12. The Shanghai Massacres and Extermination Campaigns

Who supported Chiang’s turn on the Communists?

• industrualists and traders, who opposed trade unions that the communists were helping to build in Shanghai

• foriegners in the international settlement, afraid of losing economic interests if the communists seized control

• violent secret societies called Triads and the crime organisation known as the “Green Gang”

How many communists were killed in the so called “White Terror?”

• More than 5,000 Communists were dragged out and killed in Shanghai

• The attacks spread to other areas. In Hunan, more than a quarter of a million people were killed.

What did Mao and the communists try to do?

• Mao and the Communists did not follow orders from the Comintern to continue the United Front at any cost and staged the Autumn Harvest Uprising in August–September 1927, but the army was too small to take on the NRA

• Mao and his followers were forced to flee to the mountains of Jiangxi province. Here they set up a ‘Chinese Soviet Republic’, generally known as the Jiangxi Soviet, to govern the province. They spent the next 7 years in a struggle for survival there.

What was the aim of the extermination campaigns?

• Chiang desperately wanted to destroy the Communist, believing them to be an even greater threat than the warlords

• In the 1930-34 he stage 5 extermination campaigns

What did the first extermination campaign look like?

• in october 1930, with 44,000 NRA troops directed at the Communists in Jiangxi. Chiang intended to surround and destroy the Communists.

• plan failed completely, with the communists simply refusal to fight face to face with the GMD, instead tricking the NRA to enter their territory and laying traps for them

• The Communists captured the commander of the first army unit and tortured him, cutting out his tongue and damaging his face before they beheaded him.

What did the second extermination campaign look like?

• Chiang took personal direction of this one, directing 100,000 troops against the CCP in July 1931

• However, even though he caught the Reds by surprise, his cautious strategy of moving slowly to avoid ambushes allowed the much smaller communist forces to escape.

• Chiang’s troops met with opposition from the peasants, had too little to eat and caught dysentery from the dirty water. The troops reacted violently by burning down villages, massacring all the inhabitants and seizing their crops.

• Lack of support from the peasants was a key reason why Chiang’s extermination campaign did not

• succeed. Chiang attempted to recruit volunteers from the villages to help find the Communists, but villagers were unwilling, as they were unhappy with the violent actions of the GMD.

How many peasants were killed by the GMD in the years 1930 to 34

More than a million

What did the fifth extermination campaign look like?

• The GMD launched its fifth and final extermination campaign in autumn 1933.

• The Nationalists established a blockade around the soviet and deprived the inhabitants of food. They built over 11,000 km of roads into the soviet to allow the faster movement of troops.

• Chiang’s new military adviser, the German General Hans von Seeckt, advised the building of defences to force the Communists back and to provide shelter for the NRA. This allowed the GMD to surround the Communists and the scorched earth policy used by the Nationalists also meant that the Reds would have no alternative but to fight a static war.

• The Reds faced defeat after defeat; by October 1934 they were left with no alternative but to abandon the Jiangxi Soviet. They had lost over 60,000 soldiers and more than half of their territory.