ABSTRACT
The National Government was faced with a gigantic task, a military, social, and economic revolution, to reach its goal of building a nation. A practical effort was also made by the National Government to expand primary and secondary education and vocational training for badly needed teachers. Primary education provided not only literacy for almost 100 percent of the young, but trained them also in the standard national language—kuo yu—to unify the different dialect groups. A distinction had to be drawn between the National Government that had come over from the mainland and the provincial government, more and more based on local elections and in the hands of Taiwanese Chinese. The National Government had to face the problem of an aging leadership. To stress Chinese nationalist integrity, Sun Yat-sen attempted to define somewhat simplistically the ideological distinction between Chinese nationalism and communism.
