Republic of China

History

The Xinhai Revolution and End of Imperial Rule

Following the 1911 Xinhai Revolution inspired by Sun Yat-sen's 'Three Principles of the People' (nationalism, democracy, and the livelihood of the people), the Qing Dynasty abdicated, bringing an end to more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China. Proclaimed in January 1912 as Asia's first constitutional republic, the Republic of China overcame an era of regional warlord fragmentation when Chiang Kai-shek led the Northern Expedition to establish the Nationalist Government in Nanjing in 1928.

The United Front and Retreat to Chongqing

After Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and launched a full-scale invasion following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, the rival Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and Chinese Communist Party forged a Second United Front to resist foreign invasion. Even after losing coastal metropolises and the capital of Nanjing, the government refused to capitulate, relocating factories, universities, and millions of refugees up the Yangtze River to the mountainous inland wartime capital of Chongqing to wage a protracted war of attrition ('trading space for time').

Allied Power and Founding Member of the United Nations - The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization founded in October 1945 immediately after World War II to maintain international peace and security, protect human rights, and foster global cooperation among sovereign states. Learning from the failure of the post-World War I League of Nations—which lacked U.S. participation and any military enforcement mechanism—Allied leaders designed the UN with a powerful Security Council featuring five permanent members (the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China) authorized to impose sanctions and deploy peacekeeping forces. Encompassing nearly every recognized nation on Earth today, the United Nations adopted the landmark 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and coordinates global humanitarian, health, and cultural initiatives through specialized agencies such as UNICEF, UNHCR, the WHO, and UNESCO.

By tying down hundreds of thousands of Japanese ground troops across the Chinese mainland for eight years, China's tenacity proved vital to the global Allied war effort. Supported by American Lend-Lease - The Lend-Lease Act, enacted by the United States Congress in March 1941, was a massive wartime aid program under which the United States supplied Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the Republic of China, Free France, and other Allied nations with weapons, ships, aircraft, fuel, raw materials, and food. To overcome domestic isolationist laws while Britain stood nearly out of cash, President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously compared the policy to lending a garden hose to a neighbor whose house is on fire to prevent the flames from spreading, declaring that the United States must serve as the 'Arsenal of Democracy.' Distributing over $50 billion (equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars today) in war matériel by 1945—including over 400,000 American trucks, locomotives, aluminum, and rations sent to the Soviet Union—Lend-Lease proved indispensable in sustaining Allied armies across every theater of World War II. supplies airlifted over the Himalayas ('The Hump'), the Republic of China participated in the 1943 Cairo Conference alongside the United States - A federal republic founded in 1776 that served as the 'Arsenal of Democracy' during World War II and emerged as a global superpower. and Great Britain, and Upon victory in 1945 became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.