History of the Republic of China

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The history of the Republic of China began in 1912 with the end of the Qing dynasty, when the Xinhai Revolution and the formation of the Republic of China put an end to 2,000 years of imperial rule. The Republic experienced many trials and tribulations after its founding which included being dominated by elements as disparate as warlord generals and foreign powers.

In 1928, the Republic was nominally unified under the Kuomintang (KMT; also called "Chinese Nationalist Party") after the Northern Expedition, and was in the early stages of industrialization and modernization when it was caught in the conflicts involving the Kuomintang government, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), local warlords, and the Empire of Japan. Most nation-building efforts were stopped during the full-scale Second Sino-Japanese War against Japan from 1937 to 1945, and later the widening gap between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party made a coalition government impossible, causing the resumption of the Chinese Civil War, in 1946, shortly after the Japanese surrender to the Allied Powers in September 1945.

A series of political, economic and military missteps led to the KMT's defeat and its retreat to Taiwan (formerly "Formosa") in 1949, where it established an authoritarian one-party state under Generalissimo/President Chiang Kai-shek. This state considers and until the 1990s actively asserted itself to be the continuing sole legitimate ruler of all of China, referring to the communist government or "regime" as illegitimate, a so-called "People's Republic of China" (PRC) declared in Beijing by Mao Zedong in 1949, as "mainland China" and "communist bandit". The Republic of China was supported for many years – even decades – by many nations, especially the United States who established a 1954 Mutual Defense treaty. After political liberalization began in the late 1960s, the PRC was able – after a constant yearly campaign in the United Nations – to finally get approval in 1971 to take the seat for "China" in the General Assembly, and more importantly, be seated as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. After recovering from this shock of rejection by its former allies and liberalization in the late 1970s from the Nationalist authoritarian government and following the death of Chiang Kai-shek, the Republic of China has transformed itself into a multiparty, representative democracy on Taiwan and given more representation to those native Taiwanese, whose ancestors predate the 1949 mainland evacuation.