Founded on June 16, 1924, China’s first modern military academy aimed to reunite a divided nation. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Looking out over rows of aspiring young military cadets on an island, not far from the bustling docks at Whampoa in Guangdong province, the great revolutionary Sun Yat-sen felt a stirring of hope for reigniting his vision of a unified Republic of China.
China in May, 1924, had gone grievously off-piste from the nation Sun was credited with founding over a decade ago. It was fragmented into regional satrapies ruled by warlords. Far away, in the former imperial capital of Beijing, a rotating cast of warlord-adjacent politicians took turns as the nominal president of the republic. When Sun proclaimed the cadets as the inaugural class of the Whampoa Military Academy on May 1, it was the latest in a long series of schemes and strategies to revive the fortunes of the Kuomintang (KMT), the political party he co-founded.
Jeremiah Jenne is a writer and historian based in Beijing since 2002. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Davis, and has taught Late Imperial and Modern Chinese History for over 15 years. His essays and articles on China have appeared in The Economist, the South China Morning Post, The Journal of Asian Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The World of Chinese. His writings can also be found in China in “2008: A Year of Great Significance,” “The Insider’s Guide to Beijing,” and the 2015 collection “While We’re Here: China Stories from a Writer’s Colony.” Jeremiah frequent speaks and leads workshops on history, culture, and cultural adaptation for students, embassies, companies, and community groups. Along with David Moser, Jeremiah also hosts the podcast Barbarians at the Gate.
