A report on Nationalist government, Chinese Civil War and Chiang Kai-shek

The party retreated from the mainland to Taiwan on 7 December 1949, following its defeat in the Chinese Civil War.

From 1926 to 1928, the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek successfully led the Northern Expedition against regional warlords and unified the fragmented nation.

From 1937 to 1945, the KMT-ruled Nationalist government led China through the Second Sino-Japanese War against Japan.

The Republic of China (ROC) was commonly recognised as the official designation of China from 1912 to 1949, when it was a country in East Asia based in Mainland China, prior to the relocation of its central government to Taiwan as a result of the Chinese Civil War.

General Chiang Kai-shek, who became the Chairman of the Kuomintang after Sun's death and subsequent power struggle in 1925, began the Northern Expedition in 1926 to overthrow the Beiyang government.

In 1927, Chiang moved the nationalist government to Nanking and purged the CCP, beginning with the Shanghai massacre.

The CCP under his leadership emerged victorious in the Chinese Civil War against the Kuomintang, and in 1949 Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

However, when the right-wing of the KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek, turned on the CCP and massacred tens of thousands of the party's members, the two parties split and began a prolonged civil war.

Support for the CCP continued to grow throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War, and after the Japanese surrender in 1945, the CCP emerged triumphant in the communist revolution against the KMT government.

The PLA can trace its origins during the republican era to the left-wing units of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) of the Kuomintang (KMT) when they broke away on 1 August 1927 in an uprising against the nationalist government as the Chinese Red Army before being reintegrated into the NRA as units of New Fourth Army and Eighth Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The CCP founded their military wing on 1 August 1927 during the Nanchang uprising when Communist elements of the National Revolutionary Army rebelled under the leadership of Zhu De, He Long, Ye Jianying and Zhou Enlai and other leftist elements of the Kuomintang after the Shanghai massacre of 1927 by Chiang Kai-shek.

1927–1950: Chinese Civil War

The expedition was led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and was divided into two phases.

The first phase ended in a 1927 political split between two factions of the KMT: the right-leaning Nanjing faction, led by Chiang, and the left-leaning faction in Wuhan, led by Wang Jingwei.

Although Chiang was ultimately victorious in that war which ensured his status as the singular leader of all China, regionalism and warlordism would continue, weakening the country and laying the groundwork for the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War.

The Shanghai massacre of 12 April 1927, the April 12 Purge or the April 12 Incident as it is commonly known in China, was the violent suppression of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organizations and leftist elements in Shanghai by forces supporting General Chiang Kai-shek and conservative factions in the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party, or KMT).

For the rest of 1927, the CCP would fight to regain power, beginning the Chinese Civil War.

In January 1927, the NRA, commanded by Chiang Kai-shek captured Wuhan and went on to attack Nanchang, and KMT leader Wang Jingwei and his left-wing allies, along with the Chinese Communists and the Soviet agent Borodin, transferred the seat of the Nationalist Government from Guangzhou to Wuhan.

Nanjing served as the capital of Eastern Wu (229–280), one of the three major states in the Three Kingdoms period; the Eastern Jin and each of the Southern dynasties (Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang and Chen), which successively ruled southern China from 317 to 589; the Southern Tang (937–75), one of the Ten Kingdoms; the Ming dynasty when, for the first time, all of China was ruled from the city (1368–1421); and the Republic of China under the nationalist Kuomintang (1927–37, 1946–49) prior to its flight to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-Shek during the Chinese Civil War.

Former Central Government of ROC Building Group along N. Zhongshan Road (中山北路国民政府建筑群)

He was an instigator of the 1936 Xi'an Incident, in which Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of China's ruling party, was arrested in order to force him to enter into a truce with the insurgent Chinese Communist Party and form a united front against Japan, which had occupied Manchuria.

In 1930, when warlords Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan attempted to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government, Chang stepped in to support the Nanking (Nanjing)-based government against the Northern warlords in exchange for control of the key railroads in Hopeh (Hebei) and the customs revenues from the port city of Tianjin.

On 6 April 1936, Chang met with CCP delegate Zhou Enlai to plan the end of the Chinese Civil War.

1) President Chiang Kai-shek declared incapacity on 21 January 1949 amid several Communist victories in the Chinese Civil War and was replaced by Vice President Li Tsung-jen as the acting president. However, Chiang continued to wield authority as the director-general of the Kuomintang and commander-in-chief of the Republic of China Armed Forces. Li Tsung-jen lost the ensuing power struggle and fled to the United States in November 1949. Chiang evacuated with the government to Taiwan on 10 December 1949 and resumed his duties as the president on 1 March 1950.

Sun died in 1925 with no clear successor and leadership of the government, now named the National Government, rested in a series of Leninist-style dual party and state committees, the most powerful of which was the policy-making Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang.