Following the beliefs of Sun Yat-sen, political power should have been returned to the people after the National Revolutionary Army militarily ended the Warlord Era. However, martial law in Taiwan continued from 1949 until 1987, during which other political parties were banned. Martial law was lifted in 1987 by presidentChiang Ching-kuo, a move that legalized other political parties such as the Democratic Progressive Party and ended the Dang Guo era.
Origin
Dang Guo was short for Yi Dang Zhi Guo (以黨治國), which literally means "using the political party to run the state". In 1920, Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Republic of China, made Dang Guo the official ROC national policy during the phase of military rule and political tutelage [zh] (two of the three phases of the Fundamentals of National Reconstruction). He was influenced by Leninist ideology, which led to the October Revolution in Russia. According to Sun, the Kuomintang should be paramount over the Republic of China in the course of revolution (war against the warlords) and should issue orders to the ROC bureaucracy, all NGO groups, and indeed to all individuals.
During the Russian Revolution, political dictatorship was used, everything else can be discarded, the only aim was the success of the revolution... its success was because the party (Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)) was on top of the state. I suggest... we should reorganize by putting the party (Kuomintang) on top of the state (ROC).
In practice
Blue Sky with a White Sun flag above the oath of Guominjun
After Sun Yat-sen decided to follow and copy the Soviet political system, his successor Chiang Kai-shek used the Kuomintang to control and operate both the Nationalist government and the National Revolutionary Army, which was sometimes called "The Party's Army" (黨軍). The ROC bureaucracy had then become the means and the tools of Kuomintang, where all the major national policies were formulated, while resulted 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 to instruct the people on how the democratic system would 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" (功在黨國) and in the national anthem, which makes an explicit reference to "Our Party". Likewise, the emblem of the Kuomintang was used as the emblem of the state, and the flag of the Kuomintang has been used as the naval jack to this day.
After martial law ended in 1987, 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 Taiwan. In 2000, Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party was elected as the first non-KMT president under the Constitution.
