Chinese Revolution in Brief The leader at the beginning of the revolution was a man named Sun Yat-sen who had declared China a republic in hopes of a free democratic society in 1912. Unfortunately for Yat-sen, a military strongman, Yuan Shigai, ousted Yat-sen before he could realize his dream. Shigai created a dictatorship out of the democracy to be, but Yat-sen wasn't done yet.
Sun Yat-sen set up the would-be Nationalist party and tried to overthrow Shigai, but failed, so Yat-sen and his followers fled to Japan.
Yuan Shigai died in 1916, and turmoil rained in China. Local military leaders, called Warlords, took control of vast areas of land. Sun Yat-sen came back to China in 1917, a year after Shigai's death, and tried to regroup the Nationalist party. In 1923, Yat-sen got support from the Soviet Union and a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek. The combined forces rapidly grew in strength, and three years after Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925, Chiang led the army to victory against the warlords, and set upa government in the city of Nanjing.
English: National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in...
孙中山在黄埔军校开学典礼演讲（在...
English: Chiang Kai-shek, leader of China, on the ...The government was not a democracy, but it improved China's dwindling economy, but failed to improve the quality of life for China's vast majority of peasants.
The Communists had started to gather together an army themselves, and even helped the nationalists in the war against the warlords, but in 1927 they tried to take over the Nationalist party with gruesome results. When the Communists attacked, Chiang Kai-shek and his army killed over 6,000 communists in the city of Guangzhou. With the Nationalist army on their heels, the Communists retreated to southern China, where a son of a prosperous peasant, Mao Zedong, gathered the Communists together and formed the Red Army.
During the early 1930's Mao and the Red Army...