Kuomintang

Kuomintang (Chinese, Nationalist Party), political party of China organized after the Republican Revolution of 1911-1912, by which the Qing (Manchu) dynasty was overthrown and a republican government was established in China. In the summer of 1912 Nationalist leaders Sun Yat-sen and Sung Chiao-ren (Song Jiaoren) merged several revolutionary groups to form the Kuomintang, with Sun as its leader. The Kuomintang won a majority of seats in the parliamentary elections that August. However, the party was soon at odds with President Yuan Shikai, who became increasingly autocratic. Yuan had Sung assassinated and expelled the Kuomintang from the government.

After World War I (1914-1918), the Kuomintang set up a separate government in southern China and attempted to secure the recognition of the major foreign powers but succeeded in gaining only that of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The party held its first national congress in 1924; included among the delegates were numerous non-Kuomintang groups, notably the representatives of the Chinese Communist Party, who exercised great influence on the decisions of the congress. Between 1924 and 1927 the power of the Communists within the Kuomintang increased sharply. However, in 1927 Chiang Kai-shek, then a military officer and leader of a right-wing faction of the party, expelled the Communists and began a military campaign aimed both against them and at the conquest and unification of all China under the Kuomintang banner. By late 1928 this campaign had largely succeeded; the Kuomintang then began a period of “political tutelage,” during which the party was to run the government while educating the people about their political rights. This period, originally scheduled to end in 1935, was extended (because of the war against Japan) until the end of 1947, when a new constitution was promulgated.

Meanwhile, following the conclusion of World War II in 1945, the Communists, operating from bases in northern China and Manchuria, had resumed hostilities against the Kuomintang (Nationalist) regime. Attempts in 1946 by the U.S. government to mediate the strife ended in failure. In the bloody fighting that ensued, the Nationalist armies suffered a succession of grave defeats, and by the middle of 1949 the Communists controlled most of the Chinese mainland. The Kuomintang and remnants of its armies withdrew in the summer of 1949 to the island of Taiwan. With U.S. economic help and under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang (KMT) gradually strengthened Taiwan. On Chiang’s death in 1975, leadership of the Kuomintang was assumed by his son, Chiang Ching-kuo. After the latter died in 1988, Lee Teng-hui became the first native-born Taiwanese chairman of the KMT. Lee was responsible for significant democratic reforms in Taiwan, including the popular election of the Taiwanese president.