The Shanghai massacre

Before dawn on 12 April 1927 armed men wearing workers’ armbands attacked the premises of the Communist-led General Labour Union in Shanghai and of its armed workers’ pickets in the districts of Zhabei, Nanshi, Pudong and Wusong. They were not workers but members of criminal secret societies, above all the Green Gang led by Du Yuesheng. As fighting flared across the city, units of the National Revolutionary Army stepped in on the pretext of ending “fratricidal clashes between workers” and disarmed the pickets. The next day soldiers fired on a procession demanding the return of the weapons and the release of those arrested. Over the following days and weeks thousands of Communists, trade unionists and left-wing activists were arrested, killed or listed as missing in Shanghai and in other cities held by the troops of Chiang Kai-shek. Chinese Communists call these events the “counter-revolutionary coup of 12 April”; Kuomintang historiography calls them the “party purification”. The massacre ended the alliance between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, formed in the lifetime of Sun Yat-sen, and marked the beginning of a civil war that, with interruptions, lasted more than twenty years.

An alliance full of distrust

Since the joint declaration of Sun Yat-sen and Adolph Joffe in 1923, the Kuomintang had drawn on Soviet money, weapons and advisers, while Communists joined it as individuals, keeping their own party. The Soviet advisers were headed by Mikhail Borodin, Moscow’s envoy in Canton, and the military advisers by General Vasily Blyukher. After Sun’s death in March 1925 the alliance held together ever more weakly. The Communists were gaining influence in the trade unions, in the peasant movement and in the Kuomintang’s departments, and the party’s right wing accused them of building a party within the party and intending to take over the revolution. On 20 March 1926 Chiang Kai-shek, commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy and the strongest commander in Canton, imposed martial law in the city after the so-called Zhongshan gunboat incident. He arrested the gunboat’s Communist commander, surrounded the Soviet advisers’ quarters and forced a reduction of the Communists’ role in the party leadership. Moscow gave way because it needed the Kuomintang, and Chiang needed Soviet weapons.

In July 1926 Chiang led the army north on the Northern Expedition, which aimed to crush the warlords and unify China. The campaign brought rapid victories. In July the troops took Changsha, in September and October they captured the three cities of Wuhan, defeating Wu Peifu, and in November Nanchang, driving out the forces of Sun Chuanfang. Ahead of the army went agitators, often Communists, who set up trade unions and peasant associations. In Hunan the peasants began seizing land and putting landlords on trial. Mao Zedong, then an activist in the peasant movement, described this in a report of early 1927 as a great revolution in the countryside. For many officers of the National Revolutionary Army, who came from landowning families, it was, however, a threat.

Two centres of power

At the turn of 1926 and 1927 the National Government and the Kuomintang leadership moved from Canton to Wuhan. Left-wing party activists and Communists dominated there, and Borodin wielded enormous influence. Chiang Kai-shek, with his headquarters in Nanchang, tried to keep the government with him, but lost. In March 1927 a plenum of the Executive Committee in Hankou curtailed his powers as commander-in-chief and handed control of the army to collective bodies in which his opponents had the upper hand. The leader of the left was to be Wang Jingwei, who was just returning from Europe by way of Moscow.

Chiang sent his army east, towards the rich cities of the lower Yangtze. On 21 March 1927 a general strike broke out in Shanghai, followed by a workers’ uprising prepared by the Communists, in which Zhou Enlai played an important part. The workers’ pickets defeated the warlord garrison and took control of the Chinese part of the city, except for the International Settlement and the French Concession, where foreign troops were stationed. On 22 March units of the National Revolutionary Army under Bai Chongxi entered the city. On 24 March, after the capture of Nanjing, Nationalist soldiers attacked the foreign consulates and foreigners’ homes there. Several foreigners were killed, and British and American warships shelled the city. This so-called Nanjing incident alarmed the great powers and Chinese businessmen. The Kuomintang right blamed it on the Communists, who allegedly wanted to set Chiang at odds with the West.

Preparations

On 26 March Chiang arrived in Shanghai. The city was China’s financial heart, and its bankers and merchants feared that the revolution would do to it what it had done to Wuhan, where strikes had paralysed trade. They were ready to pay for order: in those weeks they gave Chiang millions of dollars in loans and donations. The great powers, which had thousands of soldiers in the International Settlement and warships on the river, also expected a reckoning with the “Bolsheviks”. Chiang came to an understanding with the bosses of the Shanghai underworld, Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin. They formed an organisation called the Common Progress Association, which was to move against the Communist unions.

On 1 April Wang Jingwei arrived in Shanghai. The next day the Kuomintang’s Central Control Commission, whose members included Cai Yuanpei, the former president of Peking University, accused the Communists of conspiracy and resolved to purge them from the party. Right-wing leaders urged Wang to lead the move against the Communists. He refused, and on 5 April he issued a joint declaration with the Communist leader Chen Duxiu on continued cooperation between the two parties, before leaving for Wuhan. On 6 April in Beijing the police of the warlord Zhang Zuolin, with the consent of the diplomatic corps, raided the Soviet embassy compound and arrested the Communists hiding there, among them the party’s co-founder Li Dazhao. On 9 April Chiang declared martial law in Shanghai. On the night of 11–12 April the chairman of the Shanghai General Labour Union, the Communist Wang Shouhua, was invited to Du Yuesheng’s house and murdered.

12 and 13 April

The attack began on 12 April between 1 and 5 a.m. Gang squads struck the quarters of the workers’ pickets, and when shooting broke out soldiers of the 26th Army, under Bai Chongxi’s command, disarmed the workers. The trade unionists held out longest at the Commercial Press works in Zhabei and at the union headquarters, but resistance was broken there too. According to Bai Chongxi’s memoirs, the army took about 3,000 rifles from the pickets. Many trade unionists were killed or arrested.

On 13 April the Communists called a general strike and held a mass rally in Zhabei. Its participants marched along Baoshan Road to the headquarters of the 2nd Division of the 26th Army, demanding the return of the weapons and the release of those arrested. The soldiers opened fire with machine guns. The number killed is disputed. The Chinese press of the time, already under military censorship, wrote of a dozen or several dozen dead, while the present-day official history of the Chinese Communist Party states that more than a hundred people were killed on the spot. The army dissolved the municipal government formed after the March uprising, along with the trade unions and organisations under Communist influence, and replaced them with unions subordinate to the Kuomintang and to Du Yuesheng’s men.

How many victims

Popular summaries speak of a massacre of 5,000 to 10,000 Communists. This figure can be neither confirmed nor refuted, since no exact count was ever made. Communist sources state that in the three days after 12 April more than 300 people were killed in Shanghai, more than 500 arrested and more than 5,000 went missing. Some historians estimate that several thousand people may have died in Shanghai and its surroundings alone in the following weeks. In the months that followed, those executed in Shanghai included Chen Duxiu’s son Chen Yannian and the trade-union activist Zhao Shiyan. Bai Chongxi earned the nickname “the cutter of Communist heads” in the Western press.

Shanghai was only the beginning. On 15 April a purge was carried out in Canton, where more than 2,000 people were arrested, and then in Nanjing, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Fuzhou and other cities controlled by Chiang. On 28 April in Beijing Zhang Zuolin had Li Dazhao and more than a dozen of his comrades hanged. In May and June the wave of violence also engulfed the territory of the Wuhan government, where officers of the National Revolutionary Army turned on the peasant movement. In Changsha, after a regiment mutinied on 21 May, many thousands of people were killed within a few weeks. In 1928 Zhou Enlai told a party congress in Moscow that more than 300,000 Communists and their supporters had been killed since the spring of 1927. This is a party estimate that cannot be verified, but there is no doubt that the so-called White Terror of 1927–1928 cost tens of thousands of lives. The Communist Party, which in the spring of 1927 had about 58,000 members, had by the end of the year, according to frequently cited estimates, about 10,000.

The alliance collapses

On 17 April the Wuhan government expelled Chiang Kai-shek from the party and called for his arrest. The next day Chiang and his supporters set up a rival National Government in Nanjing, headed by Hu Hanmin. China now had two Kuomintang governments, and in the north there was still the warlord government in Beijing. Sun Yat-sen’s widow, Soong Ching-ling, denounced Chiang as a traitor to her husband’s ideas.

The Wuhan government did not last long without Shanghai’s money and faced with mutinies by its own generals. In Moscow Joseph Stalin, who at the beginning of April, according to those who heard him speak, had still been insisting that the Kuomintang must be “squeezed like a lemon and then thrown away”, now ordered the Communists to stick with the Kuomintang left. The opposition led by Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev saw the defeat in Shanghai as proof of the errors of Stalin’s policy, and the dispute over China became one of the main issues in the struggle within the Soviet party. On 1 June Stalin sent Wuhan a telegram ordering the arming of workers and peasants and the purging of “reactionary” generals from the Kuomintang. The Comintern representative, the Indian Manabendra Nath Roy, showed it to Wang Jingwei. Wang concluded that Moscow wanted to take over his party, and on 15 July the Wuhan leadership broke with the Communists. Borodin left China at the end of July. On 1 August the Communists launched an armed uprising in Nanchang, with which the civil war began. The Wuhan and Nanjing governments merged, and Chiang Kai-shek, who had stepped down as commander-in-chief in August 1927, returned in January 1928 as leader of the Kuomintang and completed the Northern Expedition that year.

Shanghai also had a personal dimension. Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, was then studying in Moscow. After the massacre he publicly denounced his father, and he then remained in the USSR for ten years, in effect as a hostage, returning to China only in 1937.

The long shadow of the Shanghai massacre

The Shanghai massacre ended the First United Front and gave Chiang Kai-shek control of the Kuomintang along with the backing of Shanghai’s financiers and the great powers. Thanks to this, in 1928 he nominally unified China under the Nanjing government. At the same time it started a civil war that did not end until 1949. The surviving Communists, driven out of the cities, moved to the countryside, where Mao Zedong and Zhu De began to build their own army.

For the road to the Second World War, what mattered most was that China entered the 1930s divided. When Japan seized Manchuria in 1931, Chiang decided that the Communists had to be destroyed first and only then could the invader be resisted. The best government divisions fought the Communists in Jiangxi, not the Japanese. Japanese military men also presented their expansion as a struggle against Bolshevism, and in 1936 Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany. Only when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937 did the Kuomintang and the Communists briefly stand on the same side, but the distrust born in April 1927 never disappeared. André Malraux described the massacre in his novel Man’s Fate (La Condition humaine), awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1933, which fixed it in Europe’s memory.