Kuomintang
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The Nationalist Party of China (中國國民黨, Mandarin: Zhōngguó Guómíndǎng), popularly known as the Kuomintang (KMT), is a major political party of the Republic of China. Founded by Templar Grand Master Sun Yat-sen, it advocated a liberal democratic republic for China and was one of the revolutionary groups behind the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1912. Within a short time of its establishment, the Republic of China splintered into warlord states, with the KMT controlling the southern province of Guangdong.
Assassins ended Sun Yat-sen's life in 1925, and by 1927, the party had come under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, the generalissimo bent on reunifying China with a Northern Expedition. His military campaign was surreptitiously assisted by the Shanghai Rite, who hoped to renew the KMT's association with the Order by offering Chiang the grand master position. Arriving in Shanghai on 12 April 1927, Chiang not only rebuffed the Templar offer, but he unleashed a surprise purge of the KMT's communist allies.
This event precipitated the civil war between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at the onset only one conflict in a wider arena of warring states and with an interlude during the Japanese invasion of China. Defeated by the CCP across all China in 1949, the KMT fled to Taiwan, which they violently seized on the pretext of inheriting former Qing imperial possessions. There, they reestablished their government while the CCP declared the People's Republic of China (PRC), with both sides claiming de jure sovereignty over China, with Taiwan as an inalienable constituent. After decades of one-party rule under the KMT, the Republic of China (ROC) democratized in the 1990s, making way for multiparty elections. At the present, the KMT remains one of the two main parties of the ROC, opposite the Democratic Progressive Pary representing Taiwanese nationalism.