The Republic of China and the Kingdom of Spain had relations before 1931 (link). Did they maintain these relations after the Second Spanish Republic was established?
After 1945, the Spanish State under Franco had relations with the Kuomintang-dominated ROC, by then confined to the island of Taiwan (link).
After the Republic was founded, but before Franco's victory over the Republic in 1939, did the ROC have relations with either side? Some individual Chinese communists came over to fight on the Republican side, which presumably would have displeased the ROC. Did they respond by helping Franco, even rhetorically?
The Spanish Civil War and the Chinese wars were contemporaneous, and parallels were drawn frequently both at the time and in later history. Some might say that the fact both were locked in a civil war and would have had little to do with each other, but I respectfully disagree. Both China and Spain had more dealings with foreign countries because of the conflict they were experiencing. And as I established Spain, as a moderately powerful European country, had had relations with China for a long time.
There are two ways to look at this, as I see it:
Everybody in the west, including supporters of the USSR and the USSR itself, wanted Chiang Kai-Shek to win against the Japanese. No-one cared about the Chinese Communist Party. Despite being a right-wing dictator, Chiang found himself on the side of the democracies, and was seen by them as the innocent victim of basically fascist Japanese aggression. So Spain would have supported him. Spain was being attacked by an internal faction vigorously backed by Italy and Germany, the allies of Japan. Like the Spanish government, Chiang was a Republican, fighting against against an enemy that included a lot of monarchists in its ranks. So the Kuomintang rooted for the Spanish Republic.
Chiang was a right-wing dictator. He was fighting against the Communists, and had no love at all for either the West or the Soviets; at a later time he described Britian, America and Russia as 'a robber, a hooligan and a bully'. He would perhaps have heard that some Chinese Communists had gone to aid the republic, which would have made him better-disposed to Franco. The ROC had a long history of collaboration with Germany up to the Nazi era, which was only just starting to unravel. For their part, the Spanish Republic recognised Franco in a man like Chiang, and didn't like it at all. They saw someone on the wrong side of history and wanted the CCP to defeat both him and the Japanese. Which one of these is closer to the truth? Are they both wrong?