The Nanking regime was born of factional strife and bloodshed. In the early morning of 12 April 1927, gangs of thugs belonging to the Mafia-like Green Gang plunged through the streets of Shanghai, seized Communists and suspected Communists, and executed them on the spot with pistols or broadswords. Several thousand were massacred then and during the ensuing month. Chiang Kai-shek had split with the Communists; the first united front was ended. Six days later, on 18 April, the Nationalist government was inaugurated at Nanking.

The challenge confronting the new government was awesome – nothing less than to turn back the tide of national disintegration that, for a century and more, had been washing over the Chinese nation. A central, national government had virtually ceased to exist. Political power had devolved into the hands of regional militarists, ‘warlords’, who too often were unconcerned for the popular welfare and sought only to enhance their wealth and power by reliance on military force. The sense of moral community – the broad and pervasive consensus regarding the values and proper relationships of cultural and social life, which had so richly contributed to the stability of traditional China – had disintegrated, and in its place were confusion and contention. Even the economic foundations of the traditional political system had eroded.

THE INITIAL CONSOLIDATION OF POWER

Because the Chinese were profoundly sensitive to the abject condition of their nation, to the ravages of warlord struggles, and to the humiliations of imperialist aggression, the Nationalist revolutionary armies had been greeted exultantly as their Northern Expedition moved from Canton in the south (beginning in July 1926) to Peking in the north (occupied in June 1928) (see volume 12).

It lasted eight years. Some fifteen to twenty million Chinese died as a direct or indirect result. The devastation of property was incalculable. And after it was over the Nationalist government and army were exhausted and demoralized. Thus it inflicted a terrible toll on the Chinese people and contributed directly to the Communist victory in 1949. The war with Japan was surely the most momentous event in the history of the Republican era in China.

INITIAL CAMPAIGNS AND STRATEGY 1937–1939

The fighting began in darkness, not long before midnight on 7 July 1937. Since 1901, in accordance with the Boxer Protocol, the Japanese had stationed troops in North China between Tientsin and Peiping. And on that balmy summer night, a company of Japanese troops was conducting field manoeuvres near the Lu-kou-ch'iao (Marco Polo Bridge), fifteen kilometres from Peiping and site of a strategic rail junction that governed all traffic with South China. Suddenly, the Japanese claimed, they were fired upon by Chinese soldiers. A quick check revealed that one of their number was missing, whereupon they demanded entry to the nearby Chinese garrison town of Wan-p'ing to search for him. After the Chinese refused, they attempted unsuccessfully to storm the town. This was the initial clash of the war.

That the Japanese must ultimately bear the onus for the war is not in question; their record of aggression against China at least since the Twenty-one Demands in 1915, and especially since they seized Manchuria in 1931, was blatant.

This book fills a special need. The two decades of Nationalist rule on the mainland (1927–1949) were among the most critical in recent Chinese history. During those years, the Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, endeavored to consolidate its revolutionary victory of 1927–1928 and to build a nation based on Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People. At the same time, the revolutionary party led by Mao Tse-tung, drawing inspiration from the principles of Marx and Lenin, grew from a seemingly insignificant guerrilla band in the rural hinterland of Kiangsi Province into a military and political force that shook not only China but the world.

Yet none of the existing college textbooks on modern China presents the events of this momentous period comprehensively or on the basis of the most recent scholarly literature. Until the 1970s, most of what Westerners knew about the Nationalist period was gleaned from such journalistic accounts as Edgar Snow's Red star over China, Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby's Thunder out of China, and Jack Belden's China shakes the world – wonderful books that can still be read with excitement and benefit. In recent years, however, academic historians have been turning their attention to these critical decades. As a result, a spate of books, articles, and doctoral dissertations have substantially modified our understanding of the Nationalist period, shedding new light on the character of Nationalist rule and on the sources of the Communists' revolutionary victory.