Kuomintang (KMT)
China's Nationalist Party: it founded the Republic, lost a civil war to Mao, fled to Taiwan in 1949, and became a democratic party there.
Few political parties have lived as many lives as the Kuomintang. It founded a republic, ruled the world's most populous country, lost it in one of history's largest civil wars, and then rebuilt itself on an island it never expected to govern. Known in English as the Chinese Nationalist Party, the KMT (or Guomindang) has been at the center of Chinese and Taiwanese politics for more than a century.
Revolution and rivalry
The party grew out of the movement led by Sun Yat-sen, the physician-revolutionary who helped topple the Qing dynasty and became the first provisional president of the Republic of China in 1912. Sun's guiding creed, the Three Principles of the People, nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood, would remain the party's official ideology for generations. Sun reorganized the KMT in the early 1920s with Soviet advice and money, building a party army and, for a time, allying with the fledgling Chinese Communist Party. When Sun died of cancer in 1925, a young general, Chiang Kai-shek, took command. Chiang led the Northern Expedition to reunify a China splintered among warlords, but in April 1927 he turned on his Communist allies, purging them in a bloody sweep through Shanghai. That break opened the Chinese Civil War, a struggle that would run, on and off, for twenty-two years.
Defeat and reinvention
From its capital at Nanjing, the KMT ruled much of China through the 1930s, a stretch known as the Nanjing decade. Japan's full-scale invasion in 1937 forced an uneasy second united front with the Communists, but the alliance frayed as both sides looked past Japan to the reckoning between them. When the civil war resumed after 1945, Mao Zedong's forces steadily outfought and outmaneuvered Chiang's. In 1949 the KMT and some two million soldiers, officials, and supporters fled across the strait to Taiwan, carrying the Republic of China's government, gold reserves, and imperial treasures with them. Chiang never abandoned the claim to the mainland, holding Taiwan under the fiction that his was the legitimate government of all China.
The party today
On Taiwan the KMT ruled for decades as an authoritarian one-party state, imposing martial law that lasted until 1987. Then, remarkably, it presided over its own democratization: under Chiang's son and successors, Taiwan became one of Asia's liveliest democracies, and the KMT reinvented itself as one of its two major parties. Today it generally favors closer ties with Beijing, a legacy of its claim to be China's rightful government. It now trades power with the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, and its stance toward the mainland shapes some of the most consequential elections on earth. The party that once ruled all of China now competes for votes on an island, still arguing about what China is and who speaks for it.