148 CRISIS IN CHINA x
But one day came other visitors, quiet and com-
posed, whose features were no less familiar to the
Generalissimo in captivity. They were a reminder,
perhaps, "of eyes he dared not meet in dreams."
. . . Turn back ten years, to the beginning of the
"Great Revolution" that Sun Yat-sen did not live
to see. Chiang Kai-shek, an able young executive,
was winning a name for himself as President of the
Whampoa Military Academy, which Sun Yat-sen had
established, with Russian advisers, as the training-
school for the National Revolutionary Army. Military
instructor at Whampoa, later Commander of Chiang's
own 2ist Division, was a youth of twenty-two called
Yeh Chien-ying. Head of the political department at
Whampoa, and already a thorn in the flesh of its
ambitious president, was a young Communist not
long returned from study in France and Germany,
His name was Chou En-lai.
1927, and the Nationalist armies, under Chiang
Kai-shek as Commander-in-Chief, had occupied
Nanking. Shanghai—the heart of China and Far
Eastern focus of world imperialism—was still in the
hands of reactionary war-lords, guarded by the guns
of foreign cruisers. To Shanghai, Chou En-lai was
sent to organise an insurrection; in the first months
nearly a million workers came out in a general strike.
The strike was suppressed, but not yet the revolution.
Chou and his comrades—Chao Tse-yen, Ku Shun-
chang, Lo Yi-ming—trained pickets and cadres,
armed a desperate band of three hundred workers.
On March zist another general strike closed the
mills of Shanghai; against the most amazing odds,
the arsenal was captured and the Chinese city passed
into the hands of the insurrectionists. Five thousand