Kuomintang

Kuomintang (or Guomindang; Chinese, ‘National People's Party’) Chinese political party. Originally a revolutionary league, it was organized in 1912 by Song Jiaoren and SUN YAT-SEN as a republican party along democratic lines to replace the Revolutionary Alliance which had emerged from the overthrow of the QING dynasty. Suppressed in 1913 by Yuan Shikai, it was reformed in 1920 by Sun and reorganized with COMINTERN assistance in 1923 in an arrangement that allowed individual communists to become members. At the party congress in 1924 it formally adopted the ‘Three Principles of the People’: nationalism, democracy, and ‘people's livelihood’. In 1926 its rise to power began in earnest with the commencement of CHIANG KAI-SHEK's Northern Campaign. The communists were purged in 1927 and the capture of Beijing in 1928 brought international recognition for its Nanjing-based Nationalist Government. It fought the CHINESE CIVIL WAR with the communists and retreated to Chongqing after the Japanese invasion of 1937. After World War II, the civil war recommenced, and by 1949 the Kuomintang's forces had been decisively defeated and forced to retreat to TAIWAN, where it still continues to form the government of Taiwan (the Republic of China), having won the country's first multiparty elections in 1991. Further elections, in 1995, saw the Kuomintang narrowly retain its majority, yet with its lowest vote (46%) since 1945.