China’s “National People’s Party” and its attendant army, often simplified in English to “Nationalists.” The Guomindang was a nationalist and anti-Qing (Manchu) party formed in 1891 by Dr. Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen). It played a leading role in the Chinese Revolution that overthrew the Qing in 1911. It won a majority of seats in China’s first national elections in 1913. But Sun Yixian and the Guomindang could not overcome the warlord General Yuan Shikai, who defeated Guomindang troops later that year and proceeded to establish a personal dictatorship that lasted until his death in 1916. The Guomindang next failed to subdue numerous successor warlords who devastated and divided much of China, either breaking away from the center or seeking to replace Yuan Shikai in control of it. During the 1920s the Guomindang was structurally reorganized by Sun Yixian along Leninist lines, though he abjured Leninist ideology. In short, the Guomindang was remade as a “vanguard party” claiming to embody the whole national ideal in a small clutch of top leaders. But it was not a Marxist party, even though its leaders tactically and temporarily aligned with the smaller Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Guomindang cadres also accepted arms from the Soviet Union and received military training from Comintern advisers. After 1925 the Guomindang was led by General Jiang Jieshi . He sent his military forces fanning out from Guangzhou (Canton) to suppress the warlords. Those whom he could not defeat militarily at acceptable costs he simply bought out, restoring immediate peace and order without creating a unified or stable central system.
Jiang set up a national government in Nanjing, then turned on the CCP, killing its urban cadres in the “Shanghai massacre” and other attacks and massacres across China in 1927. Survivors scattered to the fringes of the country, especially deep into the southern countryside and mountains. Jiang’s ruthless move against the Communists precipitated the protracted armed struggle known as the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949). During a final “Northern Expedition” led personally by Jiang in 1928, Guomindang troops defeated or bribed, intimidated, and assimilated politically the last northern warlords. That superficially unified most of China under his dictatorship. In turn, general internal peace freed Jiang to attack the rural communal strongholds, or “soviets,” of various Communist bands. This action against CCP bases was described by Jiang as a sequence of “bandit suppression campaigns.” The prolonged and bloody contest with the Communist was interrupted by Japanese aggression into Manchuria in 1931, following the provocation of the Mukden incident. Jiang continued his campaigns against Mao Zedong and other Communists still holed up in the southern “Jiangxi soviet.” That forced Mao and the southern Communists onto the “Long March,” all the way to isolated Yenan in northwest China, where they reestablished a base and continued their desultory guerilla war. The exceptional Xi’an incident of December 1936, which forced Jiang temporarily to cooperate with the Communists and Mongolians, was followed in mid-1937 by outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). The Japanese assault proved a severe blow to the Guomindang, pushing its forces away from the coastal cities that formed Jiang’s main political base, deeper into southern and western China during a series of brutal retreats.
Guomindang armed forces were developed to fight warlord armies and Communists, not to oppose in battle a more modern force such as the Imperial Japanese Army . As head of the National Military Council, Jiang was nominally supreme commander of all Guomindang troops. In fact, his armies incorporated semi-independent warlord formations and were often led by former warlord generals of dubious martial quality, and with political and military agendas all their own. By the mid-1930s the elite core of Jiang’s Central Army comprised three heavy divisions of “The Generalissimo’s Own,” just 80,000 troops trained by German instructors and armed with the best German weapons and equipment. They were surrounded by less well-equipped and barely trained Central Army divisions, bringing the total Central Army force to 300,000 men. Many hundreds of thousands more troops of little to no real quality served in garrisons and lesser Guomindang armies all over China. Many were killed in the opening Japanese siege of Shanghai, or in bloody fighting around the Wuhan cities and industrial area over the first 18 months of the war. The Guomindang lost perhaps one million men in the first year of war.
Troop losses were partly made up by recruiting refugees from the coastal cities and from barely disguised warlord armies, but Guomindang recruitment centered on rough conscription of peasants. Such brutal methods were used that conscripts suffered a death or desertion rate of nearly 45 percent before they reached frontline units. Often starving and seriously ill peasants were taken to the front roped together by the hundreds, which was hardly a prescription for later producing motivated fighting men. Therein lay a good part of the explanation for the Guomindang’s continual poor showing against the Japanese. Its conscript divisions never equaled the prewar Central Army in skill or training, while equipment and weapons supplies dwindled as the Japanese brought pressure on Britain to close the Burma Road and on French Indochina to stop all rail and road supply to southern China. By 1940 the Sino-Japanese War was stalemated. Jiang had more men than weapons and was waging a strictly defensive campaign. The Japanese were more powerful but greatly overextended. The United States authorized Lend-Lease to the Guomindang starting in mid-1941, though delivery remained a problem. The Japanese ended all but minimal air resupply “over the Hump” by shutting China’s border with French Indochina in August, then invading Burma in December. The Sino-Japanese War thus merged with World War II at the end of 1941, as the Japanese attacked British and other Allied positions across Southeast Asia. The Western powers immediately offered a formal alliance to Jiang and the Guomindang. In return, Jiang desperately offered to send 100,000 troops to fight for the British outside China, on the condition that Britain arm and feed them. Ragged Chinese troops entered Burma just in time to participate in the British defeat in early 1942.
