A prominent general in the army of Sun Yat-sen, in 1925 he became leader of the Kuomintang when Sun Yat-sen died, and launched a military campaign to unite China. In the 1930s he concentrated more on defeating the Chinese Communists than on resisting the invading Japanese, but he proved unable to establish order and was defeated by the Communists after the end of World War II. Forced to abandon mainland China in 1949, he set up a separate Nationalist Chinese State in Taiwan.