ABSTRACT
The Shanghai Guomindang The May Thirtieth Movement caused the Shanghai GMD to grow, but it continued to lack the mass base which the party had in Canton and the south. Over 2,000 joined the Shanghai organization in the second half of 1925, but the drop-out rate was high, and by May 1926 membership still stood at only 1,200, of whom half were Communists.1 There are no data on the social composition of party members, but at least half were students. We know, for instance, that there were over 300 members in the GMD branch at Shanghai University and seventy in the branch at Daxia University at this time.2 During the summer of 1926 membership grew rapidly to reach 2,266 by October, 1,300 of whom were students, one-third allegedly ‘rightists’.3 Workers probably formed the next largest contingent of members, followed by merchants, who in May 1926 numbered 300.4 Roughly the same size as the local CCP (for a brief period around May 1926, Communists outnumbered GMD members), the growth of the Shanghai GMD was pitifully slow. When measured against a national membership of 183,700, according to the far from complete figures given to the Second National GMD Congress in January 1926, the GMD in Shanghai was small.5
