Republic of China

Reference

Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia

"Republic of China (ROC): The government founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1912 and transformed by Chiang K'ai-shek after 1927. The ROC was exiled to Taiwan in 1949." [Fall and Rise of China Guidebook, p. 195] "A failed attempt to revive the empire was followed by a decade of warlordism that unsettled the countryside, while foreigners played key economic and administrative roles in the treaty ports. This inspired a nationalist revolution against foreign imperialism, which was accompanied by the crude beginnings of a social revolution to mobilize the farming masses on the land. . . . Japan's aggression, merging into World War II, added immeasurably to the Chinese people's desperation. . . . It [CCP] numbered hardly more than 300 members in 1922, only 1,500 or so by 1925, whereas the GMD [Kuomintang] in 1923 had some 50,000 members. . . . Although the GMD won power, it was composed of so many disparate elements that it was unable to function as a party dictatorship. . . . This tangled story suggests that there has been at bottom only one revolutionary movement in twentieth-century China, that of socialism mainly headed by the CCP." [Fairbank: China, p. 255-85]