I was reading through the Wikipedia entry on the Kuomintang and was surprised that they were anti-imperialist and fairly anti-capitalist, at least back in the day. There is a part there that says the Marxist in the KMT thought that China had already passed through it's feudal stage and was in a stagnant capitalist stage. My impression was that the KMT were essentially like the nationalist in German, Japan, or modern USA (they very well may have been, I suppose). I was also a little surprised that the USSR backed the KMT over the CPC too.

So really what was the beef between the two on an ideological basis?

EDIT: Sun Yat-sen is also interesting to read about. The megathread, that I somehow missed reading four months ago, was an interesting review.