authority, it did not carry much weight in its foreign relations. As it struggled awkwardly, there arose two more radical political forces, the relatively powerful Kuomintang of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and the younger and weaker Communist Party of China (CPC ). With indispensable support from the CPC and the Third International, the Kuomintang achieved sufficient success so it felt justified in proclaiming a new government, controlled by itself, for the whole of China. For a time the Kuomintang made a valiant effort to tackle China's numerous and colossal problems, including those that had ruined its predecessor : poor communications and the wide distribution of arms. It also took a strongly anti-Western course in its foreign relations, with some success. It is impossible to say whether the Kuomintang's regime would ultimately have proven viable and successful if it had not been ruined by an external enemy, as the Republic had been by its internal opponents. The more the Japanese exerted preemptive pressures on China, the more the people tended to look on the Kuomintang as the only force that prevent china from being dominated by Japan. During the Sino-Japanese war of 1937, the Kuomintang immediately suffered major military defeats and lost control of eastern China. It was only saved from total hopelessness or defeat by Japan's suicidal decision to attack the United States and invasion of Southeastern Asia. But military rescue from Japan brought no significant improvement in the Kuomintang's domestic performance in the political and economic fields, which if anything to get worse. Clearly the pre-Communist history of Modern China has been essentially one of weakness, humiliation, and failure. This is the atmosphere in which the CPC developed its leadership and growth in. The result has been a strong determination on the part of that leadership to eliminate foreign influence within China, to modernize their country, and to elimi...
