Could the First United Front have survived beyond 1927?

The short answer

• The Soviet package: party, army, mass line. Western powers had declined to support Sun, so he turned to Moscow. Soviet advisers brought money and rifles, but also a way to connect an army with a political movement: party cells, political commissars and organized agitation. Borodin was instructed to keep the revolution “national.” The Chinese parties learned techniques in this alliance that they would later use against each other during 1927–49.
• Nationalism with an address. The shootings of May 30th, 1925 gave resentment of foreign privilege a focus in the treaty system and brought the Canton movement a larger public. The Hong Kong–Canton strike and boycott mobilized hundreds of thousands and lasted sixteen months. Keeping such a movement together took organization as well as anger. When the expedition called “down with the unequal treaties” and “down with the warlords,” it spoke to grievances people already knew.
• The warlords could not combine. The warlord cliques had experience fighting one another and absorbing defeated soldiers. They had more difficulty joining forces against the expedition. Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang fought the National Revolutionary Army separately and fell separately, while Zhang Zuolin protected his position in Manchuria. Each defection weakened a warlord and added men to the advancing force. The habits of competing military employers served them poorly against an organized political movement.
• Whampoa as the multiplier. Whampoa’s few thousand cadets could not conquer half a country alone. Their importance lay in what they brought to larger units: junior officers who led from the front and helped troops hold together under fire. Academy troops suffered exceptionally heavy casualties in the Eastern Expeditions and the northern march. Their training cultivated loyalty to the party, but also to Chiang, their commandant. That second attachment would matter when the alliance divided.

What it changed

Two victors inside one victory. By spring 1927 the alliance had reached the Yangtze, but its victory contained two centers of power. Left Nationalists at Wuhan worked with the Communists. Chiang had his military base and would soon gain support from Shanghai bankers. The partners could agree on defeating warlords without agreeing on command of the movement or the shape of the government to follow.

The peasant association explosion. Peasant associations encouraged by the expedition claimed millions of members in Hunan. Before party leaders had settled land policy, some began settling scores with landlords. Mao’s 1927 “Hunan Report” defended their violence as a revolutionary force. Many Nationalist officers came from landowning families, and what Mao defended alarmed them. The dispute over class and land was pulling the front apart.

The powers pick a Chinese partner. In 1927 foreign gunboats at Nanking and barbed wire around Shanghai’s Settlement showed the treaty powers’ alarm. London and Washington were also beginning to regard a Chiang-led government as a possible source of order. As Chiang’s Nationalists divided from the revolutionary left, negotiation over treaty privileges would proceed gradually alongside that political division.