At the time of the incident, the Nationalist and Communist parties of China were working together as part of the First United Front, allied against the local warlords who were carving the country into fiefdoms.

It had assisted Sun Yat-sen in regaining control of Guangdong; after his death from cancer in 1925, the Nationalists began a protracted leadership struggle that included interprovincial war.

[5] Andrei Bubnov, head of the Soviet mission in Guangzhou, noted in his reports that the incident was due to an abortive putsch mistakenly pursued by some of the Communist commanders in the Nationalist army.

Wu Tiecheng and Hui Dongsheng surrounded the residences of Wang Jingwei and the Soviet advisors, effectively placing them under house arrest.

[8] The Canton Coup effectively ended the efforts of the Chinese Communists and Soviets to undermine the Nationalists through steady work to strengthen the party's left wing at the expense of its right.

On 3 April a public telegram[clarification needed] from Chiang stated that the affair was a "limited and individual matter" of "a small number of members of our Party who had carried out an anti-revolutionary plot".

[11] Trotsky in Russia and the central committees of the Communist parties in Shanghai and Guangdong all opposed the arrangement with Chiang, but Stalin backed it.

"Emergency decrees" soon expanded Chiang's power for the duration of the Northern Expedition, although his direct control of the military remained partial[12] owing to its regional composition and divided loyalties.

[8] Zhou Enlai, removed from his posts in Guangzhou, travelled to Shanghai, where he organized strikes by hundreds of thousands of factory workers in February and March 1927.

[14] The Communists denied that there was any plot against Chiang Kai-shek and claimed that his actions were simply intended to remove the left-wing Wang Jingwei from influence over the National Revolutionary Army and over Guangzhou's important military academy.