History of The Kuomintang - Early Years

Early Years

The Kuomintang traces its roots to the Revive China Society, which was founded in 1895 and merged with several other anti-monarchist societies as the Revolutionary Alliance in 1905. After the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution and the founding of the Republic of China, the Kuomintang was formally established on August 25, 1912 at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing where the Revolutionary Alliance and several smaller revolutionary groups joined together to contest the first National Assembly elections.

Sun Yat-sen, who had just stepped down as provisional president of the Republic of China, was chosen as its overall leader under the title of premier (Chinese: 總理; pinyin: zǒnglǐ), and Huang Xing was chosen as Sun's deputy. However, the most influential member of the party was the third ranking Song Jiaoren, who mobilized mass support from gentry and merchants for the KMT on a platform of promoting constitutional parliamentary democracy. Though the party had an overwhelming majority in the first National Assembly, President Yuan Shikai started ignoring the parliamentary body in making presidential decisions, counter to the Constitution, and assassinated its parliamentary leader Song Jiaoren in Shanghai in 1913. Members of the KMT led by Sun Yat-sen staged the Second Revolution in July 1913, a poorly planned and ill-supported armed rising to overthrow Yuan, and failed. Yuan dissolved the KMT in November (whose members had largely fled into exile in Japan) and dismissed the parliament early in 1914. Yuan Shikai proclaimed himself emperor in December 1915. While exiled in Japan in 1914, Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party, but many of his old revolutionary comrades, including Huang Xing, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin and Chen Jiongming, refused to join him or support his efforts in inciting armed uprising against Yuan Shikai. In order to join the Chinese Revolutionary Party, members must take an oath of personal loyalty to Sun, which many old revolutionaries regarded as undemocratic and contrary to the spirit of the revolution. Thus, many old revolutionaries did not join Sun's new organization, and he was largely sidelined within the Republican movement during this period. Sun returned to China in 1917 to establish a rival government at Guangzhou, but was soon forced out of office and exiled to Shanghai. There, with renewed support, he resurrected the KMT on October 10, 1919, but under the name of the Chinese Kuomintang, as the old party had simply been called the Kuomintang. In 1920, Sun and the KMT were restored in Guangdong. In 1923, the KMT and its government accepted aid from the Soviet Union after being denied recognition by the western powers. Soviet advisers – the most prominent of whom was Mikhail Borodin, an agent of the Comintern – began to arrive in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, establishing a Leninist party structure that lasted into the 1990s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their separate party identities, forming the First United Front between the two parties.

Soviet advisers also helped the Nationalists set up a political institute to train propagandists in mass mobilization techniques, and in 1923 Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun's lieutenants from the Tongmenghui days, was sent to Moscow for several months' military and political study. At the first party congress in 1924, which included non-KMT delegates such as members of the CCP, they adopted Sun's political theory, which included the Three Principles of the People - nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood.