Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong were the standard-bearers of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. From the 1920s to the 1970s, the cooperation and struggle between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek was a half-century of Chinese history and the history of the relationship between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. As former U. S. President Richard Nixon said: "The history of China over the past half century is, to a large extent, the history of three people: Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Chiang Kai-shek."
