The History of the Republic of China begins after the Qing Dynasty in 1912, when the formation of the Republic of China put an end to over 2,000 years of Imperial rule. The Qing Dynasty, also known as the Manchu Dynasty, ruled from 1644-1912. Since its founding, the republic had experienced many trials and tribulations, being dominated by elements as disparate as warlord generals and foreign powers.
In 1928 the republic was nominally unified under the Kuomintang (KMT)---aka the Chinese Nationalist Party—after the Northern Expedition, and was in the early stages of industrialization and modernization when it was caught in the conflicts among the Kuomintang government, the Communist Party of China which was converted into a nationalist party, local warlords and Japan. Most nation-building efforts were stopped during the full-scale War of Resistance against Japan from 1937 to 1945, and later the widening gap between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party made a coalition government impossible, causing the resumption of the Chinese Civil War.
A series of political, economic and military missteps led to the Kuomintang's defeat and its retreat to Taiwan in 1949, where it established an authoritarian one-party state that considered itself to be the sole legitimate ruler of all of China. However, since political liberalization began in the late 1970s, the Republic of China has transformed itself into a multiparty, representative democracy on Taiwan.
Read more about History Of The Republic Of China: Warlord Era (1916–1928), Nanjing Decade (1928–1937), Second Sino-Japanese War (1936–1945), Civil War and Transfer of Sovereignty Over Taiwan (1945–1949)
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, republic and/or china:
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Riot in Algeria, in Cyprus, in Alabama;
Aged in wrong, the empires are declining,
And China gathers, soundlessly, like evidence.
What shall I say to the young on such a morning?—
Mind is the one salvation?—also grammar?—
No; my little ones lean not toward revolt.”
—William Dewitt Snodgrass (b. 1926)