Time and place From the morning of September30 to the evening of October1, 1927, around
Tangkeng Town in the
Meizhou-
Chaozhou border hills.
Opponents A Guangdong warlord force of 15,000 troops allied with the emergent Right-
Kuomintang under
Chiang Kai-shek, well-entrenched and supplied blocking the march of the
Nanchang mutineers, led by
Communist International (Comintern) advisors and
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members, toward the resupply of
Shantou by a Soviet ship with the ultimate aim of seizing
Guangzhou for the emergent Left-Kuomintang government then established in
Hankou, Hubei. After the rigours of the two-month
Little Long March, there were only 5,000 troops available for this Comintern mission.
Ye Ting and
He Long had most of the force.
Zhu De's section was charged with protecting the march's north flank. CCP founding member
Zhang Tailei arrived from
Hong Kong with a new Comintern directive: there would be no arms shipment coming into Shantou. The troops were to avoid combat and retreat into the hills south and west of that port, there to proclaim the
Haifeng Soviet.
Outcome Left-KMT troops saw 40% of their number killed in action during the two days' of fighting. Ye Ting took his surviving troops to Haifeng where they enforced the return to local power of
Peng Pai. He Long had no men at his disposal and barely escaped; Zhu De led his survivors northwest into
Hunan, He Long's old bandit-ground. With Right-KMT-allied warlord troops closing in, CCP leaders
Zhou,
Li and
Zhang slipped out of the now-hopeless Shantou port area and eventually returned to
Shanghai, the latter two by way of Hong Kong. ==See also==