Kuomintang
From Conservapedia
The Kuomintang of China (KMT), also known as the Chinese Nationalist Party and Guomindang, is a conservative party currently active in the Republic of China on Taiwan. It supports pan-Chinese nationalism, democracy, Chinese reunification, and capitalism under the doctrine of the Three Principles of the People.
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Sun Yat-sen
In 1912 the Qing dynasty was overthrown by the Revolutionary Alliance, led by a doctor named Sun Yat-sen who had been living in the United States. Perhaps inspired by what he saw in America, Sun led the Nationalist Party known as the Guomindang (KMT), to become the first leader of the new republic of China. Sun quickly turned over power (after only 6 weeks) to Yuan Shiakai, who then ruled as a military dictator. China’s GDP at this time accounted for 27 percent of the world’s total. By 1923, the percentage dropped, but still was as high as 12 percent. In 1949, when the CCP took control, the percentage was 5.7, but in 2003, China’s GDP was less than 4 percent of the world’s total.
Warlord Period
When Yuan died, however, civil war broke out and warlords ruled amid chaos. The opium trade returned, irrigation failed, and World War I added to the general misery. Millions of peasants died due to a famine during the war. Central rule was elusive.
Nationalist China sided with the Allies during World War I, and offered some limited assistance. Guomindang was hoping to obtain return of land that Germany controlled in China, most importantly, Qingdao. Instead, the Treaty of Versailles gave that land to Japan. Feeling betrayed, the Chinese angrily demonstrated against that decision with the May Fourth Movement, which Gongchandang supported.
Soviet sponsored Communist subversion began to creep into China, and some abandoned Sun Yat-sen’s vision of democracy. Mao Zedong, a Marxist, founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921 in Shanghai. Sun himself then accepted Soviet Communist Party General Secretary V. I. Lenin’s offer of receiving Comintern military advisors in China.
After Sun died in 1925, he was replaced as head of the Nationalist Party by Jiang Jieshi who opposed communism and executed communist leaders and supporters in April 1927 in Shanghai. That destroyed the CCP in the extreme east coast, and Jiang became president of the Nationalist Republic of China in 1928 after the Northern Expedition. Britain and the United States recognized his government.
Chinese Civil War
Civil war broke out between the CCP and Guomindang in 1930. Mao Zedong trained peasants in guerrilla warfare. But Jiang’s army surrounded Mao’s, and in 1934 forced Mao’s army to go on the Long March, which was a 6,000-mile retreat back to northwestern China. Few made it back alive, and the episode proved to be the moment when the CCP could have been decisively and permanently defeated, but the Gongchandang survived the Nationalist attacks and ended its route in Yan'an, northern Shaanxi. It was at this time that American support began for the CCP/Gongchandang instead of the GMD under Jiang Jieshi - this later being reverted during the Second World War.
Second Sino-Japanese War
- Main article: Second Sino-Japanese War
Meanwhile an aggressive Japan invaded Manchuria, an area of northeast China rich in iron and coal deposits needed by Japanese industry and in March 1932 set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. On 24 February, 1933, the League of Nations adopted a resolution calling for the non-recognition of Manchukuo, however the Soviet Union nonetheless did recognize Manchukuo and sold Japan the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1935.[1] This Manchurian invasion was the beginning of World War II in Asia and is commonly referred to as the Mukden Incident. Japan followed this with an invasion of China in 1937 along the Yangtze River. The Chinese civil war stopped temporarily to defend against the Japanese invasion. The Soviet Union brought 30 thousand Red army troops to Mongolia and stationed them along the southern and south-eastern border of Mongolia on the pretext of having found the Japanese plan of military occupation of Mongolia". At the same time, the Soviet leadership gave instructions to carry out mass arrests and the execution of several ten thousands of Mongolian government, party and army cadres on the pretext of "rooting out the spy organization."
Kuomintang's Two Wars
The Nationalist Chinese led by Chiang Kai-shek received aid from the United States to fight against the Japanese, but in reality they needed that money to prepare for civil war against the communists led by Mao Zedong (also known as “Mao-Tse-tung”). After the war, the communists (from the northwest) attempted to conquer the Nationalists (from the southwest). Civil war raged from 1946 to 1949. Due to many desertions by soldiers from the Nationalist army to the communists, Mao prevailed by October 1949. Mao had promised land for the peasants and renamed the country the People’s Republic of China. Jiang fled with Nationalists to the island of Taiwan, and continued to claim sovereignty over all of China, a stance which the United States supported until Jimmy Carter broke relations with the Republic of China and established them with Communist-controlled mainland China in 1979. By February 1950, the communists in the Soviet Union signed a friendship pact with the Chinese communists, who had relied on Soviet support in part to win the civil war for control of the mainland.
Further reading
- Anne W. Carroll, Who Lost China, 1996.
- The Trial of Harry Dexter White: Soviet Agent of Influence, Tom A. Adams, December 2004.
- On the Unscrupulous Nature of the Chinese Communist Party, The Epoch Times, 2005.
