The Kuomintang's purge of the Whampoa Military Academy cadet corps took place three days after the anti-communist massacre in Shanghai.
The students were surrounded by armed troops upon reaching the academy's athletic field for morning exercise and told that they would be separated and taught different curricula if they were communists.
Shortly after returning home, Browder published the book Civil War in Nationalist China.
In section two of the first chapter, he recounts the growing divisions within the Kuomintang government and its attempts to hide them from the delegation.
It was quite evident to us that these demonstrations, at which the soldiers and cadets sang the International and shouted such slogans as "Long Live the World Revolution," were not at all to the taste of the staff officers of the army present in Canton.