To preserve national unity, Sun ceded the presidency to military strongman Yuan Shikai, who established the Beiyang government.

The Nationalist Government began drafting the Constitution of the Republic of China under a National Assembly, but was boycotted by the CCP.

After Sun's death on 12 March 1925, four months later on 1 July 1925, the National Government of the Republic of China was established in Guangzhou.

The following year, as Generalissimo of the National Revolutionary Army, Chiang Kai-shek became the de facto leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), or Chinese Nationalist Party.

Much of the Nationalist Party, however, became convinced, not without reason, that the Communists, under recent orders from the Comintern, wanted to break from the United Front and get rid of the KMT.

Chiang Kai-shek pushed the CCP into the interior as he sought to destroy them, and moved the Nationalist Government to Nanjing in 1927.

[5] Leftists within the KMT still allied to the CCP, led by Wang Jingwei, had established a rival Nationalist Government in Wuhan two months earlier, but soon joined Chiang in Nanjing in August 1927.

By the following year, Chiang's army had captured Beijing after overthrowing the Beiyang government and unified the entire nation, at least nominally, marking the beginning the Nanjing decade.

(Fung 2000, p. 30) By 1928, the Nationalists claimed that they had succeeded in reunifying China and were beginning the second stage, the period of so-called "tutelage".

(Fung 2000, p. 30) Despite nominal reunification, the Chiang's Nationalist Government relied heavily on the support of warlords such as Ma Hushan, Yan Xishan, and Zhang Xueliang to exert control on the provinces.

[8][9][10] The loyalty of these figures was often highly suspect, and they frequently engaged in acts of open defiance, as in the Xi'an Incident of 1936, or even rebellion.

In alliance with local landlords and other power-brokers, they blocked moderate land reforms that might have benefits the rural poor.

While weakened by frequent massacres and purges—historian Rudolph Rummel estimated that 1,654,000 people were killed by the KMT in anti-Communist purges during this period—the Communists were able to survive and posed a major latent threat to the regime.

During the Nanjing Decade, the spread of education increased the literacy rate across China and promoted the ideals of Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People of democracy, republicanism, science, constitutionalism, and Chinese Nationalism based on the Political Tutelage of the Kuomintang.

The military administration of the ROC extended over Taiwan, which led to widespread unrest and increasing tensions between local Taiwanese and mainlanders.

From 1945 to 1947, under United States mediation, especially through the Marshall Mission, the Nationalists and Communists agreed to start a series of peace talks aiming at establishing a coalition government.

Representatives of the Kuomintang, CCP, Chinese Youth Party, and China Democratic League, as well as independent delegates, attended the conference in Chongqing.

[29] In the context of political and military animosity,[citation needed] the National Assembly was summoned by the Nationalists without the participation of the CCP and promulgated the Constitution of the Republic of China.

The CCP, though invited to the convention that drafted it, boycotted and declared after the ratification that not only would it not recognize the ROC constitution, but all bills passed by the Nationalist administration would be disregarded as well.

Under the national government was seven ministries – Interior, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Transport, Justice, Agriculture and Mines, and Commerce.

[34]: 156 The practical power of high-ranking officials like ministers or the head of the Executive Yuan was more closely tied to their relationship with Chiang than with the formal authority of their position.

[34]: 93–94 The Nationalist government exercised relatively little control in China's border regions, where the political fragmentation along ethnic lines that began after the fall of the Qing dynasty continued.

[34]: 24–25  The Nationalist army increasingly turned to raiding villages to press-gang peasants into service and force marching them to assigned units.

[34]: 25 After the Kuomintang reunified the country in 1928, China entered a period of relative prosperity despite civil war and Japanese aggression.

Chinese industries continued to develop in the 1930s with the advent of the Nanjing decade in the 1930s when Chiang Kai-shek unified most of the country and brought political stability.

By 1936, industrial output had recovered and surpassed its previous peak in 1931 prior to the Great Depression's effects on China.

This increased competition leads to a massive decline in Chinese agricultural prices (which were cheaper) and thus the income of rural farmers.

Most of the prosperous east China coast was occupied by the Japanese, who carried out various atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 and random massacres of whole villages.

[41] Development of industries was severely hampered after the war by devastating conflict as well as the inflow of cheap American goods.

The Republic of China central government relocated to Taipei on 7 December 1949, to Taiwan where Japan had laid an educational groundwork.