Civil Wars, Invasion, and the Rise of Communism 121
suddenly many Chinese cities erupted with strikes, demonstrations, and
boycotts. The May Thirtieth Movement, as it came to be known, swelled
the membership of the Chinese Communist Party from 1,000 to 10,000
between May and November 1925 and to 30,000 by July 1926.
Having supervised the fi rst three classes of military offi cers to
graduate from the Whampoa Military Academy, Chiang Kai-shek was
appointed commander in chief of the new National Revolutionary
Army in June 1926. He enjoyed a strong personal loyalty from the vast
majority of 6,000 newly trained offi cers who commanded an army of
85,000 soldiers recruited from peasant and worker families in south
China. One of Chiang’s main rivals to become leader of the National-
ist Party after Sun’s death was Liao Zhongkai, who had been a close
associate of Sun Yat-sen and who, like Sun, maintained cordial relations
with the more radical Communists. In August 1925, Liao Zhongkai
was assassinated, eliminating one of the obstacles to Chiang Kai-shek’s
rise to power.
In July 1926, Chiang Kai-shek and the National Revolutionary
Army launched the Northern Expedition, a two-pronged campaign
along the east coast and through the center of south China to oust the
regional warlords and unify south and central China under Nation-
alist Party rule. The Communist Party labor and peasant organizers
infi ltrated areas in advance of the troops and helped undermine local
warlord forces through strikes and nationalistic propaganda calling on
people to resist foreign imperialism and support the Nationalists against
the warlords. Within one month, the National Revolutionary Army
was in control of the southwestern city of Changsha. In September and
October, Nationalist forces took Nanchang and the major Yangzi River
port city of Wuhan. By December, they had taken the coastal city of
Fuzhou. In March 1927, they took the city of Nanjing (the early Ming
capital), and by April, the great seaport and commercial capital Shang-
hai was in Nationalist hands.
Chiang Kai-shek had never trusted his Communist collaborators.
Since the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 had radicalized many work-
ers and pushed them toward the Communist camp, he feared his move-
ment and his army might be taken over by its most radical elements. In
his early days, he had briefl y been a stockbroker in Shanghai, where he
developed close ties with the banking community and with the Green
Gang, a mafi a-style organization that ran the prostitution, gambling,
and opium dens of Shanghai. With support of the Green Gang and
its henchmen, Chiang’s forces struck against their Communist “allies”
without warning on April 12, 1927, and murdered any and all known