General elections were set for late 1912, and Sun ran at the head of his newly formed Nationalist Party (Guomindang or Kuomintang). He handily gained the largest grouping in Parliament, with 269 out of 596 seats. But China’s experiment in electoral democracy, while real, was very short lived. On March 20, 1913, an assassin walked up to Song Jiaoren, the Nationalists’ brilliant young nominee for prime minister, and shot him. Song died of his wounds soon afterward. Everyone assumed the assassin had been sent by Yuan Shikai. Yuan quickly dissolved Parliament and banned the Nationalist Party. Sun
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