After Sun's death in 1925, Chiang became leader of the party and commander-in-chief of the NRA, and from 1926 to 1928 led the Northern Expedition, which nominally reunified China under a Nationalist government based in Nanjing.

In 1936, Chiang was kidnapped by his generals in the Xi'an Incident and forced to form an anti-Japanese Second United Front with the CCP, and between 1937 and 1945 led China in the Second Sino-Japanese War, mostly from the wartime capital of Chongqing.

Critics fault him for his early pacifism toward Japan's occupation of Manchuria, flooding of the Yellow River, cronyism and corruption with the Four Big Families, and his right-wing dictatorship on both mainland China and Taiwan.

[11] Chiang grew up at a time in which military defeats, natural disasters, famines, revolts, unequal treaties and civil wars had left the Manchu-dominated Ch‘ing dynasty unstable and in debt.

During his first visit to Japan to pursue a military career from April 1906 to later that year, he describes himself as having strong nationalistic feelings with a desire, among other things, to 'expel the Manchu Ch‘ing and to restore China'.

After the takeover of the Republican government by Yuan Shikai and the failed Second Revolution in 1913, Chiang, like his KMT comrades, divided his time between exile in Japan and the havens of the Shanghai International Settlement.

[28] The right wing of the party supported him, and Joseph Stalin, anxious to maintain Soviet influence in the area, had his lieutenants agree to Chiang's demands[30] on a reduced Communist presence in the KMT leadership in exchange for certain other concessions.

[28] The rapid replacement of leadership enabled Chiang to effectively end civilian oversight of the military after 15 May, though his authority was somewhat limited[30] by the army's own regional composition and divided loyalties.

Now with an established national government in Nanjing, and supported by conservative allies including Hu Hanmin, Chiang's expulsion of the Communists and their Soviet advisers led to the beginning of the Chinese Civil War.

His successor, Zhang Xueliang, accepted the authority of the KMT leadership, and the Northern Expedition officially concluded, completing Chiang's nominal unification of China and ending the Warlord Era.

After the Northern Expedition ended in 1928, Yan, Feng, Li Zongren and Zhang Fakui broke off relations with Chiang shortly after a demilitarization conference in 1929, and together they formed an anti-Chiang coalition to openly challenge the legitimacy of the Nanjing government.

Originally rebuffed in the early 1920s, Chiang managed to ingratiate himself to some degree with Soong Mei-ling's mother by first divorcing his wife and concubines and promising to sincerely study the precepts of Christianity.

[39] The United States consulate and other Westerners in Shanghai were concerned about the approach of "Red General" Chiang as his army was seizing control of large areas of the country in the Northern Expedition.

Since the KMT had completed the first step of revolution through seizure of power in 1928, Chiang's rule thus began a period of what his party considered to be "political tutelage" in Sun Yat-sen's name.

That increased the literacy rate across China and also promoted the ideals of Tridemism of democracy, republicanism, science, constitutionalism, and Chinese nationalism based on the Dang Guo of the KMT.

[77][78] He used diplomatic persuasion on the United States, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union to regain lost Chinese territories, as he viewed all foreign powers as imperialists that were attempting to exploit China.

During the Nationalists' retreat from Zhengzhou, the dams around the city were deliberately destroyed by the National Revolutionary Army to delay the Japanese advance, and the subsequent 1938 Yellow River flood killed 800,000[82] to one million people.

[115] Earlier, Dai had been involved with the Blue Shirts Society, a fascist-inspired paramilitary group within the Kuomintang that wanted to expel Western and Japanese imperialists, crush the Communists, and eliminate feudalism.

When the Communists captured the Nationalist capital of Nanjing in April 1949, Li refused to accompany the central government as it fled to Guangdong and instead expressed his dissatisfaction with Chiang by retiring to Guangxi.

[121] The former warlord Yan Xishan, who had fled to Nanjing only one month earlier, quickly insinuated himself within the Li-Chiang rivalry and attempted to have Li and Chiang reconcile their differences in the effort to resist the Communists.

The object of Li's strategy was to maintain a foothold on the Chinese mainland in the hope that the United States would eventually be compelled to enter the war in China on the Nationalist side.

[123] After Canton fell to the Communists, Chiang relocated the government to Chongqing, and Li effectively surrendered his powers and flew to New York for treatment of his chronic duodenum illness at the Hospital of Columbia University.

[132] The first decades after the Nationalists had moved the seat of government to the province of Taiwan are associated with the organized effort to resist Communism, which was known as the "White Terror"; about 140,000 Taiwanese were imprisoned for their real or perceived opposition to the Kuomintang.

When the Northern Expedition was complete, Kuomintang Generals led by Chiang Kai-shek paid tribute to Sun's soul in heaven with a sacrificial ceremony at the Xiangshan Temple in Beijing in July 1928.

Even though China received little American aid compared to Britain and the Soviet Union, it did not fold, as Chiang called on his countrymen to fight to the "bitter end" until their ultimate victory against Japan in 1945.

However, historian Rudolph Rummel documented that the Nationalist government under Chiang led to millions of excess deaths from calamities such as its persecution against actual or perceived communists and its conscription of soldiers, confiscation of food, and flooding of downstream regions of the Yellow River during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

[169][170] His popularity in Taiwan is divided along political lines, enjoying better support in the Kuomintang (KMT) while being widely unpopular among Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) voters and those who blame him for the thousands killed during the February 28 Incident and criticise his dictatorial rule.

[180] Some Chinese historians argue that the main determinants for Chiang's defeat were not corruption or the lack of US support, but his decision to start the civil war with 70% of government expenditures in the military, his overestimation of the Nationalist forces equipped with US arms, and the loss of popularity and morales of his soldiers.

[185] In recent years, Chiang's image has been somewhat rehabilitated, and he has been increasingly perceived as a man overwhelmed by the events in China, having to fight the communists, Japanese, and provincial warlords simultaneously while trying to reconstruct and unify the country.

The Yuehua, a Chinese Muslim publication, quoted the Quran and hadith to justify submitting to Chiang Kai-shek as the leader of China, and as justification for Jihad in the war against Japan.