Kuomintang

THE KUOMINTANG had its origins in the Chinese Revolution of 1912. In that year, the Ching (Manchu) Dynasty had been overthrown, after ruling China since 1644. The revolt had been instigated by those who wished to see the decrepit, Mandarin-governed kingdom replaced by a modern state. This desire had received renewed impetus by the humbling of China by foreign powers, who had divided the once proud land into spheres of influence. Also, the military weakness of the Chings had been shown by their inability to protect China during the 1894–95 war with Japan and the foreign expeditions during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

Perhaps the most important agent for change in China came from the overseas Chinese, the community that had sought avenues for prosperity closed to them at home. The overseas Chinese have been portrayed, with varying degrees of understanding, by fiction writers as diverse as the Englishman Joseph Conrad in Typhoon, and by Americans such as Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain.

By the opening years of the 20th century, the outspoken leader for a new China among the overseas community was Doctor Sun Yat-sen, who had been born in 1866 in Choyhung, China. After spending some years in still-independent Hawaii, he received his medical degree in the British colony of Hong Kong in 1892. He opened his first office in Portuguese Macao. In Hong Kong, he was exposed to Western ideals of democracy, as he would be in later residence in the United States. Surprisingly, he later abandoned his Western political beliefs in emulation of the communist regime in Russia, imposed by the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917. Faced with the unique problems of still-feudal China, Sun felt the communist model provided the better avenue for Chinese modernization. Like many modernizing Chinese of the revolutionary generation, he had embraced Protestantism as his religion. Among those whom Sun would later consider his “sworn brothers” in conspiracy was Charles Jones Soong, whose family would make a lasting impression on modern China. Charles Soong had converted to Methodism in 1880 in Wilmington, North Carolina.

In his search for allies to unseat the Manchus, Sun allied himself with the Chinese secret societies, whose descendants include the Triads, which play an influential role in global organized crime. However, historically, they had been founded as resistance groups against the Manchu invaders. They had been guerrilla fighters defending the last native Chinese dynasty, the Ming, against the Manchu invaders, as Martin Booth writes in The Dragon Syndicates. The groups had unified under the battle cry of “fan ching—fuk ming” (“overthrow the Ching—bring back the Ming”). At the same time, Sun sought the support of Japan, which was attempting to capitalize on its ascendant role in East Asia following the humbling of Russia in the 1904–05 war. Japanese influence was not in itself inimical. The Emperor Meiji-Mutsohito was attempting to lay the foundations of a liberal parliamentary system in Japan in this period.

With the support of the secret societies, the overseas community, and Meiji Japan, Sun founded the Tung Meng Hui, or Revolutionary Brotherhood, in Japan in 1905, shortly after the struggle with Tzarist Russia. The seeds of the future Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, were in Sun's Revolutionary Brotherhood, and its philosophy foreshadowed that of the later organization. From the first enunciation of his Three Principles, Sun felt the Chinese people should have an integral state of their own, with their own self-rule, and opportunity for economic growth. When revolution broke out, Sun returned to China and was elected president of the new republic at Nanking on New Year's Day, 1912. Yet surprisingly, he would abdicate power to General Yuan Shih-kai, a holdover from the Manchus, in March 1912. At the same time, the chief organizer of [Page 731]the Kuomintang, Sung Chiao-jen, was assassinated. The entry of Yuan Shih-kai began the devastating era of the tuchuns, the Chinese warlords, usually provincial military governors, who devastated China with their wars.

Chiang Kai-shek (above) led the rightist Kuomintang Party and was defeated by Mao Zedong's leftist communists.

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