China’s civil war paused for Japan, then finished on Taiwan’s shore
Fighting between the Nationalist Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party ran intermittently from 1 August 1927 until Communist victory sent the KMT to Taiwan on 7 December 1949. A First United Front had helped the Northern Expedition; Japan’s war interrupted, then the 1945–49 phase decided the mainland.
The Qing dynasty fell in the 1911 Revolution, and Sun Yat-sen became president of the new Republic of China before handing over to Yuan Shikai. Yuan's brief bid to crown himself emperor failed, and after his death in 1916 the country splintered among warlords. Sun's Kuomintang set up a rival government in Guangzhou. When Western governments ignored his requests for aid, he turned to Moscow, and in 1923 the Sun-Joffe Manifesto pledged Soviet help to unify China.
The Chinese Communist Party had begun as an intellectuals' study group and was formally founded in 1921 at a congress in Shanghai's French Concession. It was tiny, with 300 members in 1922 and 1,500 by 1925, against the Kuomintang's 50,000 in 1923, and its members joined the Nationalists individually in the First United Front. Chiang Kai-shek studied in Moscow in 1923 and then ran the Whampoa Military Academy, supplied by the Soviets, where future premier Zhou Enlai served as a political instructor.
In 1926 and 1927 the allies ran the highly successful Northern Expedition against central China's warlords. But after Sun died in 1925 the Kuomintang split into left and right, and in March 1926 Chiang, now commander in chief, began pushing Communists out of senior posts. Open war broke out on 1 August 1927. Communist historiography calls these stages the First and Second Revolutionary Civil Wars.
From 1937 to 1945 a Second United Front largely paused the fight to resist Japan, though clashes never fully stopped. As Japanese defeat neared the war resumed, and in the 1945 to 1949 phase, known as the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Communists took the mainland, proclaiming the People's Republic in October 1949. The Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan on 7 December. Nationalist guerrillas fought on in mainland China and northern Burma until 1961, open conflict tacitly ceased in 1979, and no armistice or peace treaty has ever been signed.
Source: Chinese Civil War
