Historical Studies (Chinese Edition)

No.2, 2018

Sun Yat-Sen’s Punitive Expeditions against Chen Jiongming and the Beginning of the Northern Expedition(Abstract)

Tan Qunyu and Cao Tianzhong

Putting down Chen Jiongming’s insurrection, reorganizing the Kuomintang and reunifying the country through the Northern Expedition were the major issues facing Sun Yat-sen in his later years. The three were closely related but not all of the same importance. Sun’s strategy was to attack Chen, who wanted peaceful relations in the West but aimed to fight in the East, through a combination of the East Route Army and the West Route Army. The East Route Army, with Fujian as its base, drew in Chen’s main forces, while in Guangxi the West Route Army, mainly made up of the Yunnan Army, defeated Chen’s strategy of maintaining peace to the West and occupied Guangzhou, the center of the Southwest. Unlike Henk Sneevliet, also known as Ma Lin, who believed that putting down the insurgency and reorganizing the Kuomintang were conflicting priorities, Mikhail Markovich’s well-thought-out handling of the relationship between the political positions of Guangzhou and Shanghai and his persuading Sun to continue with the reorganization meant that Guangzhou, which originally played a largely military role, became a Kuomintang revolutionary base with military, political and diplomatic functions connecting it to Shanghai, the Northwest and Beijing. This enabled the strategic reach of the Northern Expedition to extend from Guangzhou to the whole country.