Perhaps the one valid vote that did not go his way was actually his own? At any rate,that's how it appeared, and it made him look humble.
Two hundred and forty-eight votes was better than a clean sweep of 249.
Soong Ching-Iing, elected with 245 votes, spoke highly of the situation in Guang-dong after the victorious Eastern Expedition： "Everything with the government and mili-tary situation here is making progress, going better than when Mr. Sun was still with us."
There could be no higher endorsement than those words from Sun Yat-sen's widow："going better than when Mr. Sun was still with us."
Chiang Kai-shek could not even get into the KMT's First National Congress; by the Second, he was the coming man.
At the entrance to Guangzhou First Park hung a paired couplet. It read： "Jingwei to tame the roaring ocean. Kai-shek to fix the broken heaven."
People cannot recall anyone being commended as highly as Chiang Kai-shek.
With his reputation at a peak, Chiang moved into action.
In March 1926, in the Zhongshan Warship Incident, he killed three birds with one stone.
This time he had new targets： the CPC, the Russian advisors and Wang Jingwei.
Borodin happened to be out of Guangzhou at the time, but the other Russian advisors were put under house arrest. Then the "Party Purge Act" stripped Borodin of any actual power he had previously enjoyed.
After the Party Purge, the Communists were forced to give up their seats on the KMT Central Committee. They also had to quit the First Army. In the aftermath of the Zhong-shan Warship Incident, the Communists exited the First Army and the Soviet chief advisor Kuibyshev was expelled. For a long time these were viewed as the malign consequences of Chen Duxiu's "compromising" policy vis-a-vis Chiang. The truth, however, is that the Soviet advisors Andrei Bubnov and Borodin were the actual decision makers and they forced this conciliatory policy on Chen. Later, Bubnov gave six reasons in defense of his action. His first reason was so as not to "scare offthe big bourgeoisie," since without them the Communists "would be unable to assume leadership of the National Revolution, a job that they are totally not ready for." In a report on reaction to the Zhongshan Warship Inci-dent, Bubnov argued that the CPC should just do the hard work to "ensure the success of the revolution" and not seek to lead it. Otherwise, ~iany radical action might scare off the big bourgeoisie," "plunge the Guangzhou government into crisis and ultimately lead the National Revolution to defeat."
Bubnov's senior advisor was Borodin.
Bubnov went back to Moscow via Shanghai, where he shared his take on things with Chen Duxiu, who knew nothing about recent events in Guangzhou. In a rushed response,he issued an instruction on behalf of the CPC Central Committee describing Chiang as having been misled by the rightists. While his "action is extremely wrong, the situation cannot be solved by simply punishing Chiang." Rather, they should "pull him out of the abyss of his own error."
The withdrawal of the Communists from the KMT Central Committee and the First Army was turned into their way of "pulling [Chiang] out ofthe abyss of his own mistake."
Chiang did not do much in terms of payback. All he did was to oust Wu Tiecheng,Sun Ke and Wu Chaoshu. This was necessary if he wanted to establish a dictatorship, yet in a letter sent to Lev Karakhn on May 30, 1926, Borodin complacently described their expulsion as "a greater blow for the rightists than for the Communists……The rightists had their weapon against us taken away."
Borodin continued to live in the bubble of his own dream world.
Chiang was acting to create his own reality.
Chiang's third target, after the Communists and the Russian advisors, was Wang Jingwei.
Of Chiang's three targets, Wang was the only one who understood what had hap-pened with the Zhongshan Warship Incident.
He later recalled, "No one of the central executive committee or the political commit-tee had any prior knowledge of what was going to happen on March 20. I was the chair-man of the political committee. What should have been my responsibility? Guangzhou was put under martial law on March 20 and not a soul on the military committee knew a thing about it. As chairman of the military committee, what should have been my responsibili-ty?"
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