 There he was in military affairs under the orders of "General Kleber" (nom de guerre of Manfred Stern), who maintained a "military section" in the city, and in political issues under Arthur Ewert, a fellow German Communist.However, Shanghai was at that time a backwater in Chinese revolutionary affairsthe local Communist movement having been effectively crushed by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) in the Shanghai massacre of 1927.The Chinese Communists had subsequently retreated to the countryside and started to organize in the province of Jiangxi.