 Some National Revolutionary Army commanders with Communist backgrounds who were graduates of Whampoa Military Academy kept their sympathies for the Communists hidden and were not arrested, and many switched their allegiance to the CPC after the start of the Chinese Civil War.For the Kuomintang, 39 members of the Kuomintang Central Committee in Wuhan publicly denounced Chiang Kai-shek as a traitor to Sun Yat-sen, including Sun's widow Soong Ching-ling immediately after the purge.However, Chiang was defiant, forming a new Nationalist Government at Nanjing to rival the Communist-tolerant Nationalist Government in Wuhan controlled by Wang Jingwei on April 18.