ON THIS DAY ·
Nanchang Uprising
1 Aug 1927 — Communist-led regiments seize Nanchang and hold it for three days, giving the party its first army of its own. The force is driven out and broken; survivors under Zhu De make their way to the hills. The People’s Liberation Army still dates its founding to this morning.
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The moment in context
The Nanjing Decade, the Nationalists’ main period of state-building from 1927 to 1937, began by destroying the alliance that had helped bring them to power. On 12 April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek’s forces turned on Communists and unionists in Shanghai (the ◆). National Revolutionary Army soldiers and Green Gang enforcers killed hundreds that morning; thousands more were killed across the south in the following weeks. The First United Front broke as the Northern Expedition approached victory.
From Shanghai purge and Nanjing decade, chapter 5 of China in Revolution, 1911–1949 (1929).
The place: Nanchang Uprising — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Class conflict within the alliance. The United Front joined a revolution to an army whose officers and supporters came in part from landlord and merchant families. Peasant associations…
- The turn — Shanghai, 12 April 1927. Chiang’s victory in Shanghai settled the immediate struggle inside the alliance, but it also shaped the next twenty-two years of Chinese politics.…
- What it changed — The revolution goes rural. The survivors found refuge where provincial authority was weak: first in the mountains of Jinggangshan, then on the Jiangxi–Fujian border. Mao and…
Then ask the room: Was the Nanjing decade a real modernization interrupted, or a weak state exposed by Japan? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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