The Nationalist Government: Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles & the KMT

Chapter 2 closed on a real political force gathering itself to end the Warlord Era by force — Sun Yat-sen's own Kuomintang, rebuilt around a newly trained National Revolutionary Army. This chapter covers what that party actually stood for, and the real military campaign it launched to make China's own reunification more than a declared ambition.

Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People

Sun Yat-sen first articulated his own founding ideology — the Three Principles of the People, or San-min doctrine — in a 1905 speech in Brussels, and the Tongmenghui he founded that same October in Tokyo formally incorporated the Principles into its own party manifesto. Sun spent the following two decades refining the doctrine, delivering sixteen weekly lectures on it to Kuomintang cadres between January and August 1924. Those lectures, transcribed and published as The Three Principles of the People, became his own final major written work.

Sun's Death & Chiang Kai-shek's Rise

Sun Yat-sen died of liver cancer on 12 March 1925, leaving the Kuomintang without its own founding figure just as it prepared its real military push against the warlord cliques Chapter 2 traced. Chiang Kai-shek, a rising KMT military leader, moved into the resulting leadership vacuum, formally codifying Sun's 1924 lectures as the party's own official ideology and positioning himself as Sun's own legitimate political heir.

The Northern Expedition Begins

Chiang accepted command of the newly organized National Revolutionary Army (NRA) on 9 July 1926, launching the Northern Expedition — a real, sustained military campaign aimed at reunifying China by defeating the three major warlord coalitions still dividing the country:

The First United Front & Its Real Fragility

The Northern Expedition was not fought by the KMT alone. The party had entered a real, formal alliance with the Chinese Communist Party — the First United Front — and received substantial Soviet support, including advisers like Mikhail Borodin and Vasily Blyukher. The arrangement gave the KMT real Soviet-trained military expertise and organizational support it badly needed, but it was genuinely unstable from the start: communist influence within KMT ranks grew steadily throughout the campaign, alarming Chiang and the party's own more conservative wing.

The Shanghai Massacre (12–14 April 1927)

That instability broke into open violence in Shanghai between 12 and 14 April 1927, when Chiang ordered a real, sweeping crackdown — hundreds of communists in the city were arrested and killed, effectively terminating the First United Front outright. The massacre split the KMT itself: a left-leaning faction based in Wuhan, led by Wang Jingwei, broke away from Chiang's own right-leaning government at Nanjing, dividing the nominally unified Nationalist movement into two rival centers of authority.

Completing Reunification

Chiang stepped down as NRA commander in August 1927 amid the internal KMT conflict the Shanghai split had triggered, then resumed command on 1 January 1928 once the Nanjing faction reasserted control. The renewed campaign pushed north against the last major holdout, Zhang Zuolin's Fengtian clique. Zhang was assassinated by Japanese forces in 1928; his son and successor, Zhang Xueliang, declared allegiance to the Nationalist government on 29 December 1928, formally completing China's own reunification under KMT rule and bringing the Warlord Era to its real, official close.

The unity this achieved, however, was nominal rather than complete — a great many regional warlords retained genuine local power well into the 1930s and 1940s, continuing to complicate Nationalist governance long after the Northern Expedition's own formal end. Chapter 4 turns from the KMT's own side of this story to the Chinese Communist Party's — its real 1921 founding, its role inside the First United Front this chapter has already traced from the KMT's own perspective, and the party's own path forward after the Shanghai break.

Hands-On Exercises