Chiang Kai-shek led which country?

Chiang Kai-shek led which country? He led China, ruling the Republic of China on the mainland and later on Taiwan.

Chiang became the leading figure of the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, after Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925. From 1926 to 1928, he commanded the Northern Expedition, a military campaign that defeated or incorporated many regional warlords and brought much of China under a Nationalist government based in Nanjing.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chiang led China’s wartime resistance from 1937 to 1945. His government then resumed the Chinese Civil War against Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party. After the Communists won the mainland in 1949, Chiang and the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan, where he remained the dominant political leader until his death in 1975.

A common mix-up is to answer “Taiwan,” because Chiang spent his final decades there. Historically, however, he led China’s Nationalist government and claimed to represent the Republic of China, whose government relocated to Taiwan after 1949.