FOOTNOTES:
[1] The text of this Constitution is given in Arthur N. Holcombe's invaluable study of the Great Revolution, The Chinese Revolution: A Phase in the Regeneration of a World Power, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1930, p. 356-70.
[2] Wang Shih-chieh, Pi-chiao Hsien-fa, Shanghai, XXVI (1937), p. 651-3.
[3] See China at War, Vol. V, No. 3 (October 1940), p. 77-8, for a recent official account of the Corps.
[4] Information given the author by Dr. Ch'ên Kuo-fu and members of his staff, at the Central Political Institute, August 18, 1940. Few places are more beautiful than the valley in which the cool, spacious buildings of the Institute are set. Landscaped for centuries, and celebrated as a beauty spot, the area is filled with carved shrines, severely simple monuments, and flagstone walks. A river runs through a forested gorge; waterfalls feed the stream.
Dr. Ch'ên supplemented his hospitality in Western China by transmitting to the author a series of statements in reply to questions which were put to him in writing. Of these, the two most interesting refer, first, to the economic status of the Institute's students, and secondly, to the Kuomintang training plan in the Northwest: "Judged by functions and economic levels, students of the Central Political Institute represent all economic strata of Chinese society. Those of peasant origin are most numerous, forming over 40% of the total number."—"For the purpose of educating young men and women in the border provinces, the Central Political Institute has established a School for the Border Provinces, of which branches were established at Powtow (Suiyuan province), Sinin (Chinghai province), and Kangting (Sikong province) in October 1934. Another branch was established at Shuchow (Kansu province) in August 1935, this being the school sponsored by the Kuomintang in the Northwest. The Powtow branch was suspended in 1940, and those in Sinin and Kangting were handed over to the Provincial Governments concerned at the same time. So the only Kuomintang school in the Northwest at present is the one at Shuchow. It is subdivided into three parts: namely, a Normal School, a Middle School, and a Primary School. Its annual budget is one hundred thousand dollars Chinese national currency." (Letter to the author, March 10, 1941.)
[5] The term pu is usually translated Board, but the pu-chang (pu chief) is given as Minister. Since the identical terms are rendered Ministry, Minister, Vice-Minister, etc., in the case of the government, the term Party-Ministry is here adopted as both distinct and descriptive.
[6] Visitors to Chungking owe much to the Foreign Affairs Section of the International Publicity Department. Its chief, the affable Mr. C. C. Chi, a well-known economist from Shanghai, has acted as host to almost every visitor to Hankow or Chungking. He has fulfilled endless requests—many of them irrational—with unfailing patience, good humor, candor, and intelligence. Few books on contemporary China fail to bear the imprint of his help; the present one is no exception.
[7] Statement to the author at Kuomintang Central Headquarters, Chungking, July 16, 1940; Dr. K'an also supplied the facts for the new organizational features of the Party. The following interpretations are the author's alone.
[8] For a Marxian analysis of the Kuomintang, carefully stripped of frank Marxian verbiage, see "Wei-Meng-pu," "The Kuomintang in China: Its Fabric and Future" in Pacific Affairs, Vol. XIII, No. 1 (March 1940), p. 30-44. The author a priori defines the Kuomintang as the party of the national bourgeoisie in China, in effect exhorting it to fulfill its historic mission of completing the national democratic revolution, whereupon socialism [i.e., Stalinism] may historically follow. Nevertheless, its comment on personalities is informing in terms of practical politics.
[9] The China Information Committee, News Release, March 4, 1940. English translations of names such as the New Life Movement, Officers' Moral Endeavor Corps, National Spiritual Mobilization, etc. are often awkward or jejune where the original is not.
[10] Young, C. W. H., New Life for Kiangsi, Shanghai, 1935, is a missionary work which praises the New Life Movement highly. The book includes interesting, first-hand, unfavorable accounts of the rule of the quondam Chinese Soviet Republic, and explains some of the opposition to the Communists. The interconnection between Communist-suppression and the New Life Movement is consciously and clearly demonstrated.
[11] Chiang, May-ling Soong, China Shall Rise Again, New York, 1941, p. 38 ff. Mme. Chiang's work also includes a full account of the enterprises of the New Life Movement and of its affiliates.
[12] Chiang K'ai-shek, Outline of the New Life Movement, Chungking (?), n.d. p. 8. This is the translation, by Mme. Chiang, of Hsin Shêng-huo Yün-tung Kang-yao, Nanking, n.d., originally published in May 1934.
[13] Giles, Herbert, A Chinese-English Dictionary, Second Edition, Shanghai and London, 1912; ideograph No. 7128.
[14] The same; ideograph No. 1999.
[15] Chiang K'ai-shek, cited, p. 7.
[16] Reprinted as Appendix III (B), p. [373], below.
[17] Chiang K'ai-shek, cited, p. 6-7.
[18] Most of these and the following facts, but not the interpretations, are based on interviews which the author had with the hospitable Major-General J. L. Huang in Chungking, on July 14, 1940, and subsequently.
[19] For an excellent outline of the role of women in the war, see Chiang, May-ling Soong, China Shall Rise Again, cited, p. 287 ff.
Chapter VI
THE COMMUNIST AND MINOR PARTIES
The party politics of Republican China fall into two periods: the early period of competitive, pre-parliamentary parties, 1912 to the Great Revolution; and a later period of struggling monopoly-power parties, from the Great Revolution to the present. In the earlier period the Kuomintang and its rivals tolerated one another's existence; each regarded co-existing parties as natural, desirable, and useful. But the sham democracy of the prostituted Republic disheartened the Kuomintang, which thereupon bid for the complete conquest of power, brooking no legitimate competitors; its rivals did likewise. The first coalition (1922-27) of Kuomintang and Communists was therefore not the democratic competition of two parties with different stresses upon a common ideological foundation, but a war-time alliance of basically incompatible forces. After the 1927 break, the Kuomintang became the only legal party in most of the country, while the Communists—with a rebel army, an unrecognized government, and a territory of their own—enjoyed legality within the limits of their own swords. The Kuomintang, embraced by all major groups save the Communists, became the foremost vehicle for Chinese political life. Minor parties enjoyed precarious, ineffectual existences, underground or expatriate.
With the outbreak of war in 1937, Nationalists and Communists adopted a truce, formally a Communist surrender of armed rebellion, subversive ideology, and separate government. In actuality it was an alliance of deadly enemies against the Japan which threatened them both. Today, Chinese party politics revives in the People's Political Council, and to a slight degree in public opinion. The legal prohibition of minor parties, including the Communists, remains in effect. Chinese party politics, in the Western sense of a friendly subdivision of common opinion, remains vestigial. The only guarantee of party rights is an unstable toleration extended by the Kuomintang in the negative form of non-prosecution. The Kuomintang is the Party for most of China. The Communist Party is the party for a separate fraction of China. The minor parties, holding neither territory nor armies in the game of power, maneuver between and about the two, struggling to attain legal existence.