History
The Republic of China was founded by the Kuomintang (KMT) leader Dr. Sun Yat-sen in 1912. The Kuomintang's prior revolutionary political group, the Revive China Society, was founded on 24 November 1894. It later merged with various other revolutionary groups to form the Tongmenghui in 1905. In August 1911, the Tongmenghui further merged with various other political parties in Beijing to form the KMT. In July 1914, the KMT re-organized itself as the "Chinese Revolutionary Party" in Tokyo, Japan. In 1919, the party officially renamed itself as "Kuomintang of China", which literally translates to "Chinese Nationalist Party". It was China's first major political party. In 1921, the Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao in Shanghai as a study society and an informal network. Slowly, the CPC began to grow. These were the two major political parties in the ROC, during the time when the ROC ruled mainland China from 1911 to 1949.
During the Chinese Civil War, under the leadership of the CPC, the People's Liberation Army defeated the National Revolutionary Army of the Kuomintang in 1949. The Kuomintang had no choice but to leave mainland China and move to Taiwan. It continued to use the name "Republic of China" (ROC) even though the CPC claimed that the Republic of China ceased to exist after 1949.
As Taiwan democratized during the 1980s, the number of legally registered political parties in Taiwan had increased exponentially and continued to increase year by year, indicating a liberal democracy and high political freedom in Taiwan.
Read more about this topic: List Of Political Parties In The Republic Of China
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)