Chinese Nationalist Party

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), identified in the book as the Nationalists, was the party overthrown by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Its defeat marks the transition in the account from the struggle over national rule to the establishment of a Communist dictatorship and a state-directed, highly extractive economy.

Defeat and the Founding of the People’s Republic

Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party finally overthrew the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in 1949. On October 1, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed. The evidence identifies the Nationalists’ defeat as the political turning point but does not describe the military campaign, the party’s organization, or the circumstances of Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership in further detail.

The Political Order That Followed

The new order concentrated political authority in the Chinese Communist Party: no other political organization was allowed in China, and Mao dominated the party and government until his death in 1976. The KMT’s overthrow therefore preceded not a pluralist political settlement but a one-party state. The account uses this succession to distinguish a change of ruling party from a change to inclusive political institutions.

Economic Institutions After 1949

The regime established after the Nationalists’ defeat also transformed economic life. Mao nationalized land and industry, abolished property rights, and largely eliminated the market economy. Rural residents were gradually organized into communal farms; money and wages were replaced by work points exchangeable for goods. Introduced in 1956, internal passports restricted travel without authorization, extending political and economic control into daily movement.

The state also controlled the sale of produce such as rice and grain, enabling it to tax farmers heavily. Industrial policy followed Soviet-style five-year plans. After 1958, the second plan’s Great Leap Forward sought rapid growth, including a declared target of doubling steel output in a year through small-scale backyard furnaces. These policies belong to the history of the order established after the KMT’s defeat; the evidence does not attribute their design to the Nationalists.

Significance in the Book’s Argument

The KMT’s defeat serves as the threshold to the book’s account of Communist rule, not as an explanation of every subsequent policy. The narrative emphasizes how the victorious party centralized political power and reorganized property, labor, production, and movement. In this framing, the decisive consequence of the Nationalists’ overthrow was the creation of a new institutional order whose political monopoly and economic controls shaped China under Mao.