Modern China — Guomindang rule and the rise of communism

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Jiang Jieshi's military campaign, aided by the CCP, that defeated northern warlords and nominally unified China under GMD rule by 1928.

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Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), founding commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy.

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1927–37 period of GMD one-party rule from Nanjing; brought partial modernisation (new currency, industry, New Life Movement) but left rural land ownership unreformed and relied on corrupt urban alliances.

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A staged railway explosion the Japanese Kwantung Army blamed on Chinese saboteurs, used as the pretext to invade and conquer Manchuria.

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The puppet state Japan created in Manchuria in 1932, with the deposed Qing emperor Puyi as a powerless figurehead ruler.

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He judged China's army too weak to win, and saw the CCP as the greater internal threat — his policy was 'internal pacification first, external resistance later.'

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Jiang Jieshi's forces, working with the Green Gang, killed thousands of CCP members and sympathisers in Shanghai, ending the First United Front.

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The 1923–27 alliance between the GMD and CCP, formed with Soviet encouragement, which collapsed after the Shanghai Massacre.

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A rural communist base area where Mao Zedong built peasant support through land redistribution, after the CCP was driven underground in 1927.

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The CCP's roughly 9,000 km retreat from Jiangxi to Yan'an under GMD military pressure; forces fell from about 86,000 to under 10,000 survivors.

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A meeting during the Long March where Mao Zedong won a power struggle within the CCP leadership, becoming its de facto leader.

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Short-term: near-catastrophic losses and retreat from a productive base. Long-term: forged loyal leadership under Mao and secured the Yan'an base that enabled the CCP's eventual 1949 victory.