Thus, when the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China fled to Taiwan in 1949 after they lost to communist forces in the Chinese Civil War and brutally established power there with martial law (1949-1987), a sense of nostalgia about the Japanese colonial rule took root, even though the military government under KMT told Taiwanese that they should hate Japan because of their colonization of Taiwan and their invasion of China.