Chinese Civil War — Shanghai Massacre to Long March (1927–1935)
The Shanghai Massacre of 12 April 1927 was the event that defined Chinese politics for the next quarter-century. Chiang Kai-shek, having completed the Northern Expedition that nominally unified China under Kuomintang (Nationalist) rule, turned on his Communist allies in a coordinated purge. In Shanghai, armed gangs connected to the Green Gang criminal organisation — acting on Chiang's orders — attacked Communist Party offices and labour union headquarters, killing between 300 and 5,000 Communist members and activists. Simultaneous purges followed in other cities. The massacre ended the First United Front — the KMT-CCP alliance that had been the basis of Soviet support and the revolutionary strategy for Chinese unification since 1923. The surviving Communist leadership dispersed to rural areas; the party's urban networks were effectively destroyed. Moscow's response was confusion and eventual acknowledgement that the alliance strategy had failed. The civil war that followed had a distinctive character: the Communists, driven from the cities, built peasant base areas in remote mountain regions — beginning with the Jiangxi Soviet, established under Mao Zedong and Zhu De in southern China. Chiang's Nationalist government launched five 'Encirclement Campaigns' (1930–34) to destroy these base areas; the fifth, which used fortified blockhouse networks designed by German advisers under Hans von Seeckt, succeeded in making the Jiangxi Soviet untenable. In October 1934 approximately 86,000 Communist soldiers and 15,000 party workers broke through the Nationalist encirclement and began the Long March — one of the most extraordinary retreats in military history. Over 370 days and approximately 9,000 kilometres (with some units marching longer routes), the Communist forces crossed flooded rivers, high mountain ranges, and the grasslands of western Sichuan, fighting Nationalist forces and local warlords throughout. Of the 86,000 who began, approximately 7,000–8,000 reached Shaanxi Province in northwestern China in October 1935. The Long March was militarily a catastrophe and politically a founding myth. During the march, at the Zunyi Conference (January 1935), Mao Zedong achieved dominant political authority over the Chinese Communist Party — a position he would hold until his death in 1976. The march's survivors became the core leadership of the People's Republic of China.
- Year: 1927 CE
- Category: Military
