History of The Republic of China

The History of the Republic of China begins after the Qing Dynasty in 1912, when the formation of the Republic of China put an end to over 2,000 years of Imperial rule. The Qing Dynasty, also known as the Manchu Dynasty, ruled from 1644-1912. Since its founding, the republic had experienced many trials and tribulations, being dominated by elements as disparate as warlord generals and foreign powers.

In 1928 the republic was nominally unified under the Kuomintang (KMT)---aka the Chinese Nationalist Party—after the Northern Expedition, and was in the early stages of industrialization and modernization when it was caught in the conflicts among the Kuomintang government, the Communist Party of China which was converted into a nationalist party, local warlords and Japan. Most nation-building efforts were stopped during the full-scale War of Resistance against Japan from 1937 to 1945, and later the widening gap between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party made a coalition government impossible, causing the resumption of the Chinese Civil War.

A series of political, economic and military missteps led to the Kuomintang's defeat and its retreat to Taiwan in 1949, where it established an authoritarian one-party state that considered itself to be the sole legitimate ruler of all of China. However, since political liberalization began in the late 1970s, the Republic of China has transformed itself into a multiparty, representative democracy on Taiwan.