On the 12th of april in 1927, Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-Shek carried out the Shanghai Massacre, attacking and disarming workers' militias by force, resulting in more than 300 people being killed or wounded.
This incident marked the beginning of a campaign of violent suppression of Chinese communists by conservative factions in the Kuomintang, killing 300,000 people over the course of three years.
The Shanghai Massacre began before dawn, when nationalist troops began to attack district offices controlled by the union workers. Under an emergency decree, Chiang then ordered the 26th Army to disarm the workers' militias.
The union workers organized a mass meeting denouncing Chiang Kai-shek the next day, and thousands of workers and students went to the headquarters of the 2nd Division of the 26th Army to protest. Soldiers opened fire, killing 100 and wounding many more.
This incident marked the beginning of a prolonged purge of communists from the Wuhan province, and the ensuing violence killed over 300,000 people in less than three years. Stalin offered his support, sending a telegram to the Chinese communists on June 1st, urging them to organize militarily against the state.
The events of April 1927 prompted the Comintern in Moscow to break ties with the Guomindang. It also triggered in-fighting between communists and left-wing nationalists in Wuhan that contributed to the collapse of Wang Jingwei’s government there. By late summer 1927, right-wing nationalists were ascendant in the Guomindang and Chiang Kai-Shek had emerged as the dominant republican leader of China.
Thousands of communists were forced underground in the cities or dispersed to rural areas. Some attempted to fight back. In response to the Shanghai massacre, on August 1st, 1927, the Communist Party launched an uprising in Nanchang against the Nationalist Wuhan government, which had previously been sympathetic to the Communists. The conflict meant that the Wuhan government and Chiang were once again aligned to crush the CCP.
This period is also acknowledged to have seen the emergence of the CCP’s “Red Army,” comprised of armed peasants and former nationalist soldiers. Despite KMT efforts to suppress the CCP forces, the communists successfully established control over many areas in southern China after attacks on cities such as Changsha, Shantou, and Guangzhou. In September, the leader of the Wuhan government, Wang Jingwei, was forced into exile.
By this point, three capitals were in effect across China: internationally-recognized Beijing, the KMT regime in Nanjing, and CCP-held Wuhan. This marked the start of a decade-long struggle known as the Ten-Year Civil War.
A large group in southern China led by Mao Zedong established a base in the remote Jinggang Mountains. A Kuomintang counterinsurgency campaign forced Mao and his group to relocate once again, and they moved into the border region between Jiangxi and Fujian provinces.
In order to rebuild the party's strength, the 6th National Congress ordered these rural cadres to organize soviet governments. Mao's group founded the Jiangxi Soviet, which became the largest and best administered soviet thanks to the number of Communist cadres from across the country that took refuge there. Although the Central Committee of the Communist Party was still underground in Shanghai during this period, the center of political gravity had begun to shift to Mao in Jiangxi.
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We got another one
Mind if ask for a wiki or something? I wanna binge the world building. I assume stuff is going to be explained later, but I just hate feeling confused
I don't know of any wiki for it at this point. I'll lay out a few basics of the world building for you. Major spoilers ahead.
world building spoilers
Setting: Earth's oceans, unknown thousands of years after some probably manmade crisis caused the surface to become uninhabitable and the photic layer of the ocean to be inhabited by giant Kaiju monsters called Leviathans which will destroy anyone who ventures up there. People live in cities on the seafloor and travel in submarines between them.
Combat is accomplished by means of ship battles shooting missiles and guns, as well as deploying mechas with single pilots called divers. Because everything is happening in the deep ocean, radio and radar don't work and visibility is extremely low so things tend to happen at very close ranges, even to the point of literal knife fights between divers.
Many of our POV characters are diver pilots, because mecha pilots and mechas fights are cool. Divers were originally created by the Union as essentially underwater technicals but are now used in a role somewhat analogous to fighter aircraft by all factions.
Major polities:
The Union: communist society created by slave revolt against the Empire some 20 years before the events of the story. The good guys.
The Empire: like it says on the tin, capitalist empire with a monarchist government. The emperor dies around the start of the story, leading to a shattering of the empire with various factions vying for power, prominently including fascists.
The Republic: capitalist "democracy" which has been fighting border wars against the Empire for many decades, cautiously semi-allied with the Union on the grounds of having a common enemy in the Empire.
Katarra: ancap eugenicists, not really a functional country, often hired as mercenaries all over the place.
People come in many shapes. There are your baseline humans, plus elves, cat people (called shmii), dog people (called loup), and fish people of every possible description, the latter coming mostly from the eugenicist labs of Katarra.
Even more major spoilers, do not read beyond this point unless you want to be thoroughly spoiled on things which are not revealed for dozens of chapters:
There are also nonhuman fish people called Omenseers who can either take a Leviathan form and swim in the sea or a Katarran-like fish person form and walk among humans. They are truly alien in biology and psychology and many of them are very inimical to humanity as a whole while others are cute and friendly.
There are psychic powers in the setting, from seeing a person's emotional state as a colored aura, to telekinesis, telepathy, and more exotic effects. These are a combination of inborn ability and training, and are little known and kept secret among humans, while Omenseers are basically all adept and extremely powerful with them.
If you want to know more just ask in a megathread and one or more of us Unjust Depths nerds will answer.
I don’t read the one labeled as major, but I really appreciate you taking the time to describe the basic setting and stuff in the first tag.
I’m on chapter 4 now, and holy shit this person deserves a book deal
Enjoy