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In 1911, the last imperial dynasty, the Qing (ethnic Manchu led) Dynasty was overthrown by the Han nationality led by a man called Sun Yat-sen. Sun became the first president. For lack of popular support, however, Sun had to step down quickly to defer to another man called Yuan Shikai, who used to work in the imperial government and had connections in the Chinese north with the various warlords--regional rulers who disregarded the central post-imperial government because they had their own armies loyal to them. In 1915, President Yuan Shikai conorated himself as the new emperor but died within a hundred days of rule because the whole nation rose against him. After his death in 1916 came a succession of warlord rule in Beijing, the capital of China, until 1928. Meanwhile, the Nationalist Party, the first modern political party established in China, was active in the Chinese south.

Eventually, the Nationalists allied with another modern Chinese politifcal party, the Communists, and marched northward from Canton to recover the whole China. When they saw the glimmer of success, the Nationalists abandoned the Communists and massacred the latter in Shanghai. Chinese Communists turned underground and rural, to southeast China. guerrilla warfare became the norm. The Nationalists became the government in 1928, after which they concentrated their force on exterminating the Chinese Communists, forcing the latter to launch a "long march" away from their base in southeast China to northwestern China via the southwest, crossing marshes, snow covered mountains, and the Tibetan plateau, from Oct.1934-Oct.1935, arriving finally in Yanan. The Communist force was decimated from 40,000 to around 3,000.

In Yanan the Communists rebuilt their force. Meanwhile, the Japanese were aggressively progressing in China in the name of protecting their citizens and properties in China. In the face of an impending war with Japan, elite members of the Nationalist government captured Chiang kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists, and forced him to stop civil war with the Communists and sit down and talk about an alliance with the Communists in the face of Japanese invasion. The United Front, as the alliance was called, was struck in 1936, and in 1937, the Sino-Japanese war broke out. The war lasted for eight years, finally ending with the American dropping two A-bombs in Japan in August 1945.

Civil war between the Nationalists and Communists immediately ensued after the Japanese surrender. The United States, after some hesitation, threw its lot with the Nationalists because it decided Communism to be a greater enemy than the corruptionofthe Nationalists. The Communists through the use of guerrilla warfare and land redistribution in the countryside, drew popular rural support and eventually won the civil war. The Nationalists fled to Taiwan, which became the location of the Republic of China, while mainland China became the People's Republic of China in 1949. International recognition was mostly given to Taiwan as the legitimate government of China. The Cold War prevented much communication between Communist China and the Western world until 1972, when President Nixon visited China and decided on American withdrawal from Vietnam. China finally opened up to the outside world after 1978 and normalized diplomatic relationship with the U.S. in 1979.

For about 30 years, China and Taiwan claimed to be the legitimate government of China. But in the past 15 years or so, the Taiwan government increasingly expressed its attitude that Taiwan is a separate country from China. Unification with Taiwan has remained one of the unchanging agendas of Communist China, on the other hand.