History of political parties in China
Open-knowledge reference entry

In the history of political parties in China, the first major party in China was the Kuomintang (KMT), which moved to Taiwan in 1949. It was founded in the Republic of Hawaii on November 24, 1894, before being reorganized at Guangdong Province on August 25, 1912, from a union of several revolutionary groups. The Republic of China was founded by Kuomintang's leader Sun Yat-sen later that year. In 1921, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao in Shanghai as a study society, and an informal political network.
During the Chinese Civil War, the CCP's military wing, the People's Liberation Army, defeated the Kuomintang's National Revolutionary Army (later the Republic of China Army) in 1949. The Kuomintang leadership fled mainland China, and re-established itself in Taiwan.
History
After the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, a plethora of parties appeared to compete for the upcoming National Assembly elections. The four largest winners were the Nationalist Party representing revolutionaries, the Republican Party representing militarists, the Unity Party representing the gentry, and the Democratic Party representing former constitutional monarchists. The latter three merged to form the Progressive Party in 1913. After the failed Second Revolution against Yuan Shikai, the Nationalist leadership fled China and regrouped as the Chinese Revolutionary Party.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of political parties in China” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.