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For both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Guomindang (GMD), the experience of their political association from 1922 to 1927 had a profound effect on the later course of their development. This period has come to be known as the First United Front, though in fact this term cannot be used without initial reservation, since only the CCP spoke of a united front between it and the GMD. For the latter party, with its well-established revolutionary history, the term “admission of the communists” (rong gong) was invariably used to denote the opening up of GMD membership to members of a smaller and definitely junior political movement. The adoption of the communist designation in later years by many students of the period reflects in part the attention given by western scholarship to the development of the CCP during the critical years of the 1920s. However, even if the term “united front” is retained for convenience as a general rubric for the 1922–27 period, it is important that the Guomindang be subjected to careful scrutiny in its own right, so that the GMD-CCP relationship may be understood more fully. This is to be stressed, since the categories often applied to the GMD, such as “left” and “right,” while of value in some instances, on the whole blur or distort the wide range of opinion within that party on the question of communist involvement in it. Until the purge of the CCP took place in 1927, GMD attitudes towards the communists were characterized by much fluidity.

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