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.
Career timeline
- 1905–1912Leader of the Tongmenghui
- 1912.01–03Provisional President of the Republic of China
- 1919–1925Leader of the Kuomintang
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.
Career timeline
- 1927Chairman of the Wuhan Nationalist government
- 1932–1935President of the Executive Yuan
- 1940–1944Head of the Japanese-sponsored Nanjing government
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.
Career timeline
- 1908Joined the Tongmenghui
- 1924–1927Commandant, Whampoa Military Academy
- 1926–1928Commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, led the Northern Expedition
- 1928–1931Chairman of the Nationalist government and President of the Executive Yuan
- 1937–1945Supreme commander of China's theatre in the war against Japan
- 1948–1975President of the Republic of China
- 1950–1975Ruled the Nationalist government in Taiwan
He rewrote the grammar of revolution for a peasant country
In a letter of 5 January 1930 to Lin Biao, he answered pessimism about the Red Army's prospects by invoking the old Chinese saying that 'a single spark can start a prairie fire.'
Born to a peasant family near Shaoshan, Hunan, he studied in Changsha and was shaped by the 1911 Revolution and by nationalist and anti-imperialist currents. Introduced to Marxism while working as a librarian at Peking University, he took part in the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and in July 1921 attended the Chinese Communist Party's First National Congress in Shanghai as one of thirteen delegates, becoming a founding member. He developed rural base areas, guerrilla warfare and protracted people's war; elected to the leadership at Zunyi in January 1935, he became Chairman of the Military Commission in November 1935 and took the party chairmanship only in 1943. He led land redistribution and industrialisation, intervened in the Korean War in October 1950, suppressed opponents, and presided over the Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962 and the Cultural Revolution launched in 1966.
Career timeline
- 1921At the founding of the Chinese Communist Party
- 1927The Hunan report: revolution as a peasant affair
- 1934–1935The Long March; takes command at Zunyi
- 1937Published the philosophical essays On Practice and On Contradiction
- 1940Published On New Democracy
- 1949Proclaims the People's Republic of China
- 1958–1961The Great Leap Forward and its catastrophic famine
- 1966–1976The Cultural Revolution
Sun Yat-sen’s widow who stayed with the Kuomintang left and became a vice-chair of the People’s Republic
At the 1922 mutiny she stayed behind to cover Sun Yat-sen's escape, saying 'China can do without me; it cannot do without you.' On 16 May 1981, weeks before her death, she was admitted to the CCP and named honorary chairman of the PRC.
The second of the three Soong sisters of a wealthy Christian Shanghai family, she married Sun Yat-sen in 1915. Opposing Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup in 1927 she became the symbol of the Kuomintang left, went to Moscow, and in the 1930s led the China League for Civil Rights in Shanghai. During the war with Japan she organised the China Defence League in Hong Kong to supply the Communist base areas. In 1949 she became a vice-chair of the Central People’s Government; shortly before her death in 1981 she joined the Communist Party and was named honorary president. Her younger sister Soong Mei-ling was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife.
Career timeline
- 1949–1954Vice-Chair of the Central People’s Government
- 1959–1975Vice-President of the People’s Republic of China
Chair of the founding congress who split with Mao on the Long March and defected to the Nationalists
At the 1935 Long March reunion he insisted on turning south to Sichuan rather than north to Shaanxi. Losing over 75% of his 80,000 troops discredited him in his army and Comintern.
A Peking University student leader in May Fourth, he chaired the party’s founding congress in 1921. After years of labour organising he went to the Eyuwan Soviet in 1931 and became political leader of the Fourth Front Army, which met Mao’s Central Red Army in Sichuan on the Long March in 1935. Clashing with Mao over marching north or west, he set up a rival “centre” and turned south, lost much of his army, and rejoined at Yan’an in 1936. Criticised in 1937, he fled to the Nationalist zone in 1938 and was expelled; he later wrote his memoirs in Hong Kong and Canada and died in Toronto.
Career timeline
- 1921Chairman of the First Party Congress
- 1931–1935Leader of the Eyuwan Soviet and the Fourth Front Army
