History of the Republic of China
On the other hand, since the failure of the Second Revolution, Sun Yat-sen and his allies were trying to rebuild the revolutionary movement. In July 1914 Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party (). He felt that his failures at building a consistent revolutionary movement stemmed from the lack of cohesiveness among its members. To that end, Sun required that party members to be totally loyal to Sun and follow a series of rather harsh rules. Some of his earlier associates, including Huang Xing, balked at the idea of such authoritarian organization and refused to join Sun. However, they agreed that the republic must not revert to imperial rule.
Generations of Chinese leadership
Thus, the first generation, from 1949 to 1976, consisted of Mao Zedong as core, along with Zhou Enlai, Zhu De (as informal triumvirate), Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun, Peng Dehuai, and later Lin Biao and the Gang of Four (neither Lin nor the Gang are today considered by official discourse to be part of this generation because of political antagonism resulting from the Cultural Revolution). These were the leaders that founded the People's Republic of China after the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. They were born between 1886 and 1907, although the Gang of Four were a distinct subgroup born 1914 to 1935. Most were born before the demise and fall of the Qing Dynasty (not including the Gang) and thus lived to see both the birth and, on the mainland, the end of the Republic of China. One heavy characteristic of these leaders were that they tended to be both political and military leaders. Most had some education outside China, and their formative experiences included the Long March, Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. The guiding political ideology from the first generations were general principles of Marxism and "Mao Zedong Thought".