China's Nationalist government promised democracy in three stages but stalled at stage two
Sun Yat-sen's plan for China ran in three steps: unify by force, tutor the people in their rights, then hand over to a constitution. The Nationalist government that ruled from 1925 to 1948 finished the first step, lingered for two decades in the second, and reached the third only as it dissolved itself.
The government was set up by the Kuomintang in Guangzhou on 1 July 1925, four months after Sun died. It inherited a country in pieces: the republic proclaimed on 1 January 1912 had lost its footing once Yuan Shikai, who tried to make himself emperor, died in 1916 and warlords carved up the provinces. Chiang Kai-shek, commanding the National Revolutionary Army as Generalissimo, led the Northern Expedition, backed by Soviet aid and advisers, to defeat those regional strongmen.
The alliance with the Communists broke apart in 1927 when Chiang turned on them first, a split that fed the long civil war. He moved the capital to Nanjing that year, absorbed a rival leftist government in Wuhan led by Wang Jingwei, and by 1928 had taken Beijing and nominally unified the country. The Nanjing Decade that followed, running to 1937, saw central power at its strongest, though a provisional constitution in 1931 entrenched one-party rule and left Chiang in authoritarian control.
The record was mixed. The party backed women's education, reserved parliamentary seats for women and opposed polygamy and foot binding, literacy rose, and new institutions such as Academia Sinica and the Central Bank of China appeared. Between 1929 and 1941 the economy expanded by an average of 3.9 per cent annually, and in 1932 China sent its first Olympic team. Yet famines between 1928 and 1943 cost at least 11.7 million lives, corruption ran through every level, and Chiang depended on unreliable warlord allies such as Yan Xishan and Zhang Xueliang, who defied him openly in the Xi'an Incident of 1936. The historian Edmund Fung argues democracy may have been out of reach in those conditions anyway.
Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and the war from 1937 drove the government west to Chongqing. After Japan surrendered, China became a founding member of the United Nations, and the government went back to Nanjing in 1946. American-brokered talks, including a consultative conference in January 1946, collapsed, full civil war resumed in early 1947, and on 20 May 1948 the Nationalist government gave way to a constitutional one.
Source: Nationalist government
