ABSTRACT
This chapter might be entitled "How to Make a Revolution," but the story it tells does not adhere to the neat outline that historians often structure to show the macrotrajectory, or large course, of revolution. As identities were politicized into right or left, conservative or radical, revolutionaries began drawing the sword. The episode revealed Chiang's active suspicion of Communist intentions, although he still favored cooperation in the united front; it also pointed clearly to the intraparty feuding that repeatedly saw drawn swords. Political polarization between left and right inhibited revolutionary progress as the CCP and the Guomindang left and right tended to turn in on themselves, drawing swords to strike out against their perceived foes and, they would have said, the foes of revolution. The CCP would rise again, but its leaders would be of a different sort than the May Fourth intellectuals who had formed and given life to the party in this, its first incarnation.
