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impression of Chen and maintained that Li, who saw a greater
revolutionary role for China's peasants than Chen did, was the more
ideologically correct of the two).
The Chinese Communist party (or CCP, as it is sometimes abbrevi-
ated in English) organized youth leagues and held foreign language
classestoprepareChina'sbrightestmindsforfurthertrainingand
indoctrination in Moscow. It also helped organize several labor unions
and strikes in Shanghai. Labor unions then spread to other Chinese
cities, where suspicious Chinese warlords sometimes violently
opposed them. In Peking, for instance, the warlord Wu Peifu opened
fire with machine guns in February 1923 on striking railroad workers,
killing or wounding several hundred of them.
By July 1922 the CCP had over 100 members in several Chinese
cities, and the Second Congress had decided to place the CCP under
the Comintern's control and direction. This meant that Moscow
would, in theory at least, be in charge of ideological and doctrinal mat-
ters pertaining to communism in China. This would eventually lead to
some friction in China between more orthodox Communists who fol-
lowed Moscow's guidance for “bourgeois” and “proletariat” revolu-
tion on the one hand and the peasantist group (including Mao
Zedong) on the other, which advocated a greater revolutionary role
for China's millions of peasants.
THE FIRST UNITED FRONT
The warlord period did not drag on forever. The geopolitical divi-
sion and intellectual openness it fostered had both come to an end by
1927, when Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun Yat-sen's key generals, finally
defeated most of the warlord regimes and more or less allied or
entered into a state of detente with the rest of them. In achieving a
nominal unification of China, Chiang Kai-shek also broke off all ties
with the Chinese Communists. This led to periodic civil war in China
until 1949 and the final Chinese Communist triumph.
After Yuan Shikai betrayed Sun's republican revolution, Sun once
again went abroad for a time, seeking more funds from his followers
and eventually regrouping them into a more tightly organized body,
which he named the Nationalist Party, or Guomindang (sometimes
also known as the KMT, after the initials of its old-style spelling,
Kuomintang). He eventually returned to China and established a
government of his own in southern China to serve as an alternative
to the various warlord-dominated regimes in Beijing.
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