The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the sole ruling party of Mainland China from 1928 to 1949 until its relocation to Taiwan, and in Taiwan ruled under martial law until 1987. The KMT is a centre-right to right-wing party and the largest in the Pan-Blue Coalition, one of Taiwan's two main political groups. Its primary rival is the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the largest party in the Pan-Green Coalition. As of 2025, the KMT is the largest single party in the Legislative Yuan and is chaired by Cheng Li-wun.
The party was founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1894 in Honolulu, Republic of Hawaii, as the Revive China Society. He reformed the party in 1919 in the Shanghai French Concession under its current name. From 1926 to 1928, the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek unified China in the Northern Expedition against regional warlords, leading to the fall of the Beiyang government. After initially allying with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the First United Front, the party under Chiang purged communist members. It was the sole ruling party of China from 1928 to 1949 but gradually lost control while fighting the Empire of Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War and the CCP in the Chinese Civil War. In December 1949, the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan following its defeat by the communists.
From 1949 to 1987, the KMT ruled Taiwan as a one-party state after the February 28 incident. During this period (known as the White Terror), martial law was in effect and civil liberties were curtailed as part of its anti-communism efforts. The party oversaw Taiwan's rapid economic development but later experienced diplomatic setbacks, including the loss of the country's seat in the United Nations and loss of international diplomatic recognition to the CCP-led People's Republic of China (PRC) in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, party leader Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and the ban on opposition parties. His successor, Lee Teng-hui, continued democratic reforms and was reelected in 1996 in the first direct presidential election. The 2000 presidential election ended 72 years of KMT presidencies. The party reclaimed power with the landslide victory of Ma Ying-jeou in the 2008 presidential election, then lost the presidency and its legislative majority in the 2016 election, but regained a legislative plurality in the 2024 election.
The party's guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, advocated by Sun Yat-sen and organized on a basis of democratic centralism. As the KMT supports the ROC as the only representative of China, it opposes both Chinese unification under the PRC and formal Taiwan independence. As the KMT opposes non-peaceful means to resolve the cross-strait disputes while still strongly adhering to the ROC constitution, the party favors a closer relationship with the PRC and accepts the 1992 Consensus, which defines both sides of the Taiwan Strait as "one China" but maintains its ambiguity to different interpretations. It seeks to maintain Taiwan's status quo rather than formal independence or unification.
The KMT traces its ideological and organizational roots to the work of the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, a proponent of Chinese nationalism and democracy who founded the Revive China Society at the capital of the Republic of Hawaii, Honolulu, on 24 November 1894. On 20 August 1905, Sun joined forces with other anti-monarchist societies in Tokyo, Empire of Japan, to form the Tongmenghui, a group committed to overthrowing the Qing dynasty and establishing a republic in China.
The group supported the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the founding of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912. Sun and the Tongmenghui are often depicted as the principal organizers of the Xinhai Revolution, but this is disputed by scholars who argue that the Revolution broke out in a leaderless and decentralized way and that Sun was only later elected provisional president of the new Chinese republic. However, Sun did not have military power and ceded the provisional presidency of the republic to Yuan Shikai, who arranged for the abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor, on 12 February.
On 25 August 1912, the Nationalist Party was established at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing, where the Tongmenghui and five smaller pro-revolution parties merged to contest the first national elections. Sun was chosen as the party chairman with Huang Xing as his deputy.
The most influential member of the party was the third-ranking Song Jiaoren, who mobilized mass support from gentry and merchants for the Nationalists to advocate a constitutional parliamentary democracy. The party opposed constitutional monarchists and sought to check the power of Yuan. The Nationalists won an overwhelming majority in the first National Assembly election in December 1912.
Yuan soon began to ignore the parliament in making presidential decisions. Song was assassinated in Shanghai in 1913. Members of the Nationalists, led by Sun Yat-sen, suspected that Yuan was behind the plot and thus staged the Second Revolution in July 1913, a poorly planned and ill-supported armed uprising to overthrow Yuan, which failed. In November, claiming subversion and betrayal, Yuan expelled KMT adherents from parliament and dissolved the Nationalists, whose members had largely fled into exile in Japan. In early 1914, he dismissed the parliament.
Yuan proclaimed himself emperor in December 1915. While exiled in Japan, Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party on 8 July 1914, but many of his old revolutionary comrades, including Huang Xing, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin, and Chen Jiongming, refused to join him or support his efforts in inciting armed uprising against Yuan. To join the Revolutionary Party, members had to take an oath of personal loyalty to Sun, which many old revolutionaries regarded as undemocratic and contrary to the spirit of the revolution. As a result, he became largely sidelined within the Republican movement during this period.
Sun returned to China in 1917 to establish a military junta at Canton to oppose the Beiyang government but was soon forced out of office and exiled to Shanghai. There, with renewed support, he resurrected the KMT on 10 October 1919, under the name Kuomintang of China (中國國民黨) and established its headquarters in Canton in 1920.
In 1923, the KMT and its Canton government accepted aid from the Soviet Union after being denied recognition by the western powers. Soviet advisers—the most prominent of whom was Mikhail Borodin, an agent of the Comintern—arrived in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), establishing a Leninist party structure that lasted into the 1990s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their separate party identities, forming the First United Front between the two parties. Mao Zedong and early members of the CCP also joined the KMT in 1923.
Soviet advisers also helped the KMT to set up a political institute to train propagandists in mass mobilization techniques, and in 1923 Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun's lieutenants from the Tongmenghui days, was sent to Moscow for several months' military and political study. At the first party congress in 1924 in Guangzhou, which included non-KMT delegates such as members of the CCP, they adopted Sun's political theory, which included the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood.
Under Chiang Kai-shek in mainland China
When Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, the political leadership of the KMT fell to Wang Jingwei ("Reorganization Group") and Hu Hanmin ("Western Hills Group"), respectively the left-wing and right-wing leaders of the party. However, the real power was in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, who was in near complete control of the military as the superintendent of the Whampoa Military Academy. With their military superiority, the KMT confirmed their rule on Canton, the provincial capital of Guangdong. The Guangxi warlords pledged loyalty to the KMT. The KMT now became a rival government in opposition to the warlord Beiyang government based in Beijing.