China: The Asian Civilization - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 245

to plotting from abroad the overthrow of the Manchus. While Sun was soliciting money
and support from the Chinese community in the United States, he was elected Provisional
President by the fledgling republican government. Sun hurried to China in time to take the
oath of office on January 1, 1912. (October 10, 1911, has been officially celebrated as the
birthday of the Republic.)
Events now moved to favor the nascent republican cause. On February 12, the boy
emperor abdicated, and 2,000 years of traditional monarchy crumbled into the dustbin of
history. The most powerful republican faction was soon to be the National Peoples Party,
The Kuomintang, organized in the summer of 1912 (even as the country was sundered into
military fiefdoms—the war lords).
In 1918 two new unknowns were added to the algebra of Chinese politics. Sun allied
himself to Chiang K'ai shek, a Chinese soldier trained by the Japanese army. In 1923 Sun
appointed Chiang military chief of staff of his government. Very quickly Chiang took over
leadership of the Kuomintang and would dominate China in good times and bad for the
next thirty-five years. In 1918 the Russian revolution also occurred. Shortly thereafter,
agents of Soviet Russia began operating in China, working to install a Communist regime.
CIVIL WARS
Nationalists and Communists competed for supremacy. Shanghai was the deadliest con-
frontation. In 1927 Chiang's troops overran the city and killed the Communist leaders of
the workers' unions along with several hundred of the rank and file. Communist uprisings
spread to other cities, but these fell to Shanghai's fate. [220] The years 1927 to 1937 were
the decade of Chiang's greatest success, even as the Communists under two gifted lead-
ers—Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) and Chou En-lai (Zhou En lai)—were re-grouping in
the countryside and taking control of scattered cities. Fighting between the Nationalists and
Communists flared sporadically until 1934. A crushing assault by Chiang forced Mao to
lead his forces on the historic Long March: a 6,000-mile trek from Kiangsi northward to
safety in Yenan in Shensi province. There, the Communists wooed the peasants, redistrib-
uted land, created their own version of a Communist state, trained their army, and waited.