Aftermath[edit]
Afterwards, the Nationalist Government issued a statement blaming the deserters from Zhang Zongchang's army for starting the attacks on the foreign consulates, and also accused the Communist soldiers within the NRA of committing atrocities which were wrongly assigned to the Kuomingtang.
National Revolutionary Army commander in chief Chiang Kai-shek suspected that the Communist Party of China and Soviet advisors in the Wuhan Nationalist Government used anti-imperialists and anti-foreign sentiments to instigate the Nanjing incident, and conspired to strengthen the communists and damage the right-wing faction of the Kuomingtang. Therefore, the Nanjing incident led to his determination to violently purge the communists from the Kuomingtang in Shanghai on 12 April 1927, formally ending their cooperation during the Northern Expedition and officially commencing the Chinese Civil War.
In 1928, Huang Fu, foreign minister of the newly formed Nationalist government in Nanjing, reached agreements with the United States and Great Britain to settle the damages caused by the Nanjing Incident, and the Kuomingtang agreed to apologize and pay significant compensation to both countries without disclosing the exact sum to save face for the Chinese. Although the Kuomingtang suffered financial loss as a result of this settlement, the Nationalist government did receive international recognition and established formal diplomatic relationship with two of the world's great powers for the first time after the Northern Expedition.[5]