After the overthrow of China's last emperor during the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, the new government in China created Zhuyin to help the common people read more easily. However, the Chinese Communist Party, including Mao Zedong himself, wanted to ban writing Chinese characters altogether and replace them with the Latin alphabet. When the People's Liberation Army defeated the Kuomintang (the founding party of the Republic of China) in 1949 and sent them off to exile in Taiwan, the use of Zhuyin dropped in mainland China because the CPC was interested in using the Latin alphabet for writing Chinese phonetically. However, Zhuyin is still widely used in Taiwan as it is used to type Chinese on computer and phone keyboards.