Chinese White Terror
White Terror (Chinese: 白色恐怖; pinyin: B?is? Kǒngb?) in relation to modern Chinese history is associated with the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek.
On April 12, 1927, Chiang carried out purge of Communists from the Kuomintang in Shanghai and began large-scale killings. Chiang's forces turned machine guns on 100,000 workers taking to streets, killing more than 5000 people. Throughout April 1927 in Shanghai, more than 12,000 people were killed. The killing in Shanghai drove most of the Communists out of the urban cities and into the rural countryside.[3]
The greatest slaughter took place in the countryside, however. The White Terror in China took millions of lives, most of them in the rural areas.[4] The Chinese Communist Party was virtually extinguished. At the beginning of 1927, the Chinese Communist Party had about 60,000 members. By the end of the year, no more than 10,000 remained.
The "White Terror" continued throughout the Chinese Civil War, and also resulted in the assassination of a number of prominent Communists, leftists and democrats such as Wen Yiduo.