Republic of China

The Republic of China was the state that governed mainland China from 1912 until 1949, ending more than two thousand years of imperial rule.

It was proclaimed on 1 January 1912 following the Xinhai Revolution, which toppled the Manchu-led Qing dynasty, with Sun Yat-sen, leader of the revolutionary Nationalist movement, serving as the first provisional president. Power soon passed to the military strongman Yuan Shikai, whose attempt to make himself emperor failed and whose death in 1916 plunged the country into the warlord era, a prolonged period in which rival regional militarists fought for control while a weak central government in Beijing held only nominal authority. During the 1920s the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT), reorganised by Sun Yat-sen and after his death led by Chiang Kai-shek, launched the Northern Expedition to reunify the country, establishing a national government at Nanjing in 1928. This Nanjing decade saw efforts at state-building, modernisation, and economic development, but the republic remained beset by internal division, including a deepening conflict with the Chinese Communist Party, which the Nationalists had violently purged from their ranks. The republic's stability was shattered by Japanese aggression: Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and launched a full-scale invasion in 1937, beginning the Second Sino-Japanese War, which merged into the Second World War and devastated the country with immense loss of life. Although China emerged on the victorious Allied side in 1945 and became a founding member of the United Nations, the war had exhausted the Nationalist government and strengthened the Communists. The uneasy wartime truce collapsed into renewed civil war, in which the Communist forces under Mao Zedong steadily gained the upper hand. By 1949 the Nationalists had been defeated on the mainland; the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in Beijing on 1 October 1949, and the Republic of China government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to the island of Taiwan, where it continued to function while claiming to be the legitimate government of all China.

Key figures