# Kuomintang The **Kuomintang** (KMT, the Chinese Nationalist Party) is the party [[Sun Yat-sen]] founded in 1912 out of the revolutionary societies that had toppled the Qing, that [[Chiang Kai-shek]] led from Sun's death in 1925 through the Northern Expedition, the [[Chinese Civil War]] and the war with Japan, that lost mainland China to [[Mao Zedong]]'s communists in 1949, and that governed [[Taiwan]] as a one-party state under martial law for thirty-eight years before presiding over its democratization. It survives as one of Taiwan's two major parties — and, in a reversal that takes some explaining, as the party more accommodating to Beijing. ## The arc - **Revolutionary party (1912–27).** Reorganized on Leninist lines with Soviet advisers in 1923–24; the Whampoa Military Academy under Chiang trained the officer corps of both sides of the coming civil war. The First United Front with the communists ended on April 12, 1927, when Chiang's forces massacred them in Shanghai. - **Nationalist state (1927–49).** The Nanjing decade of state-building and warlord wars, the Xi'an Incident that forced the Second United Front (1936), eight years of war with Japan that hollowed the army and the currency, and the second civil war lost on corruption and inflation before it was lost in the field. See [[Chinese Civil War]]. - **Taiwan (1949– ).** Two million mainlanders arrived with the party; the February 28, 1947 massacre had already announced how it would rule. Martial law from 1949 to 1987 — the "White Terror" — and a single-party state that the United States nonetheless treated, until 1979, as the government of all China. Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law in 1987; Lee Teng-hui, the first Taiwan-born leader, took the party through direct presidential elections (1996) and lost power to the Democratic Progressive Party in 2000. - **Now.** In opposition or in the legislature since 2016, the KMT's position — the "1992 Consensus" of one China variously defined, economic engagement, opposition to formal independence — makes it the party Beijing prefers, and the party whose ties to the mainland the DPP campaigns against. ## Why it matters here For the American right the KMT is the "loss of China" — the ally whose defeat [[Joseph McCarthy]] blamed on treason and whose exiled government the China Lobby kept as Washington's China until Nixon. The vault's interest is the reversal at the end: the party that was the Cold War's anticommunist client is now the accommodationist one, and the hawks who cite Chiang's defeat in 1949 back a Taiwan that Chiang's party governs against. See [[McCarthyism]] and the [[Chinese History Hub]]. ## See Also - [[Sun Yat-sen]] · [[Chiang Kai-shek]] · [[Chinese Civil War]] · [[Chinese Communist Party]] · [[Mao Zedong]] · [[Long March (China)]] - [[Taiwan]] · [[McCarthyism]] · [[Joseph McCarthy]] · [[Chinese History Hub]]