The First United Front in China

On 26 January 1923 a short four-point document signed by two men was made public in Shanghai: Sun Yat-sen, father of the Chinese republic and leader of the nationalist Kuomintang party, and Adolph Joffe, plenipotentiary representative of Soviet Russia in China. It went down in history as the Sun–Joffe Manifesto. In it the two men stated that communism and the Soviet system were unsuited to China, and that the country’s most urgent task was to achieve unification and full independence, in which China could count on Russia’s help. This modest-sounding text began an alliance of several years between the Kuomintang and Moscow, and through Moscow with the young Chinese Communist Party. The alliance is known as the First United Front (in China also as “alliance with Russia and admission of the communists”). It is often said that on 26 January 1923 the Kuomintang and the communists formed a front to put an end to the rule of the warlords. Strictly speaking, what happened that day was an understanding between Sun and the Soviet government. The communists decided to join the Kuomintang in June 1923, and Sun’s party congress formally admitted them in January 1924. The declaration of 26 January was, however, the point from which everything began.

Warlord China

Ever since the fall of the empire in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911–1912, China had been a republic in name only. Sun Yat-sen, provisional president for a few weeks at the turn of 1911 and 1912, had to make way for General Yuan Shikai, who ruled in an increasingly dictatorial manner and in 1915 even tried to proclaim himself emperor. After his death in June 1916 the country broke up into the spheres of influence of generals known as warlords. Backed by foreign powers, they waged war on one another for provinces, railways and customs revenue. In Beijing there was a government recognised by the world, but who sat in it was decided by whichever military clique had won last. In 1922 the capital was controlled by Wu Peifu, while Zhang Zuolin ruled Manchuria almost as an independent sovereign.

On top of this came a sense of humiliation at foreign hands. The powers had concessions in China, their own courts for their citizens, garrisons and control over the customs. At the Paris Peace Conference the victors awarded Japan the former German rights in Shandong province. This provoked a wave of protests known as the May Fourth Movement, and the Chinese delegation did not sign the Treaty of Versailles. Shandong returned to China only under a separate Sino-Japanese agreement concluded in February 1922 during the Washington Conference, the same conference that produced the Washington Naval Treaty. The young generation of Chinese intellectuals was searching for new ideas at the time. Some of them found them in Moscow.

Sun Yat-sen without an army

At this time Sun Yat-sen was a leader without a state or an army. Several times he had set up a government in Canton (Guangzhou) in the south of the country, meant to defend the constitution against Beijing, and each time he depended on local generals. In 1921 he was elected “extraordinary president” there, but his ally, the governor of Guangdong, Chen Jiongming, did not want an expedition to the north and preferred to build a federation of autonomous provinces. On 16 June 1922 Chen’s troops surrounded and shelled Sun’s residence. Sun took refuge on a gunboat, which a few days later was reached by a young officer, Chiang Kai-shek. They spent several weeks there together, and in August Sun left for Shanghai. From there he tried to rebuild his party.

For years Sun had been asking the Western powers and Japan for help. But no one wanted to bet on a politician who had neither money nor an army and every so often lost his only foothold. The only state to show serious interest in him was Soviet Russia. Sun had welcomed the news of the October Revolution with sympathy and called Vladimir Lenin a great man. He was not a Marxist. His programme was the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy (the people’s power) and the people’s livelihood. What fascinated him was the Bolshevik party as an organisation: disciplined, centralised and with an army of its own.

Moscow looks for a partner

Soviet Russia began courting the Chinese soon after the revolution. In July 1919 the deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Lev Karakhan, issued a declaration in which Moscow renounced the unequal treaties and privileges of tsarist Russia in China. A second note on the matter was sent on 27 September 1920. It soon became clear that the Bolsheviks had no intention of giving up certain tsarist gains. These were above all the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia, which the Red Army had entered in the summer of 1921 in pursuit of the Whites in the last phase of the Russian Civil War.

The Communist International was active at the same time. In 1920 its envoys helped set up the first communist circles in Shanghai and Beijing, and in July 1921 the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held in Shanghai. Its leaders were the professors Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, and among the dozen or so delegates was a young teacher from Hunan, Mao Zedong. The party was tiny: at the beginning of 1923 it had a few hundred members. Moscow concluded that in a country without a large proletariat a socialist revolution was not on the agenda. In line with Lenin’s theses on the national and colonial question, adopted by the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, communists in colonial and semi-colonial countries were to support national liberation movements directed against imperialism, even “bourgeois” ones. In China such a movement was the Kuomintang.

The Dutch communist Henk Sneevliet, working under the pseudonym Maring, had already met Sun in December 1921 in Guilin. On returning to Moscow he argued that the Chinese communists should join the Kuomintang. The Comintern leadership adopted this line, and in August 1922, at a meeting by the West Lake in Hangzhou, Maring imposed it on his reluctant Chinese comrades. They were to join Sun’s party as individuals while keeping their own organisation. Such an alliance was called the “bloc within”.

Joffe in China

Adolph Joffe was one of the most skilful Soviet diplomats. He had led the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, had been the first Soviet envoy in Berlin, and had negotiated the peace with Poland at Riga. He arrived in Beijing in August 1922. His task was to establish relations with the recognised Chinese government, but the talks stalled. Beijing demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Mongolia and the return of the railway, and Moscow would not hear of either. Joffe therefore played another game at the same time. He kept up contacts with Wu Peifu and, above all, with Sun Yat-sen, with whom he had been exchanging letters since the autumn.

In January 1923 Joffe came to Shanghai. According to Chinese studies his first meeting with Sun took place on 16 January, and they then talked several more times at Sun’s house in the French Concession. At roughly the same time Sun’s situation unexpectedly improved. Mercenary troops from Yunnan and Guangxi, paid by his supporters, drove Chen Jiongming out of Canton, and in mid-January Chen withdrew. Sun could return to the south. All he lacked was money, weapons and people who could help him turn a loose party into a force capable of unifying the country.

The declaration of 26 January

The joint statement was issued on 26 January 1923. It opened by stating that the two men had agreed on all important questions of Sino-Russian relations. The first point was the best known. Sun Yat-sen declared that the communist order, or even the Soviet system, could not be introduced into China, because the conditions for their success did not exist there. Joffe entirely agreed, adding that China’s most important and most pressing task was to achieve national unification and full independence. In this great undertaking China had “the warmest sympathy” of the Russian people and could count on Russia’s support.

In the second point Joffe, at Sun’s request, confirmed the principles of the Soviet note of 27 September 1920. Russia was ready to open negotiations on the basis of renouncing all the treaties and privileges extorted by tsarism, including those concerning the Chinese Eastern Railway. The third point, however, stated that the whole question of the railway could be settled only at a proper conference, and that until then its management might be temporarily reorganised by agreement between the two governments, on the understanding that this would not prejudice the rights and special interests of either party. Sun added that on this matter an understanding had to be reached with Zhang Zuolin, who controlled Manchuria. In the fourth point Joffe gave an assurance that Russia had never intended to pursue an imperialist policy in Outer Mongolia or to detach it from China. Sun for his part accepted that Soviet troops need not leave immediately, since the weak Beijing government would not be able to prevent fresh White intrigues.

The document was thus an exchange of concessions. Sun did not yet receive anything concrete apart from a promise of help, but he gave Moscow peace of mind over the railway and Mongolia, which the Beijing government refused to concede. In return Moscow gave a public assurance that it did not intend to establish communism in China, which reassured opponents of Russia within the Kuomintang. Shortly afterwards Joffe left for Japan, where at the resort of Atami he took a cure and held unofficial talks with the politician Gotō Shinpei on normalising Soviet–Japanese relations.

From declaration to alliance

At the end of February 1923 Sun returned to Canton and set up the Generalissimo’s headquarters there, his third government in the south. This time he had Moscow behind him. In August he sent a military delegation to Russia headed by Chiang Kai-shek. For several months Chiang inspected Soviet units, military schools and party institutions, and talked with, among others, Leon Trotsky. He came back convinced that the Russian communists were as dangerous in China as any other imperialists. Sun, however, did not change course.

In June 1923, at their Third Congress in Canton, the communists adopted a resolution to join the Kuomintang. On 6 October Mikhail Borodin, an envoy of the Soviet Politburo, arrived in Canton and became Sun’s political adviser. Under his guidance the Kuomintang was rebuilt on the model of the Bolshevik party, with an executive committee, the principle of centralism, party cells, and workers’ and peasants’ departments. From 20 to 30 January 1924 the First National Congress of the Kuomintang met in Canton. Sun spoke there of the lessons of the Russian revolution, and when news came of Lenin’s death the congress sent a telegram of condolence to Moscow. Opponents of admitting the communists were outvoted. Communists entered the party leadership, among them Li Dazhao and Tan Pingshan, and Mao Zedong became an alternate member of the executive committee. Chinese communist historiography dates the first cooperation between the two parties from this congress and attributes to Sun the “Three Great Policies”: alliance with Russia, alliance with the communists, and support for workers and peasants. Kuomintang historians stress that Sun never used this formula and admitted communists to the party only as individuals, bound to obey its programme.

The Whampoa Academy

The most important fruit of the alliance was an army. In May 1924 the Whampoa Military Academy, the Kuomintang’s officer school, began work on Huangpu (Whampoa) Island near Canton, and was formally opened on 16 June. Its commandant was Chiang Kai-shek, and its political commissar was Liao Zhongkai, a figure on the Kuomintang left. From the autumn of 1924 a young communist, Zhou Enlai, worked in its political department. The school was financed by Moscow and Soviet officers taught there. From the autumn of 1924 the chief military adviser in Canton was General Vasily Blyukher, using the pseudonym Galin (Galen in Western literature). In October 1924 the first Soviet ship carrying arms reached Canton. The academy’s graduates formed the officer corps of the National Revolutionary Army, but also many future communist commanders, such as Lin Biao.

Sun Yat-sen did not live to see the fruits of his policy. He died of cancer on 12 March 1925 in Beijing, where he had gone to discuss the unification of the country. After his death tensions within the alliance rose quickly. The right wing of the Kuomintang accused the communists of building a party within the party, while the communists grew stronger in the trade unions and the peasant movement. On 20 March 1926 Chiang Kai-shek, by then the strongest man in Canton, declared martial law in the city, arrested the communist commander of the gunboat Zhongshan and forced the communists to curb their influence in the party. The alliance nevertheless survived for another year. In July 1926 the Kuomintang army set out north from Canton on the Northern Expedition to crush the warlords and unify China.

The long shadow of the First United Front

The Sun–Joffe declaration and the alliance that grew out of it changed China. The Kuomintang, which in 1922 had been a loose association of politicians with no strength of its own, acquired a party army and an apparatus modelled on the Bolshevik one. Thanks to this, in two years of the Northern Expedition it took control of most of the country, and in 1928 it captured Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party, which in 1923 had a few hundred members, grew in the shadow of the Kuomintang to several tens of thousands and gained experience in organising workers and peasants. But the united front did not survive success. In April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek struck at the communists in Shanghai, and the allies of 1923–1927 became enemies in a civil war that, with interruptions, lasted until 1949.

This split was of great significance on the road to the Second World War. Japan watched with alarm as a China unified by the Kuomintang drew closer to Manchuria, where the Japanese had held a railway, troops and major interests since the Treaty of Portsmouth. The Kwantung Army responded first with the assassination of Zhang Zuolin in 1928, and then in 1931 with the Mukden Incident and the conquest of the whole of Manchuria. China met this blow divided. Chiang Kai-shek believed that the communists had to be destroyed first and only then could the Japanese be confronted, while Japanese propaganda presented expansion on the mainland as a defence against Bolshevism too. Only after the Xi’an Incident in December 1936 did the Kuomintang and the communists form the Second United Front, which in 1937, after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, united them against a common enemy. In the first years of that war China’s main supplier of weapons and aircraft was once again the Soviet Union. Many of the figures who met in Canton in 1923–1924 later played leading roles: Chiang Kai-shek as China’s wartime leader, and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai as the victors of the civil war and founders of the People’s Republic of China.