There is an old Chinese saying in Sun Ke (left), Hu Hanmin (middle), and Wang Jingwei (right): "If the name is not upright, the words will not go well; if the words are not upright, the things will not go well." Whoever represents the orthodox of the Kuomintang and who is regarde

Sun Ke (left), Hu Hanmin (middle), Wang Jingwei (right)

There is an old Chinese saying: "If the name is not right, the words will not go well; if the words are not right, the things will not go well." Whoever represents the orthodox of the Kuomintang and who is regarded as Sun Yat-sen's natural heir is extremely important for whether he can "righteously" possess the status of supreme leader and establish a stable rule. However, Sun Yat-sen did not solve this problem during his lifetime. As soon as he died, he left a vacuum in the party that others could not fill, and a situation of no leader appeared.

In the Kuomintang, the oldest qualified and most closely related to Sun Yat-sen are Hu Hanmin, Wang Jingwei, and Liao Zhongkai and . Liao Zhongkai was assassinated less than half a year after Sun Yat-sen's death. Hu and Wang have similar status: Hu Hanmin acted as the Grand Marshal after he went north after Sun Yat-sen went north, and Wang Jingwei was the first chairman of the Guangdong National Government. As for , Chiang Kai-shek , he can only be said to be a "backward" within the party, and he has not been in a high-level position for a long time. At the First National Congress of the Kuomintang, he did not even have the qualifications to represent, let alone enter the central executive committee, the core organization of the party. However, Chiang started his career as the principal of the Whampoa Military Academy and mastered this "party army". He performed outstandingly in the Eastern Expedition to attack Chen Jiongming. When he vowed to the Northern Expedition, he became the commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army. At that time, he was under 39 years old and had not yet become the "supreme leader" that could convince the public. The factional politics of the top Kuomintang leaders was carried out under such a political background.

Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen

Chen Duxiu once had a famous saying: "Any group is moving towards unification from the outside and at the same time, that is, to split from the inside, but foreign competition often intensifies internal unity. This is a public law." For the Kuomintang, the ups and downs of its high-level factional contradictions almost all reflect this "public law". Although the formal division within the party began with Sun Yat-sen's death and originated from a dispute over inheritance rights, there was no bloody conflict. When the Kuomintang went from the "source of revolution" to the whole country and became the ruling party of the country, its internal divisions turned into huge armed conflicts, especially the political forces represented by Chiang Kai-shek, Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin, who often had an opposition to openly lead other factions to oppose the ruling factions.

In this process, although Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin had the highest status within the party, the rising Chiang Kai-shek relied on his control of military power and used the conflicts between Wang and Hu to unite one side to attack the other side, and gradually established his own powerful rule. During this period, the relationship between the three people often maintained an interesting situation like two-on-one, and most of them were centered on Chiang, and the two-on-one always gained an advantage. Chiang's status was also continuously consolidated and strengthened, while Wang and Hu assisted the Jiang family in the fight against the other side with their status as veterans in the party.

Chiang Kai-shek and Hu Hanmin

According to the "public rules" mentioned by Chen Duxiu, at the beginning of the Northern Expedition, although factional conflicts within the party had developed day by day, they still maintained a situation of unity on the surface. However, when the Northern Expedition Army defeated the main force of Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang, the conflicts within the party were fully disclosed and led to the split of Ninghan; and when the second Northern Expedition was attacked by the Fengtian warlords, the four armies led by Chiang Kai-shek, Feng Yuxiang, Yan Xishan, and Li Zongren, respectively, could still act together, but when the Northern Expedition ended, the conflicts between various military forces broke out in full swing from the delegation meeting, and evolved into a series of armed conflicts and years of melee. In this war, not only Yan Xishan, Feng Yuxiang, and Li Zongren were standing against Chiang Kai-shek, but also Wang Jingwei, the veterans of the party, and the Xishan Conference. When Chiang Kai-shek was fighting in the front, the people who presided over the central government in Nanjing were Legislative President Hu Hanmin and President Tan Yan-kai .

After the victory of the Central Plains War , Chiang Kai-shek, who had always only valued military power, thought there was no more force in the country that could compete with him.At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek's arbitrary behavior and the civil conflicts between Hu and Han, who claimed to be "party power" were growing increasingly (Tan Yankai died at the time of victory of the Central Plains War). Chiang Kai-shek turned around and dealt with Hu Hanmin. Unexpectedly, it triggered a greater division within the Kuomintang again, and a confrontation between Ning and Guangdong occurred, and forced Chiang Kai-shek to step down for the second time.

Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei

But there has been no new situation of cooperation between Wang and Hu. The matter was soon because Hu refused to cooperate with Chiang and Wang. At the same time, Wang and Hu had a grudge in history, which eventually formed a new trend of cooperation between Chiang and Wang, forcing the newly-employed Sun Ke cabinet to collapse. Since then, although Hu Hanmin once controlled Guangdong and Guangxi and continued to make anti-Chiang remarks, the Southwest Government Committee and the Southwest Executive Department led by him are still nominally affiliated with Nanjing National Government and the Central Party Department; Sun Ke also quickly returned to Nanjing and took office as the president of the Legislative Yuan who was formerly appointed by Hu Hanmin. The Xishan Conference faction, which had long been excluded from the core circle of the Kuomintang rule, has since returned to the center. Local powerful leaders such as Yan Xishan, Feng Yuxiang, Li Zongren, Chen Jitang and also joined the newly established military committees. On March 1, 1932, the Second Plenary Session of the Fourth Central Committee of the Kuomintang selected Chiang Kai-shek as Chairman of the Military Commission. From then on, the Kuomintang basically established the situation of joint rule among various factions and roughly maintained until the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War.

After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, the Kuomintang held an interim National Congress in 1938, and Chiang Kai-shek was elected as the newly established president of the Kuomintang, which truly established Chiang's position as the "supreme leader" within the Kuomintang.

This article is excerpted from the introduction of "Factional Politics of the High-Leaders of the Kuomintang (Revised Edition)", written by Jin Yilin, Social Sciences Documentation Press, July 2016, with abridged.