Mikhail Borodin organized the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party on behalf of the Comintern (the Communist International) with the support of Sun Yat Sen and Chen Duxiu.
He helped fund and found the Whampoa Military Academy and he was there for the opening of the Whampoa Military Academy, run by Chiang Kai shek, with an important role for Zhou Enlai. He also was instrumental in setting up the revolutionary committee of the Chinese Kuomintang.
Borodin was in Asia to organize China on behalf of the Communist International and the Soviet Communist Party.
Feng Yuxiang took control of the Beiyang Government from the Zhili Clique.
Madame Sun Yat Sen gained independence following her near death experience.
Sun Yat Sen was in Beijing dying.
The Communist Party of China and the KMT both needed organizing. The KMT and Sun Yat-sen were overly reliant on southern warlords. When they turned on Sun, that made the KMT homeless and risked the life of Sun and those close to him, like his wife Song Qingling. She suffered a miscarriage when Chen Jiongming attacked their house in Guangzhou. Never again would Madame Sun Yat-sen be able to bear children.
Mikhail Borodin, born Mikhail Grusenberg, of the Communist International (Comintern) was valued by Sun and lead the re-organization of the KMT and the Communist Party’s outreach in Guangdong. Students went to the people and organized the peasants and began class struggle in rural Guangdong. Sun helped turn a labour strike in Guangzhou into a nationalist victory.
The Whampoa Military Academy and the KMT and Communist Party were now able to train revolutionary soldiers. Borodin thought he had the perfect unpolitical soldier in its Director, Chiang Kai-shek.
The corrupt Cao Kun, leader of the Zhili Clique, was ousted as President in a coup and Sun hoped to assume the national presidency and unite China. But he was dying of cancer and Duan Qirui had more support in the north and with the Japanese.
What would happen after Sun’s death?
3 Comments
According to Kuomintang propaganda, the First United Front was an adoption of the Communists into the KMT fold.
I do not know why there are Americans and Europeans who want to claim that the KMT allied itself with the Chinese Communist Party or sought support from the Bolshevik Communist Party of the Soviet Union. These continued distortions seem to a consistent narrative by the press of the Western World to distort reality for some strange reason. I do not deny that the KMT or Guo Ming Dang (the Chinese Nationalist Party) had to put aside their differences with the Chinese Communist and the feudal warlords of the Qing Emperor, and form a united front against the Japanese Imperial Army. The Japanese Imperial Army had been on the Far-East Asian mainland since they defeated the Imperial Russian Army and Navy in 1905. The Japanese Imperial Army had continued steadily invading and taking control of Korea and Northeastern China since 1905. An example of this continuous expansion is the annexation and colonization of Korea in 1910 by Imperial Japan. The proposal by some American historians that American objections to Japanese expansion into central and southern China was the cause of Imperial Japanese Naval attack on Pearl Harbor is an excuse for Imperial Japanese expansion. The fact the US Navy was a major force in the Pacific already determined that the Imperial Japanese Navy would have to destroy so Imperial Japan can continue to expand. An expansion that had started in 1895 during the First Sino-Japanese War. The fact most American historians or western international experts continue to ignore this consistent Imperial Japanese policy is a perfect example of the Western World refusal to study non-European history.
The KMT began in the late 1880s when a small group of educated middle class Chinese wanted to overthrow an incompetent Imperial Chinese System. This educated middle class were intellectuals from a tiny Chinese merchant class. China, unlike England and the US, never had a significantly large, educated middle class. The Qing Emperor and his Nobility owned their own private armies. China in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century was a feudal society with about 3000 years of tradition and history. Most Chinese were illiterate. China, like most of the world, never underwent the Industrial Revolution and was a backward, agrarian society. As a result, most of its society, i.e. its people, were stuck in what is equivalent to the early Middle Ages of England. Most Chinese people have never heard of "democracy, republicanism, or liberalism."
My concern is the narrator's comments in regards to the 1920s China. The narrator's statements demonstrate a lack of understanding for the circumstances of China, Chinese society, and the Chinese people. The KMT and Sun Zhongshan (known in the US and the UK as Sun Yat-sen) gave China the idea that the age-old Imperial System had to end and led the Chinese people in this struggle. I have also encountered distortions, exaggerations, and out right lies that the Chinese Communists like Deng Xiaoping attended universities in France and Soviet Union. And that Chinese Communists like Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping were open to the ideas of democracy. This is ridiculous. Chinese Communists received a traditional Chinese elementary school education. These schools taught the ideas of traditional Imperial China beginning in the Shang and Zhou Imperial periods.
From the 1890s to 1912 Sun Zhongshan and his secret society (later to become the Chinese Nationalist Party, or better known in the US and the UK as the KMT due to Southern Chinese dialectic pronounciation) tried to overthrow the Qing Imperial Government. The leaders of the Chinese Nationalists got their education in the US, the UK , France, … They were intellectuals and did not have the money nor Machiavellian foresight to obtain an army. Sun Zhongshan was able to gain a lot of support from the common Chinese people with his oration. Unfortunately, oration will not pay for a modern, industrialized army. After several attempts and failures to overthrow the Qing Emperor Sun and the Nationalist Party leadership joined forces with many feudal lords of the Qing Emperor to overthrow the Qing Emperor. You can imagine the mess this would cause. The feudal warlords switched alliances whenever convenient and often seized Imperial Authority for themselves.
It was an informative and wonderful historical coverage video about KMT internal movements and theirs relationship to Chinese communism elites at that times ( 1922-1925)