Kuomintang

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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 Gongchandang (KMT), to become the first leader of the new republic of China. Sun quickly turned over power (after only 6 weeks) to Yuan Shiakaj, 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.

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. Kuomintang was hoping to obtain return of land that Germany controlled in China. 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.

Communism 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 a businessman named Jiang Jieshi who opposed communism and even executed communist leaders in April 1927. That destroyed the CCP, and Jiang became president of the Nationalist Republic of China in 1928. Britain and the United States recognized his government.

Civil war broke out between the CCP and Gongchandang in 1930. Mao Zedong’s trained peasants in guerrilla warfare. But Jiang’s army surrounded the Mao’s, and in 1934 forced the 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 was decisively and permanently defeated.

Meanwhile an aggressive Japan invaded Manchuria, an area of northeast China rich in iron and coal deposits needed by Japanese industry. This Manchurian invasion was the beginning of World War II in Asia. 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 Nationalist Chinese led by Jiang Jieshi 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 Formosa, and renamed it the Republic of China (Taiwan), which the United States supported. By February 1950, the communists in the Soviet Union signed a friendship pact with the Chinese communists. Fear gripped the free world.

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