Northern Expedition

In July 1925 the Guangzhou National Government was founded and then unified the Guangdong revolutionary base. At that time Beiyang warlords led by Wu Peifu, Sun Chuanfang and Zhang Zuolin each held their own regions. To overthrow Beiyang rule and unify the country, the National Government decided on a Northern Expedition. In July 1926 the National Revolutionary Army, 100,000 strong, swore an oath in Guangzhou to march north, with Chiang Kai-shek as commander-in-chief. The expedition concentrated its forces to defeat enemies one by one, attacking Wu Peifu first. The Independent Regiment led by Ye Ting, with Communists as its backbone, was the vanguard and fought bravely at the Battles of Dingsi Bridge and Heshengqiao, defeating Wu's main force; the Fourth Army, to which the regiment belonged, was hailed as the “Ironsides”. It then advanced into Jiangxi and, after fierce fighting, destroyed Sun Chuanfang's main force. In March 1927 Shanghai workers, led by Zhou Enlai and others, staged their Third Armed Uprising and took Shanghai in coordination with the Northern Expedition, and the army then took Nanjing. In a little over half a year it advanced from the Pearl River basin to the Yangtze basin, dealing the warlords' rule a heavy blow. Its victories owed much to Kuomintang–Communist cooperation and strong support from workers and peasants, whose movements rose quickly everywhere. At the end of 1926 the National Government moved to Wuhan. In early 1927 the people of Wuhan and Jiujiang recovered the British concessions, the first time in modern China that a concession was recovered by mass struggle. The Northern Expedition was an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal revolutionary war led jointly by the two parties, but contradictions within the revolutionary ranks grew sharper.