certing to them to have events move in exactly the opposite direction. Their chagrin was expressed by the spilling of the blood of hundreds of Chinese men, women, and children by British and American gunboats shelling Nanking and Weichow.
It must be stated that the imperialists had reasons for their reactionary hopes. On March 20, 1926, while the Kuomintang was still confined within the Province of Kwantung so far as power was concerned, under the shadow of Hongkong, symbol of British power in China, the right wing in the party executed a coup d'etat, under the leadership of General Chiang Kai Shek, head of the military forces and the Whampoa Military Academy. From that time on, Chiang Kai Shek assumed supreme power in the party, expelled the Communists from all official positions ,and forced the elected Chairman of the party, Wang-Ching-wei, into exile. British and American newspapers suddenly began to speak in a different and more friendly tone about the Nationalist Government. And when Chiang Kai Shek became Marshal of the Northern Expedition, which swept through China in the summer of 1926, and occupied the Wu-Han cities in November, the imperialists thought the right wing was completely in power in the Kuomintang.
Under such conditions, how was it possible to effect such a radical change as we found on arriving in Hankow? How was the right wing defeated in the Party? To what extent does there exist a danger of military revolt against the Nationalist Government? What are the next perspectives of the Chinese Revolution? The following is an attempt to find the answer to these questions in the expressions of the Chinese masses themselves:
8. The Development of Revolutionary Forces
It was when the Northern Expedition of the Revolutionary Army last year marched from Kwantung, through Honan, Kiangsi and Hupeh, capturing half of China, that the forces were prepared which have now overthrown the dictatorship of Chiang Kai Shek in the Kuomintang. These military victories have been hailed by bourgeois writers as
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