1928. He was granted the title Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Expeditionary Forces on the 18th of February 1928. The NRA was reorganized into four collective armies: the First from the original Guangzhou forces, the Second from Feng Yuxiang's Guominjun, the Third from Yan Xishan's Shanxi forces, and the Fourth from Li Zongren's Guangxi clique. The combined force numbered one million soldiers.

  The resumed expedition formally launched on the 7th of April 1928. By the 29th of April, the NRA had nearly encircled Jinan. On the 2nd of May, Chiang arrived personally to negotiate a Japanese withdrawal, issuing safety guarantees to Kwantung Army commander Hikosuke Fukuda. A minor armed clash on the 3rd of May escalated on the 8th of May into a full Japanese assault on the city. During the Jinan Incident, Japanese troops killed KMT foreign affairs commissioner Cai Gongshi, several diplomats, and around five thousand Chinese civilians. Deciding to bypass the city, the NRA continued north.

• 7. The Fall of Beijing

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  On the 4th of June 1928, a bomb planted by the Japanese Kwantung Army exploded under Zhang Zuolin's train, killing him in the so-called Huanggutun Incident. His demoralised forces collapsed under the NRA advance. Sun Chuanfang delivered the final blow to his own side when he withdrew his troops from the defensive line on that same day and fled to Japanese-controlled Dairen. On the 6th of June, Yan Xishan's NRA Third Collective Army marched into Beijing, ending the Beiyang government. Tianjin surrendered to the NRA First Collective Army on the 11th of June.

  Zhang Zuolin's son, Zhang Xueliang, chose to cooperate with the nationalists. But Zhang Zongchang refused to surrender; his Shandong-Zhili Army, despite its defeats, still numbered between 60,000 and 70,000 soldiers, plus at least three armoured trains manned by White Russian mercenaries under General Konstantin Nechaev. On the 2nd of August 1928, that force crossed the Luan River and invaded Manchuria, declaring war on the Fengtian clique. After six days, it was trapped by combined KMT and Zhang Xueliang-aligned forces; most of Zhang Zongchang's troops defected or deserted, and those who refused to surrender were killed.

  On the 29th of December 1928, Zhang Xueliang officially declared Manchuria's allegiance to the nationalist government in Nanjing, formally ending the Northern Expedition and completing the reunification of China. The new peacetime Nanjing government had been launched on the 10th of October 1928, the seventeenth anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution.

• 8. An Unfinished Victory

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  Chiang Kai-shek and the leaders of the four collective armies met in Beijing in July 1928 to discuss demobilising roughly 2.2 million troops. Chiang wanted to cut the army in half to free government funds for domestic development. What quickly became apparent was that the new government was a coalition of former warlords who had nominal allegiance to Nanjing but retained their own armies and revenues. China remained de facto divided into five realms, with the Guangxi clique, Feng Yuxiang's Guominjun, Yan Xishan, and Zhang Xueliang each governing large territories largely as they saw fit.

  Defeated warlord Zhang Zongchang returned to Shandong in 1929 and launched a rebellion, demonstrating how shallow the nationalists' hold on China's territory remained. The regional warlords, with their military forces largely intact, began renouncing their allegiance to Chiang and forming alliances against the KMT. This broke into the Central Plains War of 1929-30. Even though Chiang won that war and secured his status as singular leader of China, regionalism and warlordism persisted. They weakened the country and laid conditions for the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War that followed.

  In Moscow, the expedition became a flashpoint between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had opposed CCP collaboration with the KMT on principle; Stalin had backed it, prohibiting the arming of workers and peasants and encouraging cooperation with what he considered the more revolutionary force. The failure of the First United Front hardened Stalin's shift toward Socialism in One Country and away from international revolution. He would later call the Chinese Communist Party "margarine communists" who deviated from Marxist orthodoxy by pursuing peasant-based land reform rather than worker-based revolution. The KMT's victory in the Northern Expedition thus shaped not only China's political future but the internal politics of the Soviet Union itself.