ABSTRACT
The Northern Expedition has spawned a sizeable literature, including some of the best writing on modern China, combining meticulous research with elegant prose and strong convictions about important issues. English accounts have written about the Northern Expedition as a revolutionary movement, which began with the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, entered into a decisive phase when the NRA set off from Guangdong in July 1926, and reached a disastrous end in the spring of 1927 when two centres of power in the KMT competed for supremacy and when the Nationalists unleashed a White Terror in which many thousands of Communists and tens of thousands of others died. Who was to blame for this end to what many believed could have been a successful revolution became an important concern. 1
