Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), political party of China organized during the Revolution of 1911, by which the Qing (Manchu) dynasty was overthrown and a republican government in China established. The Kuomintang was founded by the Nationalist revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, whose election in 1911 as provisional president of the republic established the Kuomintang as the leading party in the new government. In the following year, however, Sun was succeeded as president by the military leader Yuan Shikai, who, finding his autocratic policies opposed by the Kuomintang representatives, expelled the party from the government. After World War I the Kuomintang set up a separate government in southern China and attempted to secure the recognition of the major foreign powers, but succeeded in gaining only that of the Soviet Union. The party held its first national congress in 1924; included among the delegates were numerous non-Kuomintang groups, notably the representatives of the Chinese Communist Party, who exercised great influence on the decisions of the congress. Between 1924 and 1927 the power of the Communists within the Kuomintang increased sharply; but in the latter year Chiang Kai-shek, then a military officer and leader of a right-wing faction of the party, expelled the Communists and began a military campaign aimed both against them and at the conquest and unification of all China under the Kuomintang banner. By late 1928 this campaign had largely succeeded; the Kuomintang then began a period of "political tutelage," during which the party was to run the government while educating the people about their political rights. This period, originally scheduled to end in 1935, was extended (because of the war against Japan) until the end of 1947, when a new constitution was promulgated. ^^^
