Editing Zhou Enlai (section)

===Extent of cooperation===
Zhou's activities immediately after his removal from his positions at Whampoa are uncertain. An earlier biographer claims that Chiang Kai-shek put Zhou in charge of "an advanced training center for the CCP members and commissars withdrawn from the army".<ref>Hsu 53</ref> More recent Chinese Communist sources claim that Zhou had an important role at this time in securing Communist control of [[Ye Ting]]'s Independent Regiment. The regiment and Ye Ting later played a leading role in the Communists' first major military action, the [[Nanchang Uprising|Nanchang Revolt]].<ref name="Barnouin and Yu 35"/>

In July 1926, the Nationalists began the [[Northern Expedition]], a massive military attempt to unify China. The Expedition was led by [[Chiang Kai-shek]] and the [[National Revolutionary Army]] (NRA), an amalgam of earlier military forces with significant guidance from Russian military advisors and numerous Communists as both commanding and political officers. With the early successes of the Expedition, there was soon a race between Chiang Kai-shek leading the "right-wing" of the Nationalist Party and the Communists, running inside the "left-wing" of the Nationalists, for control of major southern cities such as Nanjing and Shanghai. At this point the Chinese portion of Shanghai was controlled by [[Sun Chuanfang]], one of the militarists targeted by the North Expedition. Distracted by fighting with the NRA and defections from his army, Sun reduced his forces in Shanghai, and the Communists, whose party headquarters was located in Shanghai, made three attempts to seize control of the city, later called "the three Shanghai Uprisings", in October 1926, February 1927 and March 1927.