Kuomintang Founded: China's Republic Takes Shape

Sun Yat-sen merged several revolutionary groups into the Kuomintang, China's Nationalist Party, on August 25, 1912, creating the political organization that would dominate Chinese history for the next four decades. The KMT was born into a republic barely six months old, and the struggle to make that republic function would consume Chinese politics for a generation. China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing, had collapsed in the Wuchang Uprising of October 1911. Sun Yat-sen, who had spent years in exile organizing revolutionary movements and fundraising among overseas Chinese communities, was elected provisional president of the new Republic of China. But real military power rested with Yuan Shikai, the commander of the northern armies, who forced Sun to step aside. Sun accepted the arrangement, hoping parliamentary politics would restrain Yuan. The Kuomintang was his vehicle for that strategy, uniting the Tongmenghui and smaller parties into a single nationalist bloc. The party won a commanding majority in the new parliament's first elections in early 1913, but Yuan Shikai had no interest in sharing power. He had KMT parliamentary leader Song Jiaoren assassinated, dissolved the party, and by 1915 was attempting to declare himself emperor. Yuan died in 1916, and China fractured into competing warlord territories. Sun spent years rebuilding the KMT in southern China, accepting Soviet advisors and forming a temporary alliance with the fledgling Chinese Communist Party. After Sun's death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek took control and launched the Northern Expedition to reunify China by force. He turned on the Communists in 1927, beginning a civil war that paused only for the Japanese invasion in 1937 and resumed after Japan's defeat. The KMT lost the mainland to Mao Zedong's forces in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan, where it ruled under martial law until democratic reforms in the 1980s. The party Sun founded as a democratic movement spent most of its history as an authoritarian one, a contradiction that defined modern China's tortured path to self-governance.