Kuomintang

Sun Yat-sen founded the Revive China Society in Honolulu on 24 November 1894, and on 20 August 1905 in Tokyo he joined with other anti-Qing groups to form the Tongmenghui, committed to overthrowing the Qing and founding a republic. The Xinhai Revolution produced the Republic of China on 1 January 1912, but Sun, who had no military power, ceded the provisional presidency to Yuan Shikai. On 25 August 1912 the Tongmenghui and five smaller parties merged at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing to form the Nationalist Party, with Sun as chairman and Huang Xing as deputy. It won the first parliamentary election in December 1912, but Song Jiaoren was assassinated in Shanghai in 1913, and after the failed Second Revolution against Yuan, Yuan dissolved the party in November. Sun founded the Chinese Revolutionary Party in Tokyo on 8 July 1914, but its oath of personal loyalty to him led Huang Xing and other old comrades to refuse to join. On 10 October 1919, in the Shanghai French Concession, the party was reorganised as the Kuomintang of China, and in 1920 it set up its headquarters in Canton.

Denied recognition by the Western powers, the KMT accepted Soviet aid in 1923. Soviet advisers led by the Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin reorganised it as a Leninist party modelled on the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and communists joined it while keeping their own party membership, forming the First United Front. The First National Congress in Guangzhou in January 1924 adopted the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy and people's livelihood. After Sun's death in 1925 real power passed to Chiang Kai-shek, superintendent of the Whampoa Military Academy, who took over the party leadership on 6 July 1926 and launched the Northern Expedition. His expulsion of the communists in the Shanghai massacre of 12 April 1927 began the Chinese Civil War. The National Revolutionary Army took Beijing in 1928, and the KMT moved the capital to Nanjing and began one-party rule under the name of "political tutelage".

Even after Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, Chiang gave priority to suppressing the communists, and the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi was destroyed in 1934. The Xi'an Incident of 1936 forced him into the Second United Front, and the Second Sino-Japanese War began the following year, but the alliance ended with the New Fourth Army incident of 1941. After Japan surrendered in 1945, full-scale civil war broke out in 1946. The Nationalist government failed to control hyperinflation, and the gold yuan introduced in August 1948 became worthless within ten months. At the end of 1949 the KMT retreated to Taiwan with national treasures and 2 million soldiers and refugees, and some members who stayed on the mainland founded the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang.

In Taiwan, the February 28 incident of 1947 was followed by the White Terror, in which over 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, and one-party rule under martial law lasted from 1949 to 1987. In the 1970s the country lost its United Nations seat and much of its diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China. In the late 1980s Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and the ban on opposition parties, and Lee Teng-hui continued democratisation and was re-elected in the first direct presidential election in 1996. Defeat in the 2000 presidential election ended 72 years of KMT presidencies; Ma Ying-jeou regained power in 2008, but the party lost again in 2016. It became the largest party in the Legislative Yuan in 2024 and, regarding the Republic of China as the sole representative of China, accepts the 1992 Consensus and favours the status quo.