A Significant Contribution of Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) in People's Republic of China Under Chiang Kai Shek Leadership (1925-1975)

A SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION OF KUOMINTANG (NATIONALIST PARTY) IN REPUBLIC OF CHINA UNDER CHIANG KAI-SHEK LEADERSHIP (1927-19750

The Kuomintang is a Chinese political party that 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 Party was initially founded on August 25th 1912, by Sun Yat-sen but dissolved in November 1913. It reformed on October 10th 1919, again led by Sun Yat-sen, and became the ruling party in China. After Sun's death, the party was dominated from 1927 to 1975 by Chiang Kai-shek. Though the KMT lost the civil war with the Communist Party of China in 1949, the party took control of Taiwan and remains a major political party of the Republic of China based in Taiwan.
Founded in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen, the KMT helped topple the Qing Emperor and promoted modernization along Western lines. The parties played a significant part in the first Chinese first National Assembly where the majority party was. However the KMT failed to achieve complete control. The post of president was given to Yuan Shikai as reward for his part in the revolution. Yuan Shikai abused his powers, over riding the constitution and creating strong tensions between himself and the other parties. In July 1913, the KMT staged a 'Second Revolution' to depose Yuan. This failed and the following crack down by Yuan led to the dissolution of the KMT and the exile of its leadership, mostly to Japan. Subsequently Yuan Shikai had himself made Emperor of China.
In exile, Sun Yat-sen and other former KMT members founded several revolutionary parties under various names but with little success. These parties were united by Sun in 1919 under the title "The Kuomintang of China". The new party returned to Guangzhou in China in 1920 where it set up a government but failed to achieve control of all of China. After the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916, China fractured into many regions controlled by warlords. To strengthen the party's position, it accepted aid and support for 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 sphere of influence from its Guangzhou base. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925 and Chiang Kai-shek became the KMT strong man. In 1926 Chiang led a military operation known as the Northern Expedition against the warlords that controlled much of the country. In 1927, Chiang instigated the April 12 Incident in Shanghai in which the Communist Party of China and Communist elements of the KMT were purged. The Northern Expedition proved successful and the KMT party came to power throughout China (except Manchuria) in 1927 under the leadership of Chiang. The capital of China was moved to Nanjing in order to be closer to the party'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 leadership, the remaining army, and hundreds of thousands of businessmen and other supporters, two million in all, fled to Taiwan. They continued to operate there as the "Republic of China" and dreamed of invading and reconquering what they called "Mainland China". The United States, however, set up a naval cordon after 1950 that has since prevented an invasion in either direction. The KMT regime kept the island under martial law for 38 years, killing up to 30,000 opponents during its dictatorial rule by Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo.

EARLY YEARS, SUN YAT-SEN ERA

The Kuomintang refers reverentially to founder Sun Yat-senas the "Father of the Nation." Sun is pictured here in 1917.
The Kuomintang traces its ideological and organizational roots to the work of Sun Yat-sen, a proponent of Chinese nationalism and democracy, who founded Revive China Society in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1894.[8] In 1905, Sun joined forces with other societies in Tokyo to form the Tongmenghui or the Revolutionary Alliance, a group committed to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of a republican government.
The group planned and supported the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the founding of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912. However, Sun did not have military power and ceded the provisional presidency of the republic to strongman Yuan Shikai, who arranged for the abdication of the Last Emperor on February 12. Party Flag
On August 25, 1912, the Kuomintang was established at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing, where the Revolutionary Alliance and five smaller pro-revolution parties merged to contest the first national elections. Sun, the then Premier of the ROC, was chosen as the party chairman with Huang Xing as his deputy.
The most influential member of the party was the third ranking Song Jiaoren, who mobilized mass support from gentry and merchants for the KMT to advocate a constitutional parliamentary democracy. The party opposed to constitutional monarchists and sought to check the power of Yuan. The Kuomintang won an overwhelming majority of the first National Assembly in December 1912.
But Yuan soon began to ignore the parliament in making presidential decisions. Song Jiaoren was assassinated in Shanghai in 1913. Members of the KMT led by Sun Yat-sen suspected that Yuan was behind the plot and thus staged the Second Revolution in July 1913, a poorly planned and ill-supported armed rising to overthrow Yuan, and failed. Yuan, claiming subversive and betrayal, expelled adherents of the Kuomintang from the parliament.[10][11] Yuan dissolved the KMT in November (whose members had largely fled into exile in Japan) and dismissed the parliament early in 1914.
Yuan Shikai proclaimed himself as an emperor in December 1915. While exiled in Japan in 1914, Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party, but many of his old revolutionary comrades, including Huang Xing, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin and Chen Jiongming, refused to join him or support his efforts in inciting armed uprising against Yuan Shikai. In order to join the Chinese Revolutionary Party, members must take an oath of personal loyalty to Sun, which many old revolutionaries regarded as undemocratic and contrary to the spirit of the revolution.
Thus, many old revolutionaries did not join Sun's new organization, and he was largely sidelined within the Republican movement during this period. Sun returned to China in 1917 to establish a rival government at Guangzhou, but was soon forced out of office and exiled to Shanghai. There, with renewed support, he resurrected the KMT on October 10, 1919, under the name of the Chinese Kuomintang and established its headquarter in Guangdong province in 1920.
In 1923, the KMT and its government accepted aid from the Soviet Union after being denied recognition by the western powers. Soviet advisers - the most prominent of whom was Mikhail Borodin, an agent of the Comintern – arrived in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, establishing a Leninist party structure that lasted into the 1990s. The Communist Party of China (CPC) was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their separate party identities, forming the First United Front between the two parties. During this year, Mao Zedong and early members of the Chinese Communist Party also joined the KMT.

Sun Yat-sen [middle] and Chiang Kai-shek [on stage in uniform] at the founding of the Whampoa Military Academy in 1924.
Soviet advisers also helped the KMT to set up a political institute to train propagandists in mass mobilization techniques, and in 1923 Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun's lieutenants from the Tongmenghui days, was sent to Moscow for several months' military and political study. At the first party congress in 1924, which included non-KMT delegates such as members of the CPC, they adopted Sun's political theory, which included the Three Principles of the People - nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood.

CHIANG KAI-SHEK ASSUMES LEADERSHIP

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who assumed the leadership of the Kuomintang (KMT) after the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925
When Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, the political leadership of the Nationalist Party fell to Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin, respectively the left wing and right wing leaders of the Kuomintang. The real power, however, was in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek (also known as Jiang Jieshi in Pinyin transliteration), who, as the superintendent of the Whampoa Military Academy, was in near complete control of the military.
With their military superiority, the Kuomintang confirmed their rule on Canton, the provincial capital of Guangdong. The Guangxi warlords pledged loyalty to the KMT. The KMT now became a rival government in opposition to the warlord government based in the northern city of Beijing.[12]
Chiang Kai-shek assumed leadership of the Kuomintang in 1926. Unlike Sun Yat-sen, whom he admired greatly, Chiang had relatively less contact with the West. Sun Yat-sen had forged all his political, economic, and revolutionary ideas primarily from what he had learned in Hawaii and indirectly through the British colony Hong Kong and Japan under Meiji Restoration. Chiang Kai-shek, however, knew relatively little about the West. He also studied in Japan, but he was firmly rooted in his Chinese identity and was steeped in Chinese culture. As his life progressed, he became increasingly attached to Chinese culture and traditions. His few trips to the West confirmed his pro-Chinese outlook and he studied the Chinese classics and Chinese histories assiduously. In 1924, Sun Yat-sen sent Chiang to spend three months studying in Moscow studying the Soviet political and military system. Chiang met Leon Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, but quickly came to the conclusion that the Russian model of government was not suitable for China. This laid the beginning of his lifelong antagonism against communism.
Chiang was also particularly committed to Sun's idea of "political tutelage". Sun Yat-sen believed that the only hope for a unified and better China lays in a military conquest, followed by a period of political tutelage that would culminate in the transition to democracy. Using this ideology, Chiang built himself into the dictator of the Republic of China, both in the Chinese Mainland, and when the national government was relocated to Taiwan.
Following the death of Sun Yat-sen, General Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the KMT leader and launched the Northern Expedition to defeat the northern warlords and unite China under the party. With their power confirmed in the southeast, the Nationalist Government appointed Chiang Kai-shek commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, and the Northern Expedition to suppress the warlords began. Chiang had to defeat three separate warlords and two independent armies. Chiang, with Soviet supplies, conquered the southern half of China in nine months.
A split, however, erupted between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party; this split threatened the Northern Expedition. Wang Jing Wei, who led the KMT leftist allies took the city of Wuhan in January 1927. With the support of the Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin, Wang declared the National Government as having moved to Wuhan. Having taken Nanking in March, Chiang halted his campaign and prepared a violent break with Wang and his communist allies. Chiang's expulsion of the Communists and their Soviet advisers led to the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Wang finally surrendered his power to Chiang. Joseph Stalin ordered the Chinese Communists to obey the Kuomintang leadership. Once this split had been healed, Chiang Kai-shek resumed his Northern Expedition and managed to take Shanghai.
Kuomintang forces took Beijing in 1928. The city was the internationally recognized capital, though previously controlled by warlords. This event allowed the Kuomintang to receive widespread diplomatic recognition in the same year. The capital was moved from Beijing to Nanjing, the original capital of the Ming Dynasty, and thus a symbolic purge of the final Qing elements. This period of KMT rule in China between 1927 and 1937 was relatively stable and prosperous and is still known as the Nanjing decade.

Chinese Kuomintang National Revolutionary Army soldiers marched into the British concessions in Hankou during the Northern Expedition.
During the Nanjing Incident, (March 1927) Chinese soldiers stormed the consulates of America, Britain, and Japan, looted foreign properties and almost assassinated the Japanese consul. An American, two British, one French, an Italian, and a Japanese were killed. These looters also stormed and seized millions of dollars worth of British concessions in Hankou, refusing to hand them back to Britain. Both Nationalists and Communist soldiers within the army participated in the rioting and looting of foreign residents in Nanjing.
After the Northern Expedition in 1928, the Kuomintang government declared that China had been exploited for decades under unequal treaties signed between the foreign powers and the Qing Dynasty. The KMT government demanded that the foreign powers renegotiate the treaties on equal terms.
Before the Northern Expedition, the KMT began as a heterogeneous group advocating American-inspired federalism and provincial autonomy. However, the KMT under Chiang's leadership aimed at establishing a centralized one-party state with one ideology. This was even more evident following Sun's elevation into a cult figure after his death. The control by one single party began the period of "political tutelage," whereby the party was to lead the government while instructing the people on how to participate in a democratic system. The topic of reorganizing the army, brought up at a military conference in 1929, sparkled the Central Plains War. The cliques, some of them former warlords, demanded to retain their army and political power within their own territories. Although Chiang finally won the war, the conflicts among the cliques would have a devastating effect on the survival of the KMT.

Nationalist soldiers during theSecond Sino-Japanese War.
Although the Second Sino-Japanese War officially broke out in 1937, Japanese aggression started in 1931 when they staged the Mukden Incident and occupied Manchuria. At the same time, the Communist party has been secretly recruiting new members within the Kuomintang government and military. Chiang was alarmed by the expansion of the communist influence. He believed that in order to fight against foreign aggression, the KMT must solve its internal conflicts first, so he started his second attempt to exterminate communist party members in 1934. With the advice from German military advisors, the KMT forces the Communists to withdraw from their bases in southern and central China into the mountains in a massive military retreat known as the Long March. Only less than 10% of the communist army survives the long retreat to Shaanxi province, but they reestablished their military base quickly with aids from the Soviet Union.
The Kuomintang was also known to have used terror tactics against suspected communists, through the utilization of a secret police force, who were employed to maintain surveillance on suspected communists and political opponents. In The Birth of Communist China, C.P. Fitzgerald describes China under the rule of KMT thus: "the Chinese people groaned under a regime Fascist in every quality except efficiency."
Zhang Xueliang, who believed that the Japanese invasion was a greater threat, was persuaded by the Communists to take Chiang hostage during the Xi'an Incident in 1937 and forced Chiang to agree to an alliance with the Communists in the total war against the Japanese. However, in many situations the alliance was in name only; after a brief period of cooperation, the armies began to fight the Japanese separately, rather than as coordinated allies. Conflicts between KMT and communists were still common during the war, and documented claims abound of Communist attacks upon the KMT forces and vice versa.
While the KMT army received heavy casualties fighting the Japanese, the Communists expanded its territory by guerrilla tactics within Japanese occupied regions, leading some claims that the Communists often refused to support the KMT troops, choosing to withdraw and let the KMT troops take the brunt of Japanese attacks.
After Japanese surrendered in 1945, the brief period of celebration was soon shadowed by the possibility of a civil war between the KMT and the Communists. Soviet Union declared war on Japan just before they surrendered and occupied Manchuria, the north eastern part of China. Soviet Union denied the KMT army to enter the region and assisted the Communists to take over the Japanese factories and supplies.
Full-scale civil war between the Communists and KMT in 1946. The Communist armies, previously a minor faction, grew rapidly in influence and power due to several errors on the KMT's part: first, the KMT reduced troop levels precipitously after the Japanese surrender, leaving large numbers of able-bodied, trained fighting men who became unemployed and disgruntled with the KMT as prime recruits for the Communists.
Second, the KMT government proved thoroughly unable to manage the economy, allowing hyperinflation to result. Among the most despised and ineffective efforts it undertook to contain inflation was the conversion to the gold standard for the national treasury and the Gold Standard Scrip in August 1948, outlawing private ownership of gold, silver, and foreign exchange, collecting all such precious metals and foreign exchange from the people and issuing the Gold Standard Scrip in exchange. As most farmland in the north was under the Communists' control, the cities governed by the KMT lacked food supply and this adds to the hyperinflation. The new scrip became worthless in only ten months and greatly reinforced the nationwide perception of KMT as a corrupt or at best inept entity.
Third, Chiang Kai-shek ordered his forces to defend the urbanized cities. This decision gave the Communists a chance to move freely through the countryside. At first, the KMT had the edge with the aid of weapons and ammunition from the United States. However, with the country suffering from hyperinflation, widespread corruption and other economic ills, the KMT continued to lose popular support. Some leading officials and military leaders of the KMT hoarded material, armament and military-aid funding provided by the US. This became an issue which proved to be a hindrance of its relationship with US government. US President Truman wrote that "the Chiangs, the Kungs, and the Soongs (were) all thieves", having taken $750 million in US aid.
At the same time, the suspension of American aid and tens of thousands of deserted or decommissioned soldiers being recruited to the Communist cause tipped the balance of power quickly to the Communist side, and the overwhelming popular support for the Communists in most of the country made it all but impossible for the KMT forces to carry out successful assaults against the Communists.
By the end of 1949, the Communists controlled almost all of mainland China, as the KMT retreated to Taiwan with a significant amount of China's national treasures and 2 million people, including military forces and refugees. Some party members stayed in the mainland and broke away from the main KMT to found the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang, which still currently exists as one of the eight in the People's Republic of China.

KMT IN TAIWAN

The former KMT headquarters in Taipei City; the imposing structure directly faced the Presidential Building, was seen as a symbol of the party's wealth and dominance.
In 1895, Taiwan, including the Penghu islands, became a Japanese colony, a concession by the Qing Empire after it lost the First Sino-Japanese War. After Japan's defeat at the end of World War II in 1945, General Order No. 1instructed Japan, who surrendered to the US, to surrender its troops in Taiwan to the forces of the Republic of China Kuomintang.
Sovereignty over Taiwan was transferred to the ROC in 1945 on the basis of the Instrument of Surrender of Japan which recognized the Potsdam Declaration which referenced the Cairo Declaration, and the ROC put Taiwan under military rule. Tensions between the local Taiwanese and mainlandersfrom mainland China increased in the intervening years culminating in a flashpoint on February 27, 1947 in Taipei when a dispute between a female cigarette vendor and an anti-smuggling officer triggered civil disorder and protests that would last for days. The uprising turned bloody and was shortly put down by the ROC Army in the 228 Incident. As a result of the 228 Incident in 1947, Taiwanese people endured what is called the "White Terror", a KMT-led political repression that resulted in over 30,000 Taiwan independence criminals "eliminated".
Following the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, the commanders of the PRC People's Liberation Army believed that Kinmen and Matsu had to be taken before a final assault on Taiwan. KMT fought the Battle of Kuningtouand stopped the invasion. In 1950 Chiang took office in Taipei under the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion. The provision declared martial law in Taiwan and halted some democratic processes, including presidential and parliamentary elections, until the mainland could be recovered from the Communists. KMT estimated it would take 3 years to defeat the Communists. The slogan was "prepare in the first year, start fighting in the second, and conquer in the third year."
However, various factors, including international pressure, are believed to have prevented the KMT from militarily engaging the Communists full-scale. The Kuomintang backed Muslim insurgents formerly belonging to the National Revolutionary Army during the Kuomintang Islamic Insurgency in China (1950–1958). A cold war with a couple of minor military conflicts was resulted in the early years. The various government bodies previously in Nanjing were re-established in Taipei as the KMT-controlled government actively claimed sovereignty over all China. The Republic of China in Taiwan retained China's seat in the United Nations until 1971.
Until the 1970s, KMT successfully pushed ahead with land reforms, developed the economy, implemented a democratic system in a lower level of the government, improved cross-Taiwan Strait relations, and created the Taiwan economic miracle. However KMT controlled the government under a one-party authoritarian state until reforms in the late 1970s through the 1990s. The ROC in Taiwan was once referred to synonymously with the KMT and known simply as "Nationalist China" after its ruling party. In the 1970s, the KMT began to allow for "supplemental elections" in Taiwan to fill the seats of the aging representatives in parliament.

CONLUSION Chiang's rule on Taiwan also benefited from the centralization of power over a relatively small population and territory. Local opposition to Taiwanese rule had been brutally oppressed in 1947, removing the power of local landlords and leaders that had obstructed his rule on the mainland. With the collapse of the Kuomintang armies on the mainland, Chiang was also freed from much of the internal factionalism of the past. Chiang, consolidating power under martial rule and by linking closely with the American and later the emerging Japanese economies, facilitated the economic modernization that had eluded the Kuomintang in Nanjing. Nevertheless, he will be first and foremost remembered as "the man who lost China".
Chiang did not give up. He set up a KMT government in Taipei, Taiwan, where he claimed to be the president of China. He still promised the recon quest of the mainland and even sent Nationalist guerillas to the Chinese coast. For the rest of his life Chiang lived as President of the Republic of China in Taiwan and established a strong government which suppressed dissent and instituted a stable one-party rule. This government foundation, elimination of much of the corruption, and the sound infrastructure developed by the Japanese all contributed to economic success and are the reasons why Taiwan is such a successful and wealthy democratic government to this day. During the time of the Cold War, the United States recognized Taiwan as the only government of China, although China never recognized Taiwan as her government or any sort of governmental affiliation with Taiwan. Taiwan also held China’s seat at the UN until Chiang died in 1975.