uch was a competitive political party that grew out of a previously underground revolutionary party but was not itself an underground organization.
However, this status was not to be permanent. Yuan Shi-kai, formerly an imperial minister, considered the KMT's victory in the first parliamentary elections of 1913 to be a political embarrassment; he shored up his military position, then ordered the murder of one KMT official and the removal of several KMT provincial governors from office. KMT armed forces resisted but were no match for Yuan's forces. The KMT was not merely driven back underground but essentially dismantled, as Sun and his factional colleagues went into exile to reformulate revolutionary strategy. In exile in Japan in 1914, Sun formed the China Revolutionary Party (CRP), a secret underground organization. The CRP sought to turn Yuan's military support against him, particularly when he attempted to establish an imperial dynasty for himself. Yuan's death in 1916 led to a brief parliamentary interlude in Peking, aborted, however, by triumphant warlord-military factionalism, which persisted as a practical matter of domestic politics until 1949.
Throughout World War I, China was politically fragmented, ruled by provincial warlords. Although the revolution of 1911 had created a de jure republic that lasted until 1949, the subsequent fate of Sun's republic and the periodic reconfigurations of the KMT confirm the view that, inside that republic, "party politics were . . . under the manipulation of warlords" (Chow, 1967, p. 10). Among these, Chow places Yuan, Sun's protTgT, then nominal president of China. From 1913 to 1924, Sun Yat-sen, either in exile or installed as a head of a governmental entity, engineered a series of coups aimed at consolidating enough military support to establish the ROC's governance structure on a national basis. In 1917, Sun proclaimed a Republic of South China in Canton (Kwangtung Provinc...