Kuomintang

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kuomintang was founded not in China, but in Honolulu, on the 24th of November 1894, by a man who called his organization the Revive China Society. That man was Sun Yat-sen, and his party would go on to govern one of the world's most populous nations, lose a civil war, retreat to an island, impose nearly four decades of martial law, and then preside over one of the most remarkable democratic transitions of the twentieth century. Today the Kuomintang is the largest single party in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, chaired by Cheng Li-wun, still defined by the ideology its founder sketched out more than a century ago. But to understand what the KMT is now, you have to follow it from those Hawaiian meetings through a Northern Expedition, a massacre in Shanghai, a flight across the Taiwan Strait, and a long reckoning with the violence it both suffered and inflicted.

• 2. Sun Yat-sen and the Party's Origins

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  On the 20th of August 1905, Sun Yat-sen traveled to Tokyo and joined forces with other anti-monarchist groups to form the Tongmenghui, a coalition committed to overthrowing the Qing dynasty. When the Xinhai Revolution broke out in 1911 and the Republic of China was declared on the 1st of January 1912, Sun became provisional president, but he did not hold military power. He ceded the presidency to Yuan Shikai, who arranged for the abdication of Puyi, the last Qing emperor, on the 12th of February.

  On the 25th of August 1912, the Tongmenghui merged with five smaller pro-revolution parties at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing, forming the Nationalist Party. The most influential figure in the new organization was Song Jiaoren, ranked third in the party, who built mass support among gentry and merchants for a constitutional parliamentary democracy. The Nationalists won an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly election of December 1912. Yuan Shikai, however, began ignoring parliament, and Song was assassinated in Shanghai in 1913. Suspecting Yuan of ordering the killing, Sun's followers launched the Second Revolution in July 1913, a poorly organized armed uprising that collapsed. Yuan expelled KMT adherents from parliament, dissolved the party, and in December 1915 proclaimed himself emperor.

  While in exile in Japan, Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party on the 8th of July 1914, but old comrades including Huang Xing, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin, and Chen Jiongming refused to join him. They objected that Sun required a personal oath of loyalty, which they regarded as undemocratic. Sun returned to China in 1917 to set up a military junta in Canton, was forced out again, and in Shanghai resurrected the organization under the name Kuomintang of China on the 10th of October 1919. By 1920, the KMT had reestablished its headquarters in Canton, and by 1923 it was accepting Soviet aid after the western powers refused recognition. The Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin arrived that year to reorganize the party along Leninist lines, a structure that would last into the 1990s.

• 3. The Three Principles and the First Congress

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  At the first party congress in 1924 in Guangzhou, the KMT formally adopted Sun Yat-sen's political theory: the Three Principles of the People, which he grouped as nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood. Sun defined that third principle, Minsheng, as socialism and explicitly linked it to communism in his final days. He was also deeply influenced by the American thinker Henry George; the land value tax that survives in Taiwan today traces back to this Georgist influence. The principle envisioned railroads, public utilities, canals, and forests nationalized, with income from land and mines flowing to the state to fund social welfare.

  The congress that adopted these principles also included non-KMT delegates from the Chinese Communist Party, which was operating under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT. Mao Zedong and early CCP members joined the KMT in 1923, forming what became known as the First United Front. Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun's lieutenants from the Tongmenghui days, had been sent to Moscow in 1923 to study the Soviet political and military system; upon his return he established the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou, following the Soviet model. The congress established the ideological foundations that the party carried across the mainland and eventually into Taiwan, where the Three Principles are enshrined not only in the ROC constitution but in Articles 1, 5, 7, 9, 37, 42, and 43 of the KMT's own party charter.

• 4. Northern Expedition and the Shanghai Massacre

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  When Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, the political leadership passed formally to Wang Jingwei on the left and Hu Hanmin on the right. The real power, however, belonged to Chiang Kai-shek, who controlled the military as superintendent of the Whampoa Military Academy. Chiang assumed leadership of the KMT on the 6th of July 1926 and launched the Northern Expedition to defeat the warlords and unify China. With Soviet supplies, Chiang's National Revolutionary Army conquered the southern half of China in nine months.

  During the Nanjing Incident in March 1927, the NRA stormed the consulates of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Imperial Japan, looting foreign property. An American, two British, one French, one Italian, and one Japanese national were killed. The event signaled deepening tensions within the coalition. Wang Jingwei, backed by Borodin, had declared the National Government moved to Wuhan in January 1927. Having taken Nanjing in March, Chiang halted and prepared a break with Wang and the communists. On the 12th of April 1927, KMT forces carried out the Shanghai massacre, purging CCP members and their Soviet advisers, an event that formally opened the Chinese Civil War. Wang eventually surrendered his position to Chiang, who resumed the Northern Expedition and took Beijing in 1928. The new national capital was moved to Nanjing, original capital of the Ming dynasty, in a deliberate symbolic break from the Qing. The period from 1927 to 1937, known as the Nanjing decade, is remembered as a relatively stable and prosperous era under KMT rule.

  With Beijing captured, the KMT received widespread diplomatic recognition. But the party under Chiang was already moving away from the federalism it had once promoted toward a centralized one-party state built around a single ideology and, after Sun's death, a growing cult around his memory.

• 5. Civil War, Collapse, and the Retreat to Taiwan

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  In 1931, Japanese aggression resumed with the Mukden Incident and the occupation of Manchuria. The Chinese Soviet Republic had been founded by the CCP in Jiangxi, and Chiang chose to suppress it before confronting Japan. With assistance from German military advisers, the KMT destroyed the CSR in 1934 after a series of offensives. The communists retreated in the Long March, during which less than 10% of their army survived. In 1936, Chiang was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang in the Xi'an Incident and forced into the Second United Front with the CCP against Japan. The Second Sino-Japanese War began the following year. Japan surrendered in 1945, and Taiwan was returned to the Republic of China on the 25th of October of that year.

  Full-scale civil war erupted in 1946. The People's Liberation Army grew rapidly as the KMT made a series of errors. The government drastically reduced troop levels after the Japanese surrender, producing large numbers of unemployed, trained soldiers who joined the PLA. Hyperinflation went uncontrolled through the late 1930s and beyond. In August 1948, the government converted to the gold standard, outlawing private ownership of gold and foreign exchange, collecting precious metals from the population, and issuing the Gold Standard Scrip in exchange. That scrip became worthless within ten months. Chiang also ordered his forces to defend urbanized cities, leaving the countryside to the CCP. US President Harry S. Truman wrote that key KMT families had taken $750 million in American aid. With corruption rampant and popular support collapsing, the KMT retreated to Taiwan by December 1949, bringing with it a significant portion of China's national treasury and approximately two million people, including military forces and civilian refugees.

• 6. The White Terror and Martial Law

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  On the 27th of February 1947, a dispute in Taipei between a female cigarette vendor and an anti-smuggling officer in front of the Tianma Tea House triggered civil disorder that lasted for days. The KMT put down the uprising, and what followed became known as the February 28 Incident. The White Terror that the party then imposed resulted in the death or disappearance of over 30,000 Taiwanese intellectuals, activists, and people suspected of opposing the KMT.

  Martial law was declared under the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion in 1950. Presidential and parliamentary elections were suspended until the mainland could theoretically be recovered. The KMT's internal slogan for its timeline was: "prepare in the first year, start fighting in the second, and conquer in the third year." Chiang also initiated Project National Glory in 1965 to retake the mainland, but abandoned it in 1972 after repeated failures. Throughout this period, the party ran Taiwan as a one-party authoritarian state, with KMT secret police persecuting suspected communists and political opponents. Chiang Ching-kuo, appointed director of secret police in 1950 and educated in the Soviet Union, reorganized the military's political officer corps along Soviet lines. When general Sun Li-jen, who had trained at the Virginia Military Institute, opposed this direction, he was arrested in 1955 on charges of conspiring with the American CIA and placed under house arrest.

  The Republic of China in Taiwan retained China's seat in the United Nations until 1971 and American diplomatic recognition until 1979, losing both to the PRC in the 1970s. The KMT also oversaw a sweeping internal reform between 1950 and 1952, the Party Reform Program led by the Central Reform Committee, which aimed to eliminate factionalism and dependency. At the party's National Congress in October 1952, Chiang declared the reform a success and amended the charter to define the KMT as a revolutionary democratic party drawing its core membership from youth, intellectuals, and working and agricultural classes.

• 7. Democratization and the Modern Party

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  The pro-democracy movement called Tangwai, meaning "outside the KMT," created the Democratic Progressive Party on the 28th of September 1986. Outside observers expected the KMT to crush it; instead the party's formation became the opening of Taiwan's democratization. Martial law ended in 1987. President Lee Teng-hui terminated the Temporary Provisions in 1991, allowing all parties to compete at all levels, including the presidential election. Lee became the ROC's first directly elected president in 1996.

  The 2000 presidential election ended 72 years of KMT presidencies and triggered a serious internal split. Former party Secretary-General James Soong had been denied the nomination; he ran independently, was expelled, and on the 31st of March 2000 formed the People First Party. Lee Teng-hui's apparent alignment with the opposition led to his own expulsion and the formation of the Taiwan Solidarity Union by his supporters on the 24th of July 2001. These splits cost the KMT its position as the largest party in the Legislative Yuan after the December 2001 elections.

  The party recovered. In 2005, Ma Ying-jeou became chairman in the first public election for that position. On the 22nd of March 2008, Ma won the presidential election against the DPP's Frank Hsieh by a margin of 17%, taking office on the 20th of May 2008. The KMT also won 81 of 113 seats in the legislative elections that year, or 71.7% of seats. A heavy loss in the local elections of November 2014, winning only 6 municipalities and counties compared to 14 in the previous cycle, led Ma to resign as party chairman on the 3rd of December 2014. In January 2024, no party won a legislative majority for the first time since 2004; the KMT took 52 seats, the DPP 51, and the Taiwan People's Party 8. The KMT entered 2025 as the largest single party in the Legislative Yuan, a position that shapes every cross-strait negotiation still to come.

• 8. Assets, Identity, and the 1992 Consensus

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  Upon arriving in Taiwan, the KMT occupied assets previously owned by Japan and accepted contributions from local businesses, accumulating banks, investment companies, petrochemical firms, and television and radio stations. At one point its holdings were estimated at between US$2 billion and US$10 billion, believed to make it the world's richest political party. In July 2014, the party reported total assets of NT$26.8 billion and interest earnings of NT$981.52 million for the year of 2013. In 2006, the KMT sold its original headquarters at 11 Zhongshan South Road in Taipei to Evergreen Group for NT$2.3 billion and moved to a smaller building on Bade Road. In August 2016, the DPP government established the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee to investigate and recover assets acquired during the martial law period.

  The KMT's current ideological position is organized around the 1992 Consensus, which defines both sides of the Taiwan Strait as "one China" while leaving the precise meaning deliberately ambiguous. The party opposes formal Taiwan independence and opposes unification under the PRC's "one country, two systems" framework. It seeks instead to maintain the status quo, favoring closer economic and political ties with Beijing while insisting on the Republic of China's legitimacy. As of 2020, only 3% of KMT members are under 40 years of age, a demographic gap that may prove more consequential for the party's future than any single election result.