After Imperial Japan was defeated in World War II, Chinese nationalism again gained tract as China recovered lost territories previously lost to Japan, including Manchuria and Taiwan. However, the Chinese Civil War, (which had paused in the face of Japanese invasion) had resumed, damaging the image of a unified Chinese identity. The Communists were victorious in 1949, as the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. Under Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang simultaneously began to employ Chinese nationalism as a political tool. Using Chinese nationalism, the KMT began to govern Taiwan as an authoritarian one-party state by suppressing political dissidents and Taiwanese aborigines, while the CCP began to suppress separatism and secessionist attitudes in Tibet and among the Uyghurs, a Turkic minority in the far-west province of Xinjiang, an issue that still persists even after the ideals of Maoism had declined under the Chinese economic reform.