Kuomintang

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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. In recent years it has supported pan-Chinese nationalism, democracy, Chinese reunification, and capitalism under the doctrine of the Three Principles of the People.

The Kuomintang of China (Traditional Chinese: 中國國民黨; Simplified Chinese: 中国国民党; Hanyu Pinyin: Zhōngguó Guómíndǎng; Initials: KMT or GMD) ruled China 1927-48 and then moved to Taiwan. The name translates as "China's National People's Party" and was historically referred to as the Chinese Nationalists.

The early history of the KMT was complicated. It was founded in August 1912, by Sun Yat-sen but dissolved in November 1913. It was restarted in October 1919, again under Sun Yat-sen. After Sun's death, the party was controlled from 1927 to 1975 by Chiang Kai-shek, who used it to unify and rule China. Though the KMT lost the civil war with the Communists under Mao Zedong in 1949; the party and the Nationalist government and army escaped to Taiwan, took control there, and remains a major political party of the Republic of China based in Taiwan.

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In China

Founded in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen, the KMT rejected the old Qing Dynasty and sought to modernize China along Japanese and Western lines. For a while it had the a majority in the the first Chinese National Assembly. However the Assembly gave the presidency to warlord Yuan Shikai (1859-1916) and he rejected democracy, undercut the parties, and even tried to make himself emperor. The KMT tried and failed to depose Yuan in 1913; the KMT collapsed and its leader fled to Japan. When Yuan Shikai duied unexpectedly in 1916, China fractured into many regions controlled by warlords; this warlord era lasted about ten years.

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. China sided with the Allies against Germany during World War I, and offered some limited assistance. The goal was hoping to obtain return of th cities 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.


Numerous exiled parties were united by Sun in 1919 under the name "The Kuomintang of China", usually called KMT. It returned to Guangzhou in China in 1920 where it set up a regional government.


After 1919 the Soviets based in Moscow energetically promoted Communism, and for a wehile formed an alliance wioth the KMT. sponsored Communist subversion began to creep into China, and some abandoned Sun Yat-sen’s vision of democracy. Mao Zedong, 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. To strengthen the KMT's position, it accepted money and advisors from the Soviet Union and its Comintern. The fledgling Communist Party of China was encouraged to join the KMT and thus formed the First United Front. The KMT gradually increased its geographical controls from its Guangzhou base. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925 and Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) became the KMT strong man. In 1926 Chiang led a millitary operation known as the "Northern Expedition" against the warlords that controled much of the country and defeated them. Next, Chiang tried to destroy the Chinese Communists. In Shanghai, the leading city, in April 1927 he purged and often executed the Communists in the KMT.[1] The Northern Expedition proved successful and the KMT party came to power throughout China (except Manchuria) in 1927 with Chiang the unelected strong-man or dictator. The capital of China was moved to Nanjing in order to be closer to the KMT's strong base in southern China.

The party was always concerned with strengthening Chinese identity at the same time it was discarding old traditions in the name of modernity. In 1929, the KMT government suppressed the textbook Modern Chinese History, widely used in secondary education. The Nationalists were concerned that, by not admitting the existence of the earliest emperors in ancient Chinese history, the book would weaken the foundation of the state. The case of the Modern Chinese History textbook reflects the symptoms of the period: banning the textbook strengthened the Nationalists' ideological control but also revealed their fear of the New Culture Movement and its more liberal ideological implications.

The KMT tried to destroy the Communist party of Mao Zedong, but was unable to stop the invasion by Japan, which controlled most of the coastline and major cities, 1937-1945. Chiang Kai-shek secured massive military and economic aid from the United States, and in 1945 became one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, with a veto. The KMT governed most of China until it was defeated in civil war by the Communists in 1949.

The collapse of the KMT regime can in part be attributed to the government's economic policies, which triggered capital flight among the businessmen who had been the KMT's strongest supporters. The cotton textile industry was the leading sector of Chinese industry, but in 1948, shortages of raw cotton plunged the industry into dire straits. The KMT government responded with an aggressive control policy that directly procured cotton from producers to ensure a sufficient supply and established a price freeze on cotton thread and textiles. This policy failed because of resistance from cotton textile industrialists, who relocated textile facilities and capital to Hong Kong or Taiwan around the end of 1948 and early 1949 when prices soared and inflation spiraled out of control. Their withdrawal of support was a shattering blow to the morale of the KMT.

Chinese Civil War

Civil war broke out between the CCP and Guomindang in 1930. Mao Zedong trained peasants in guerrilla warfare. But Chiang’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 to northwestern China. Few made it back alive--the survivors controlled the Communist party for the next 60 years.

Second Sino-Japanese War

Main article: Second Sino-Japanese War

Meanwhile an aggressive Japan invaded Manchuria, an independent warlord-controlled 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. 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

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