Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Kuomintang 1866–1925 ○ Liver cancer

Founding father of the Republic of China who framed the Three Principles of the People and the first united front

Credited with leading the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing and founded the Republic of China. In a deathbed testament he dictated himself, he reaffirmed friendship with the Soviet Union.

Born in Guangdong and educated in Hawaii and Hong Kong, he trained as a physician. He founded the Revive China Society in 1894 and the Tongmenghui in Tokyo in 1905 to overthrow the Qing and build a republic; after the 1911 revolution he became provisional president but soon yielded to Yuan Shikai. He formulated the Three Principles of the People (nationalism, democracy, people’s livelihood) and in 1923, after a joint statement with the Soviet envoy Joffe, accepted Soviet aid and Communist members joining the Kuomintang as individuals, opening the first united front. He died of liver cancer in Beijing in 1925; both Nationalists and Communists claimed his legacy.

Political and party leadership Kuomintang 1883–1944 ○ Illness · Nagoya

Sun Yat-sen’s heir and Kuomintang left leader who ended as head of the Japanese-sponsored Nanjing regime

In 1927 he led the left-wing Wuhan government, then purged the Communists that July; in 1940 he headed the Japanese-sponsored Nanjing regime. Arrested in 1910, he wrote: “With heroic abandon I sing in the market of Yan…”

A Tongmenghui revolutionary famous for a failed attempt on the Qing regent, and the confidant who took down Sun Yat-sen’s political testament. He led the Wuhan Nationalist government in 1927 and briefly kept the alliance with the Communists before breaking with them that July. After years of rivalry and cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek he left Chongqing in 1938 to advocate “peace” with Japan, and in 1940 became head of the Japanese-sponsored Nanjing government. He died of illness in Nagoya in 1944 and is remembered in China as the archetypal collaborator.

Political and party leadership Kuomintang 1887–1975 ○ Natural causes

Nationalist leader who combined resistance to Japan with anti-communist rule

After signing the pact with the Soviet Union in 1937, he insisted that it did not mean permitting communism to grow, explaining that Nanking could not fight Japan and the Communists simultaneously.

Chiang Kai-shek was the Nationalist Party's military and political leader, rising through the Northern Expedition of the 1920s to consolidate much of China under a government based in Nanjing. He had prioritised the civil war against the Communists, but after the Xi'an Incident accepted a united front against Japan and secured Soviet arms and aircraft through the 1937 Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. He led China's wartime resistance, then moved the Republic of China's government to Taiwan after defeat in the civil war, where he built a long authoritarian rule under martial law.