The Kuomintang And The Nationalist Government In China

This lively history of China's Nationalist revolution tells the story of a small group of Chinese patriots headed by Sun Yat-sen until his death in 1925. They mobilised men, money, and propaganda to create a provincial base from which they launched a revolutionary military campaign to unify the country, end imperialist privilege, and bring the Kuomintang to power. Soviet Russia induced the fledgling Chinese Communist Party to join the effort, and sent money, arms, military and political experts to guide the revolution. But there was a fatal flaw in this co-operation, and when the fighting was over, the remnant Communist Party had been driven underground, the Russian experts had been expelled, and a faction-riven Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek could claim to be China's new government. This study of a key period in China's history, reprinted from Volume 12 of The Cambridge History of China, is solidly based in Chinese, Russian, and Western languages sources.

In recent years historians of China have focused increased attention on the critical decades of National rule on the mainland. This recent scholarship has substantially modified our understanding of the political events of this momentous period, shedding light on the character of Nationalist rule and on the sources of the Communist victory in 1949. Yet no existing textbook on modern China presents the events of the period according to these new findings. The five essays in this volume were written by leading authorities on the period, and they synthesize the new research. Drawn from Volume 13 of The Cambridge History of China, they represent the most complete and stimulating political history of the period available in the literature. The essays selected deal with Nationalist rule during the Nanking decade, the Communist movement from 1927 to 1937, Nationalist rule during the Sino-Japanese War, the Communist movement during the Sino-Japanese war, and the Kuomintang-Communist struggle from 1945 to 1949.

The Kuomintang (KMT)--the first legalized political party and movement in modern Malaysian and Singaporean history--is studied against the background of British colonial rule, the changing political circumstances and fortunes in China, and the rising and waning of Malayan Chinese nationalism from 1894. While it highlights the development of the Malayan KMT Movement in terms of leadership, organization, and ideology, it also analyzes changing British colonial policy and management techniques toward the Movement.

Anyone making a study of the causes that led to the fall of the Chinese mainland into Communist hands will have to examine the long struggles between the two major rival parties in China, the Nationalists or the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists. As the author once took a personal part in those struggles, he has assumed the task of giving an account of the facts as known to him. Some of the intricate events recorded in the following pages may be little known to the outside world or have not yet been revealed by others. What he has put down here has been carefully checked by him and is all backed up by firsthand sources. For example, on the eve of the March 19, 1926 Chungshan gunboat incident at Canton, an incident in which the Communists had plotted to kidnap General Chiang Kai-shek, then Commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy, someone had asked the General himself in person whether he was going back to Whampoa that day. Three telephone calls were made asking this question. In making a report of the incident after it was over, General Chiang did not identify who the individual was who was so persistent in ascertaining the General's movements on that momentous day, nor did he ever breathe a word of it even to his closest aides. Up to now few people know for sure who the person might have been.