At the end of the Chinese Civil War, after Chiang-Kai-Shek retreated to Taiwan, his nationalist troops, the Kuomintang (KMT), in Western China, retreated to Burma. The KMT took control of a large portion of eastern Burma and used it to launch attacks into western China. The western democracies considered the KMT to be a valuable tool in their effort to prevent the spread of Communism. The Burmese government had a different point of view. They considered the Kuomintang to be an invading army that posed a serious threat to the survival of Burma as an independent country.