Eastman, Lloyd. "Nationalist China during the Nanking Decade, 1927-1937". In The Cambridge History of China, Vol.12, Republican China, 1912-1949, Part 2, edited by John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker, 116-167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Eastman, Lloyd. "Nationalist China during the Nanking Decade, 1927-1937". In The Cambridge History of China, Vol.12, Republican China, 1912-1949, Part 2, edited by John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker, 116-167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

• The Nationalist Guomindang was largely popular because it promised to defeat the twin evils of warlordism and foreign imperialism, solving what many Chinese considered to be their country's two biggest problems. The Guomindang was united in this goal, but it could not agree on who would lead this movement after Sun Yatsen's death in March 1925 (116-117).
• Part of the reason that the Guomindang was so disunited was that, from Sun Yatsen onward, the party had never refused membership to anyone and often engaged in mass enrollment tactics to push up nominal membership numbers. This meant that the party base had no common ideological commitments and often included defectors and warlords (118).
•  Most of the divisions within the Guomindang had been ignored for the sake of pursuing the Northern Expedition towards Beijing, but by 1927 they came to a head again because the issue of what group would capture Beijing became more and more important as military victory came closer (117).
• The Nanjing government, led by Chiang Kaishek, was formed on 18 April 1927 following General Chiang's purge of Communists from areas he controlled, most infamously during the 12 April Shanghai massacre, when hired gangsters killed thousands of suspected Communists with pistols and swords in that city (116).
• After the anti-Communist purges in Chiang Kaishek's territories, there were three distinct government claiming authority over the Guomindang: a left-wing government aligned with the Communists in Wuhan, Chiang Kaishek's government in Nanjing, and a right-wing government led by the Western Hills faction in Shanghai (117).
• At no point was the victory of the Nanjing faction ensured. In fact, the military setbacks versus Sun Chuanfang 孙传芳 in August 1927 were severe enough that Chiang Kaishek was forced to resign his command (117).
• The Wuhan government, led by Wang Jingwei 汪精衛, purged Communists from its own membership in July 1927, opening the way to reconciliation between the three Guomindang factions. All three factions formed a unified government in Nanjing in August 1927. The new government, however, excluded Chiang Kaishek and Wang Jingwei, the two most powerful men in China (117-118).
• In January 1928, the crumbling Nanjing government invited Chiang Kaishek to return from retirement to lead to the Guomindang and its armies (118).
• Chiang Kaishek was not the obvious choice to lead the Guomindang, but succeeded against much more well-connected rivals because his initial position as head of the Pazhou Military Academy meant that most of the commanders of the New Revolutionary Army were loyal to him. This transformed into effective command of the bulk of the armed forces, meaning his consent was necessary for any and all military action undertaken by the Guomindang (130).
• This independent military command both made him a necessary part of any Guomindang plans and an independent political actor. Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin, and other civilian leaders were often held captive by warlords and unable to directly commander their governments. By having primarily military authority, Chiang Kaishek was able to exercise an independent political authority (131).
• Control of Shanghai after Spring 1927 also granted Chiang Kaishek an independent financial base. The capitalists of Shanghai were indebted to Chiang Kaishek for massacring the city's Communists and crushing its labor unions, and paid him for their elimination. He extorted these capitalists for tens of millions of yuan and forced them to give his government loans. The wealth drained from Shanghai was used to make General Chiang's forces the best equipped and best paid in China (131-132).
• Once placed in control of the united Guomindang, Chiang Kaishek sought to purge the party of undesirable members, starting with the Communists. Not only were actually Communists removed from the party, but anyone with connections to Communist-affiliated organs, like the trade union and peasant branches of the Guomindang, meaning that these popular organizations were basically destroyed (119).
• Chiang Kaishek also sought to destroy the left-wing of the Guomindang, which criticized him for excessive militarism and undermining party democracy. The Guomindang left-wing supported Wang Jingwei, but since he was in exile in Europe, it concentrated around Wang Jingwei's friend Chen Gongbo 陳公博 (119-120).
• In late 1928, Chen Gongbo organized the left-wing of the party into a formal opposition group called the Reorganizationist Comrades Association, or the Reorganization faction, which advocated for an increased emphasis on workers, peasants, and small business-owners as the core of the nationalist revolution. The faction had distinct party structures within the Guomindang, and its own headquarters in Shanghai (120-121).
• The Reorganization faction actively implemented its agenda through the Guomindang, using its control of local party structures to organize boycotts of foreign goods, seize church lands, and force rent reduction (121).
• Chiang Kaishek destroyed the Reorganization faction at the Third Party Congress in March 1929, when he managed to organize the expulsion of Chen Gongbo and other left-wing opposition leaders and formally reprimanded Wang Jingwei. Furthermore, the Party Congress stripped the Guomindang of much of its power separate from the central government, further empowering the militarists (122-123).
• Chiang Kaishek replaced the posts vacated by Communists and leftists with old bureaucrats from the Qing government or warlords. This led to a proliferation of corruption, the creation of a deeply conservative bureaucracy, and the domination of the government by the military (123-124).
• Party membership was a prerequisite for government employment, further swelling the party ranks with those not ideologically committed to the nationalist revolution of Sun Yatsen (137).
• On 29 December 1928, Zhang Xueliang 張學良, the military governor of Manchuria, declared his support for the Nanjing government, extending the Guomindang's control to all parts of China except Tibet and Mongolia (124).
• Military control of China and the Guomindang was recognized through the division of Chinese administration into regional branches, each ruled by a warlord. Accordingly, Feng Yuxiang 馮玉祥 headed the branch in Kaifeng, Yan Xishan 閻錫山 led the  Taiyuan branch, Li Zongren 李宗仁 led the Hankou branch, Bai Chongxi 白崇禧 led the Beijing branch, Li Jishen 李济深 led the Guangzhou branch, and Zhang Xueliang led the Mukden branch (125).
• Chiang Kaishek disturbed this order with the announcement in late 1928 that the administrative branches would be dissolved by March 1929. He intended to concentrate all power within the presidency, making himself military dictator of all China (125).
• In January 1929, Chiang Kaishek organized a national conference in Nanjing to discuss demilitarizing the country. The armed forces numbered a total of 2 million men and cost more than the total national revenue. Everyone managed to agree to reduce the army to 800,000 men and expenditure to under 41% of the budget, but could not agree what force to cut first (125-126).
• Chiang Kaishek argued that his own units, led by loyal Pazhou graduates, were the best trained and most effective and therefore should be reduced the least. The regional warlords were unwilling to disband their forces while Chiang Kaishek's remained in tact, so no disarmament actually occured after the conference (126).
• The warlords of the Jiangxi clique -- Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi, and Li Jishen -- revolted against Chiang Kaishek in March 1929, hoping to force him to reverse his decisions on disarmament and the abolition of regional branches. Together they mustered 230,000 soldiers and had the sympathy of Feng Yuxiang (126).
• Chiang Kaishek managed to outmanouver the Jiangxi clique, paying General Feng 2 million yuan and offering him control of Shandong to stay neutral in the conflict. By May 1929, with better led and equipped troops, Chiang Kaishek managed to seize Hubei and Hunan and force Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi to retreat into Jiangxi (126).
• War broke out between Chiang Kaishek and Feng Yuxiang in May 1929, after General Chiang renegged on his promise to transfer Shandong to General Feng's control. Feng Yuxiang now declared his support for the Jiangxi clique and declared war (126-127).
• Within the first weeks of fighting, almost half of General Feng's army -- 100,000 men -- defected to Chiang Kaishek after their commanders were given massive bribes. Feng Yuxiang was then forced to retreat, with General Chiang seizing control of Henan and Shandong (127).
• The defeat of both Feng Yuxiang and the Jiangxi clique made Yan Xishan nervous for his own position should Chiang Kaishek continue centralization. With Feng Yuxiang, General Yan created an anti-Chiang coalition called the Northern Coalition in March 1930 (127).
• The Northern Coalition garnered support from all of Chiang Kaishek's many enemies, with Feng Yuxiang, Yan Xishan, Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi, the Reorganization faction, and the Western Hills faction all agreeing to attend a new Guomindang conference in Beijing in July 1930 (127).
• Before the Guomindang conference could occur, Chiang Kaishek ordered his troops to attack the Northern Coalition.  The war featured intense combat with high casualty rates, with roughly 250,000 soldiers dying in the four months of combat (127).
• In September 1930, Chiang Kaishek had gained the advantage in the war and managed to push Coalition forces back into Shanxi (127).
• Zhang Xueliang was neutral in most of the fighting between the Coalition and Chiang Kaishek, but was actively courted by both sides. In September, after receiving over 10 million yuan in bribes and the promise of all territory north of the Yellow River, Zhang Xueliang declared his support for Chiang Kaishek (127-128).
• The wooing of Zhang Xueliang was a pyrrhic victory for Chiang Kaishek, as General Zhang took the opportunity to force the Northern Coalition out of Hebei and take control of Beijing and Tianjin, as well as major nearby railroads, for himself (128).
• Jealous of the popularity of the provisional constitution created by the Northern Coalition, Chiang Kaishek determined that he would create his own constitution, making a public announcement of this intent in February 1931. This plan was vocally resisted by Hu Hanmin 胡汉民, who feared the document would be used to entrench Chiang Kaishek's dictatorial powers and resigned his post in protest. Chiang Kaishek arrested him after his resignation (128).
• In protest over Hu Hanmin's arrest, Bai Chonxi, Li Zongren, and Chen Jitang 陳濟棠 -- now the military governor of Guangdong -- called their own Guomindang conference in May 1931. Supported by Wang Jingwei, some of the Western Hills faction, and Sun Ke 孫科, they declared their own government in Guangzhou in June 1931 (128).
• In response to military threats from the Nanjing government, the Guangzhou government announced that it would only disband if Chiang Kaishek agreed to relinquish all of his positions in the Nanjing government (128-129).
• The Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 18 September 1931 caused massive protests across China demanding national unity and forced the Nanjing and Guangzhou governments to enter peace agreements. After months of acrimonious and complex negotiations under intense public pressure, Chiang Kaishek agreed to resign his positions and retire in his hometown of Xikou, Zhejiang in December. A new government in Nanjing was constituted with Lin Sen 林森 as Chairman and Sun Ke as President on 1 January 1932 (129).
• The new government collapsed after 25 days, as it excluded Chiang Kaishek, Wang Jingwei, and Han Humin. Without these figures, it was unable to win the public confidence to collect taxes or command the army. This became apparent very quickly, with Chiang Kaishek's return being requested by 2 January. On 21 January, Chiang Kaishek, Sun Ke, and Wang Jingwei met in Hankou and made a deal; on 25 January, Sun Ke resigned, replaced as president by Wang Jingwei, while Chiang Kaishek was made head of the Military Affairs Commission, responsible for the army (129).
• The Nanjing government's non-democratic rule was justified on the rationale of Sun Yatsen that China was unprepared for full democracy and need to progress towards that ideal in stages. The first stage had been military dictatorship. The Guomindang announced that this stage was officially over with the capture of Beijing in June 1928, and had been replaced by 'political tutelage' under a dictatorship of the Guomindang, which would run government and allow local elections until the populace was prepared for full democracy (134).
• There was a civilian government in Nanjing, separated into five branches: executive, legislative, judicial, examination, and control -- the last one acting as a censure and ombudsman for the government. Its authority, however, was subordinate to the Central Political Committee of the Guomindang, led by Chiang Kaishek, which was in turn subordinate to Central Executive Committee, led by Wang Jingwei (134-135).
• In practice, the Guomindang and civilian government were both weak during the 1930s, with real power resting with the military, led by Chiang Kaishek. Both the civilian government and the Guomindang were severely underfunded and frequently overruled by General Chiang (136-137).
• Corruption and cronyism were universal in the Nanjing government, with factions vieing to control political power and enrich themselves from the public purse. It was generally common practice for new appointees to fire everyone below them and replace them with their own cronies, who then paid for their position through a portion of corrupt proceeds (141).
• The Nanjing government was generally unpopular by the 1930s, as Chinese saw it as corrupt, despotic, and as appeasing the Japanese and other foreign imperialists. The government responded by doubling down on repression, arresting thousands of student protesters, assassinating opposition politicians, and shutting down or censoring critical newspapers (137-138).
• As the dictatorship tightened, dissenters were forced to operate in areas outside Chiang Kaishek's control. This usually meant either the foreign concessions or territories controlled by rival warlords, like the parts of Hubei ruled by Zhang Xueliang or Guangdong under Chen Jitang (138).
• The unpopularity of the Nationalist government made it dependent on the support of local elites, namely landlords and capitalist industrialists. Accordingly, the government opposed any form of rent reduction, control the trade union organizations, and even redistributed land back to landlords in areas controlled by the Communists (139).
• Originally, bankers were also able to place significant pressure on the Nanjing government, as the provincial collection of tax revenue meant that the government depended on loans to stay afloat. This relationship was upended, however, in 1935, when the government forced banks to sell majority shares to the government at reduced prices, effectively nationalizing the majority of the banking system by 1937 (139-140).
• The main focus of regime repression during the 1930s were still the Communists, who were arrested if discovered. The other primary focus was the Japanese, who were viewed as the imperialist power posing the greatest threat to China (141).
• The Nanjing government was split into a number of different cliques and factions, most involved with personal gain, but some with genuine political goals. The most powerful factions were the CC Clique, the Political Study Clique, and the Pazhou Clique (142).
• The CC clique was led by Chen Lifu 陈立夫 and Chen Guofu 陈果夫, brothers and the nephews of Chen Qimei 陈其美, a mentor and father-figure of Chiang Kaishek. Using their high position within the Guomindang, the Chen brothers appointed their supporters throughout the middle and lower levels of government, dominating the trade unions, educational system, bureaucracy, and the secret police (142).
• The Pazhou clique was composed of graduates of the Pazhou Military Academy. Outside of fierce loyalty to Chiang Kaishek, the Pazhou clique had no common ideology. Any organization among the graduates was from membership in the Blue Shirts, a secret organization formed in 1932 in opposition to Communism, Japanese imperialism, and corruption that gradually became openly fascist. The Blue Shirts ran the secret police, much of the civilian police, and carried out many of the assassinations order by Chiang Kaishek (142-144).
• The Political Study clique was a loose association of friends at the highest levels of government and lacked the organizational infiltration and popular base of the other cliques. Its leading figures were Huang Fu 黄郛 and Zhang Qun 張群, both close friends and sworn-brothers with Chiang Kaishek. They were generally technocratic and provided many of the policies adopted by the Nanjing government (144).
• Relationships between the cliques were complicated and tense, as they all agreed on the core points of supporting Sun Yatsen's nationalism and supported Chiang Kaishek to the hilt. The CC clique resented the Political Study clique for its influence on Chiang Kaishek's policies, while the Blue Shirts despised the other cliques as representatives of the corrupt civilian bureaucracy holding China back (145).
• Chiang Kaishek was primarily a nationalist, and sought to strengthen China so that it could successfully challenge Japan and the other imperialist powers. He sought to do this by adopting Western technology and creating a disciplined society, similar to that he observed in Japanese military academies (145).
• Chiang Kaishek admired the militarism and discipline of Germany, Italy, and Japan. He particularly liked fascism and thought that China should aspire to create a heavily militarized, disciplined society based on the principle of collective self-sacrifice and led by a strong totalitarian dictator (145-146).
• These aspirations for societal transformation were expressed in his creation of the New Life Movement 新生活運動 in 1934, which sought to instill all Chinese with discipline and willing to sacrifice everything for their country (146). Many, perhaps the majority, of its adherence were members of the Blue Shirts (144). The Movement was based on Confucian principles, reworked to fit fascist ideology (146-147).
• Chiang Kaishek believed that China needed to be internally united if it was to stand a chance against foreign imperialists like the Japanese. He thought the Communists were the greatest threat to this unity, saying that, "The Japanese are like a disease of the skin, but the Communists are like a disease of the heart" (148).
• China was overwhelmingly agricultural in the 1930s, with over 80% of the popular involved in farming, which accounted for roughly 65% of GDP. This rural peasant population was incredibly poor, often living barely above the level of subsistence and succumbing to starvation or disease during bad years. The mortality rate was more than twice that of the USA and higher than that of British India (151).
• Much of China's rural poverty was caused by an extremely unequal system of land tenure, in which land ownership was concentrated in the hands of a small number of landlords who charged exorbitant rents to peasants. Nearly half of Chinese rented farmland and often paid 50% to 70% of their income in rent (151-152).
• Hu Hanmin, then the head of the Legislative Yuan, tried to cap rents at 37.5% of harvest value in 1930, but this law was ignored by the provincial authorities and never enforced by the Nanjing government (151-152).
• The Nationalist government did adopt plans to expand irrigation systems, repair dikes and levees along rivers, and introduce new disease-resistant crops, but severe underfunding meant that these project never had a significant impact (152-153).
• The poverty of rural China only increased in the 1930s as the Great Depression collapsed demand, and therefore prices, for agricultural goods. This not only lowered peasant incomes, but also caused many indebted peasants to become insolvent. An abnormally stormy Winter in 1934 further compounded peasant woes by destroying crops, leaving the wealth of China in 1935 at roughly half that of 1931 (153).
• The increased effectiveness of the Nanjing government compared to previous warlord governments was expressed in higher taxes rather than improved services, which were not provided. This meant that the tax burden increased just as income plummeted. These taxes were sometimes supplemented with forced labor for the military or direct requisitioning of food, supplies, or draft animals by the military (154).
• The Nanjing government invested heavily into the industrialization of China, with that sector growing at 6% and the total electricity output doubling between 1927 and 1937. This growth, however, occurred from an extremely small base (155-156). This growth often occurred in government-owned sectors -- often confiscated from owners with compensation -- which constituted 12% of the industrial economy in 1937 (158), and had been established both for the lucrative monopoly opportunities and to provide the Chinese army with an industrial base (159).
• Government measures to increase economic growth were only partially effective and suffered from a severe lack of implementation. The Nanjing government abolished inter-provincial tariffs, established uniform weights and measurements, declared paper money to be the only official currency, and built over 2,700 miles of railway; doubling the total length of track in the nation (156).
• In practice, provincial warlords ignored the abolition of official inter-state tariffs and continued to levy their own fines on all commercial traffic, uniform weights and measurements were ignored by everyone except the central government, and use silver taels or paper currency issued by warlords was still common (156-157).
• These growth-producing measures were undermined by the government's own rapacious tax policies towards existing businesses. A lack of credit, with the vast majority being monopolized by the government and only available to private businesses at 20% interest, and heavy taxes forced hundreds of businesses into bankruptcy during the 1930s. Often, bribery of local tax collectors was needed to avoid an otherwise crippling tax burden (157).
• The power of the Nanjing government was still restricted in 1931, with its authority being present to some degree in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Jiangxi, Hubei, and Fujian, and essentially absent elsewhere in the country. This authority only began to expand with the initiation of the 5th annihilation campaign against the Communists in 1933 (148).
• The previous four annihilation campaigns in southern China had been failures, with the Communists employing guerrilla tactics to outmaneuver Guomindang forces, evade capture, and eventually drive off the invaders. The fifth campaign only succeeded on the back of 800,000 soldiers, Japanese and German advisers, and a simultaneous economic blockade of Communist-held areas (148).
• By Summer 1934, the Communists were running low on essential foodstuffs and equipment and losing to Nationalist forces. In October 1934, they decided to flee, breaking the Nationalist encirclement and beginning the Long March from their basis in the south to northern China (148).
• Using the excuse of following the retreating Communists, who were powerful enough that few of the warlords felt comfortable facing them alone, Chiang Kaishek occupied Hunan, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan. His troops installed their own garrisons in place of warlords', build strategic roads for future military transport, and forced these provinces to begin accepting and using the Nanjing government's paper money (148-149).
• Chiang Kaishek took advantage of his renewed authority over Guizhou and Hunan to threaten Chen Jitang's government in Guangdong. When Hu Hanmin, the key figure supporting Chen Jitang's government, died in May 1936, Chiang Kaishek demanded that Chen Jitang and the Jiangxi clique fully submit to the Nanjing government (149-150).
• The group rejected Chiang Kaishek's ultimatum and began mobilizing their troops in the north, allegedly to help fight off the Japanese, but really to fight Chiang Kaishek (150).
• Chiang Kaishek bribed the Guangdongese air force, getting the entire service to defect to his side in July 1936. Interlaced with a serious of minor skirmishes, Chiang Kaishek managed to bribe or intimidate almost every important member of the Jiangxi clique to defect to his side. In September 1936, Chen Jitang agreed to submit Guangdong to control by the Nanjing government (150).
• China experienced an economic boom in 1936, as the official replacement of a silver-backed currency with a fiat currency boosted total investment and economic stability at the same time as unusually good weather created a bumper crop. This ended a long economic crisis, allowing peasants to produce enough to buy consumer goods, in turn boosting the industrial economy (161-162).
• With Guangdong and Jiangxi now submitting to the Nanjing government, Chiang Kaishek decided that China was strong and unified enough to end its policy of appeasement and militarily resist Japan. A Japanese attempt to depose Fu Zuoyi 傅作义, the military governor of Suiyuan, and establish a puppet state in November 1936 was resisted and the Chinese foreign ministry repeatedly rejected Japanese demands in late 1936 (161).
• Despite his hardened stance against the Japanese, Chiang Kaishek still had a hate-boner for the Communists and launched a campaign in November 1936 to wipe out the last Communist base in northern Shaanxi. The Manchurian army assigned to this operation, however, sympathized with the Communists and resented fighting Chinese Communists instead of the Japanese, who were currently occupying Manchuria and parts of Hebei (162).
• In December 1936, the Manchurian forces, under the command of Zhang Xueliang, refused to continue fighting. Chiang Kaishek flew to Xi'an on 4 December to personally direct the operation. After days of fruitless negotiations with the Manchurian soldiers, on 12 December several Manchurian soldiers overpowered Chiang Kaishek's bodyguard and held him captive (162-163).
• Chiang Kaishek was held in Xi'an for two weeks, being released on 25 December after reaching a verbal agreement with Zhang Xueliang to stop attacking the Communists and focus on combatting Japanese imperialism, after General Zhang had overruled some radical Manchurian soldiers who had wanted to kill Chiang Kaishek (163).
• The public outcry in China at his kidnapping and jubilancy at his release testifies to Chiang Kaishek's genuine popularity by 1936, especially compared to general distrust of him in 1928 and his government's widespread unpopularity (163). 
• "The improved economic situation, [...], was directly related to the vagaries of China's weather and to the uncertainties inherent in the inflationary trend set off by the creation of a managed currency. The political and military unity of the nation was also extremely fragile, [...]. And the popularity of Chiang Kai-shek was attributable to his avowed determination to resist the Japanese rather than to any fundamental reforms in the regime itself. The new mood of the nation, in other words, had been generated largely by superficial and possibly transient phenomena. [...] The civil bureaucracy remained inefficient and corrupt. Government offices were filled with nepotistic appointees who had few if any qualifications for office, but filled the government bureaus with superfluous and self-serving personnel. Wages of these employees were low, and corruption was consequently rife in the administration" (164).