Kuomintang

Kuomintang, also Guomindang, (Chinese, “Nationalist People's Party”), political party of China organized during the Revolution of 1911, by which the Qing dynasty was overthrown and a republican government in China established. The Kuomintang was founded by the Nationalist revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, whose election in 1911 as provisional president of the republic established the Kuomintang as the leading party in the new government. In the following year, however, Sun was succeeded as president by the military leader Yuan Shikai, who, finding his autocratic policies opposed by the Kuomintang representatives, expelled the party from the government.

After World War I 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 Soviet Union. 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; but in the latter year 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, the Communists, operating from bases in northern China and Dongbei, had resumed hostilities against the Kuomintang regime. Attempts in 1946 by the United States 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, some two million people in all, withdrew in the summer of 1949 to the island of Taiwan. With US economic help and under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang gradually strengthened Taiwan, which it has continued to rule. 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 party's first native Taiwanese chairman.

In a historic vote on March 18, 2000, more than 50 years of Kuomintang's rule came to an end when a nationalist candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chen Shui-bian, was elected president of Taiwan despite warnings and threats from China. Lee Teng-hui stepped down and was replaced as party leader by Lien Chan, one of the unsuccessful presidential candidates. The party, however, continued to hold a majority in Taiwan's National Assembly. In April 2005, Lien Chan visited Beijing for talks with Chinese president Hu Jintao—the first meeting between KMT and Communist party leaders since 1949.