ABSTRACT
As discussed in the previous chapter, the Comintern’s plenum in May 1927 once again supported the United Front policy, only this time an alliance of the CCP and the Left Guomindang alone. However, behind the scenes the Communist International’s sub-committee on China took sole responsibility upon itself for evaluating the agrarian movement in China and deciding how the Chinese Communist Party could best use it to their advantage. While this sub-committee appears to have adhered publicly to the Comintern’s policies supporting the agrarian revolution in China, in private it sought to temper the agrarian movement so as not to endanger the Chinese Communist Party’s faltering United Front with the Left Guomindang and the Hankou government. One of the Centrists’ main goals in keeping the second stage of the
United Front alive was to attack and destroy the United Opposition. During the middle of July 1927, Radek, Zinoviev, and Trotsky finally buried their own ideological differences and proposed a unified China policy of their own. For a time, it appeared that their proposals might even gain wide support throughout the Comintern, especially with the final collapse of the CCP-Left Guomindang alliance in late July. The Centrists could not afford to see this happen, and were willing to do almost anything to stop them. In a move specifically designed to undermine the policies of the United
Opposition, this chapter will provide the background to Stalin’s order to the Chinese Communists to organize and carry out an urban uprising in Nanchang under the banner of the Left Guomindang. A military action of this type-no matter how brief or how unsuccessful-would throw significant doubts on the United Opposition’s criticism that the Chinese Communists had little or no following among China’s urban population. Although the Centrist order to stage this uprising was carried out successfully and the United Opposition lost further ground as a result, such selfserving orders were to wreak havoc within the Chinese Communist Party, while ultimately leading to the Communist Red Army’s first purely military disaster.
