Today we finally leave the warlords of the north behind and turn back to China's southern provinces, where Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang were still struggling to establish a stable base. Those efforts would be saved by the intervention of an outside party: the Soviet Union. Their aid though came at the price of allying with the tiny Communist Party of China. The partnership would change the KMT in ways Sun hadn't foreseen, but would also lift the Party out of the morass of frustrations it had been subjected to for the past decade.

Bibliography for this episode: 

1. Fairbank, John K & Denis Twitchett The Cambridge History of China, Volume 12: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 1 Cambridge University Press 1983

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