Guomindang (1912–1949)

Abstract

Studies on the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Zhongguo Guomindang (GMD), have focused on some fundamental questions. The first has concerned its political and ideological roots. The GMD was built in 1912 when Sun Yat-sen directed the transformation of the Tongmenghui into a centralized, democratic political party. In 1913, however, the ex-Qing minister and general, Yuan Shikai, became the president of the Republic of China and ordered the dissolution of the GMD. In 1919 the GMD was revived by Sun, but only in 1923 did the party reaffirm its role. In the early Republic, the GMD developed in a political culture in which factions and personal connections were fundamental, causing large disagreement about its policy and ideology. In the early 1920s, Comintern representatives helped to reorganize the GMD in a Leninist-style party, setting basic approaches for bilateral cooperation, to include the recently established Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The GMD was restructured and a modern military force was created. The party’s ideology was, on the contrary, rather homegrown: the Three People’s Principles were elaborated into a political platform that targeted warlordism and imperialism. From 1926 on, the Guomindang, with the support of the Soviet advisers and the CCP, brought the warlord era to an end and, to a great extent, unified China; after Sun’s death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) rose to national power. The second area of investigation has concerned GMD’s performance in state building and governance. In 1928, after the end the Northern Expedition and the GMD-CCP split, Chiang and the GMD established a national government in Nanjing, which lasted about ten years (1928–1937, the so-called Nanjing decade), before the start of China’s war of resistance against Japan. The war years (1937–1945) saw the GMD-CCP United Front, which was largely ineffective; the relocation of the capital to Chongqing; and the birth of a collaborationist government headed by Wang Jingwei. In the late 1940s, a final battle between the GMD and the CCP resulted in the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and in the retreat of the Guomindang to Taiwan. Scholars have debated on the GMD’s capacity, arguing either that the modest but definite successes in unification and a variety of modernization projects would in the long run have produced a stable and prosperous country, had not the Japanese invaded China, or, on the contrary, emphasizing how GMD regime’s authoritarianism, corruption, and incompetence as well as Chiang’s policy produced a demoralizing effect on the party and a growing dissatisfaction within society. For many decades, studies on the GMD have been informed by the Cold War–era divisions and the basic orientations of Chinese historiography during the Maoist period. Recently new trends have emerged offering deeper insights into several questions, which include a more reliable evaluation of Chiang Kai-shek’s role.