Founded in Guangdong Province on August 25, 1912 by Sung Chiao-jen and Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the KMT was formed from a collection several revolutionary groups, including the Tongmenghui, as a moderate democratic socialist party.

The party gained a majority in the first National Assembly, but in 1913 Yuan Shikai, who was President dissolved the body, had Sung assassinated, and ordered the Kuomintang suppressed.

Sun re-established the KMT in the form of a secret society while exiled in Japan in 1914 and returned in 1918 to establish a rival government at Guangzhou. In 1923, the KMT and its government accepted aid from the Soviet Union after being denied recognition by the western powers. Soviet advisers--the most prominent of whom was an agent of the Comintern, Mikhail Borodin--began to arrive in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, establishing a Leninist party structure that lasted into the 1990s. The Communist Party of China was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their party identities, forming the First United Front between the two parties. Soviet advisers also helped the Nationalists set up a political institute to train propagandists in mass mobilization techniques and in 1923 sent Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun’s lieutenants from Tongmeng Hui days, for several months’military and political study in Moscow.

At the first party congress in 1924, which included non-KMT delegates such as members of the CPC, they adopted Sun’s political theory, which included the Three Principles of the People - nationalism, democracy, and the livelihood of the people.