Who they were
Military and political leader of the Kuomintang and the Republic of China. Trained militarily in Japan, he rose as Sun Yat-sen’s protégé and became the first commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy in 1924.
What they did
He led the Northern Expedition (1926–28), which nominally reunified China under the Nanjing government, and in 1927 violently purged the Communists in Shanghai, opening a decade of civil conflict. Seized in the Xi’an Incident of 1936, he then saw the second united front against Japan take shape, and led China through the war of resistance (1937–45) as one of the Allied “Big Four”. Defeated in the renewed civil war, he moved the ROC government to Taiwan in 1949 and ruled there under martial law until his death in 1975.
Legacy
Assessments vary: national unifier and wartime leader on one reading, the authoritarian who lost the mainland on another.