Dang Guo, or Party-State, is a version of the one-party state ideology that was formerly the official policy of the Republic of China under the Kuomintang. Since 1924, after Sun Yat-sen decided to copy the Soviet Union's political system, Chiang Kai-shek used the Kuomintang to control and operate the National Government of the Republic of China and the National Revolutionary Army. All of the major national policies of the ROC bureaucracy were formulated by the Kuomintang party, resulting in the party holding the supreme power of the whole nation. In his belief, the rules of the state should be returned to the people after the Kuomintang Army militarily ended the Warlord Era.
Origin
Dang Guo was short for Yi Dang Zhi Guo, which literally means using the political party to run the state. In 1920, Sun Yat-sen, the Founding Father of the Republic of China, made Dang Guo the official ROC national policy during the phase of Military Rule and Political Tutelage, having been influenced by Leninist ideology which led to the Russian Revolution. According to Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang should be paramount over the Republic of China in the course of revolution, and Kuomintang should issue orders to the ROC bureaucracy, all the NGO groups, and indeed to any individual. In 1924 Sun Yat-sen said:
Kuomintang holding supreme power
After Sun Yat-sen decided to follow and copy the Soviet Union political system, his successor Chiang Kai-shek used Kuomintang to control and to operate both the Republic of China government and the Nationalist Revolutionary Army, which was sometimes called The Party's Army, and equivalent to Mao Zedong's famous quote Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The ROC bureaucracy had then become the means and tools of Kuomintang, where all the major national policies were formulated, resulting in the party holding the supreme power of the whole nation. The concept of Dang Guo was an outgrowth of Sun's concept of "political tutelage," during which the Kuomintang was to lead the state and instruct the people on how the democratic system was to work prior to the transition to full democracy. Under Dang Guo, ROC military personnel and civil servants alike were expected to owe their allegiance to Kuomintang first and the State second — a policy reflected by such phrases as "Service to the Party and the Nation", and also on the national anthem, which makes an explicit reference to "Our Party". Likewise, the emblem of Kuomintang was used as the emblem of the State, and the flag of Kuomintang has been used as the naval jack to this day. The Kuomintang unified China in 1927, and started to prepare the state for democracy, as according to Sun's teaching. The Constitution of the Republic of China enacted in 1947 stipulates that different parties shall enjoy equal status, and the National Revolutionary Army was returned to civilian control as the Army of the Republic of China. However, due to the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War, the ROC was under military rule of the KMT during the period of mobilization. In the 1990s, when the martial law ended, all political parties became legal and the Republic of China was democratized. Since then, the President of the Republic of China has been democratically elected by the people of the Free Area. Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party was elected president, making him the first non-KMT president under the Constitution.
In 1938, Mao Zedong stated: "The fundamental principle is, the Communist Party is in command of the Army, not the other way around". On 1 April 2009 Gen. Li Jinai, the People's Liberation Army's top political commissar who sits on the 11-member Chinese Communist Party Central Committee that exercises direct control over China, had stated that China's military "must continue taking orders exclusively from the Communist Party" in an essay published in the party's official theoretical journal, Qiushi. The essay further stated:''