The Kuomintang Regime and the Shanghai Capitalists, 1927–29

Abstract

“The reorganized Kuomintang [of 1927] established itself on a new social base – the Shanghai bankers, the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie of the cities, and the landlords in the country.” Such was the view of the allegedly leftist editor Frederick Spencer writing in 1934, and his opinion has been shared by writers of a variety of political persuasions and backgrounds. T. A. Bisson, a research associate for the Foreign Policy Association, observed in 1933 that the Nanking regime's “most powerful supporters have been the Shanghai bankers.” Robert W. Barnett, writing in 1941 for the Institute of Pacific Relations, argued that after 1927 “a progressive but anti-revolutionary Chinese bourgeoisie provided the ruling Kuomintang with its principal source of inspiration and support.” Ch'en Po-ta wrote that the Nanking regime was “a counter-revolutionary military dictatorship of the big compradors and big landlords. It was formed with the Shanghai, or the ‘Kiangsu-Chekiang,’ gangster ring of comprador–financiers at its core.”