Intra-Kuomintang Politics
The years which saw the rise of the Kuomintang to power, and its subsequent period of authority, showed a diminution of the disparateness of Party fractions. For a long time the adherents of Wang Ch'ing-wei stood formally Left; those of Hu Han-min, formally Right; while various older Party alignments preserved their outlines more or less clearly (e.g., the Kuomintang Western Hills Group). With the consistent rise of Chiang K'ai-shek to Party and national leadership, and the steady influx of non-Party or merely nominal Party men into the government, Party distinctions lost their cogency in practical affairs.
In terms of influence, patronage, and effective policy-making, the Kuomintang is a conglomeration of innumerable personal leaderships knit together by a common outlook, a common interest in the maintenance of the National Government and formal Party power, and a common loyalty to the Party Chief. The clearest groups are those which are out of the current political stream; most notable among these is the Wang schism, and a few scattered irreconcilables of half-forgotten Party struggles. Within the regime, Kuomintang groups tend to coalesce as the leaders meet, negotiate, and govern together in the councils of state.
So completely in the ascendant that they have lost their general character as groups are the Erh Ch'ên (literally "the two Ch'êns"; also termed "C.C. group" by English-speaking Chinese), led by the brothers, Ch'ên Li-fu, Minister of Education, and Ch'ên Kuo-fu, head of the Central Political Institute, and the Huangpu (Whampoa Academy) groups, led by the Generalissimo himself. The Ch'ên brothers have been close adherents of Chiang throughout his career. Brilliant, vigorous, sharp in the retention of power, they have made themselves anathema to the Left. They are effective reorganizers of the Kuomintang, keenly aware of its position as monopoly Party, and their protégés and trainees are omnipresent through government and Party. Their military counterpart is the Huangpu group. It includes officers either trained by Chiang himself or under his close supervision. With the passage of each year, the proportion of Whampoa (or daughter-institution) graduates in the national armies rises. The officers include a high proportion of technically qualified men, whose capabilities and interests are chiefly military. Builders of the new army, they look to the Generalissimo and the Party for dicta on social, economic, and political policy; they provide China with the unpolitical army which has been an American ideal, although rejected by Soviet and South American practice. The officers are not encouraged to assume decisive roles in local politics, but to refer such things back to Headquarters. In consequence, although the danger of a new tuchünism has almost disappeared, the army staff does not readily adapt itself to a levée en masse, or to the problems of a social-revolutionary army. The very factors which make of the army a tool and not a practice-ground of government also make it somewhat rigid in dealing with guerrilla situations.
Both the C. C. and Whampoa groups are instilled with notions of Party and military discipline which trace back in the first place to the instruction given by Russians from the Soviet Union. While they follow Sun and Chiang in accepting the promises of democracy, their notion of democracy is as different from that of the Left as Washington's was from the Jacobins'. They are interested in sound, disciplined, powerful national government, representative, republican, and stable; they see the revolution as largely complete in the power-destroying phase, and are beginning to think in the reconstruction phase. After ten years of strain and terror in fighting the Communists, they look with suspicion on political changes which would open the nation to opportunist Communist agitation, or make Chungking the helpless diplomatic dependency of the Narkomindel. The bitterness of internecine conflict has made them deeply suspicious of sudden or radical reform, although they themselves profess a genuine interest in social welfare. The actual reforms which have been accomplished are, in the scale of political reality, already stupendous: opium eradication, tax collection, diffusion of national authority, communications, industrialization, military advance, etc. To the Kuomintang center, a demand for sharp or shocking change is suspect. They desire to amplify what they have, and to let changes wait on the ability of trained personnel—not entrusting progress to the vagaries of mass movements with incalculable force and direction.
While the National Government was at Nanking, there was a Fu-hsing Shê (Regeneration Club), organized by a few hot-headed members of the Kuomintang center. Its activities in support of the Generalissimo and the government, under the further sobriquet of Bluejacket or Blue Shirt group, earned it the reputation of a Chinese Schutzstaffel. The comparison was at best fanciful, but any comparison at all was heartily desired by the Europocentric Chinese Left and by the world press. Magnified beyond recognition, the Club was identified with almost every agency in the government and Party, not excluding the New Life Movement. As applied, the name Blue Shirt covered a wide scattering of unrelated agencies which had the common features of a Kuomintang-center position, an inclination to effective action (including violence) and some secrecy. Effective political-police work is led by one T'ai Li, whose name is whispered by dissidents; but counter-espionage and supervision of suspects is also performed through Party agents, the regular military, and governmental agencies.
Around the Kuomintang center there are other groups, some closely related to Chiang, some remote. The Political Scientists (Chêng-hsüeh Hsi) owe their name to a society which once existed in Nanking. They include many of the administrators, men with American training who are interested in industrial and fiscal development. The clarity of this group has faded by its absorption into the governing center. The Cantonese are represented by two levels of politics: those who based their power on Canton province and those who remained within the government. President Sun K'ê of the Legislative Yüan has been outstanding in his willingness to cooperate with the Communists and Left, and is on cordial terms with relatively independent progressives, such as Mme. Sun Yat-sen. Further groups within the Kuomintang are constituted by the loyalist followers of Wang Ch'ing-wei, who now attach themselves to other leaders, and by other personal or regional followings (e.g., the Tungpei followers of Chang Hsüeh-liang, ex-tuchün of Manchuria and ex-Vice-Commander-in-Chief, still "retired" as a result of the Sian kidnapping). Finally, a number of elder Party leaders remain because of their seniority or connection with Sun Yat-sen; they do not need to attach themselves to any particular clique in order to retain their position. These include such men as the venerable Secretary-General of the Party, Yeh Ch'u-tsang; the President of the National Government, Lin Shên; and the President of the Control Yüan, Yü Yu-jên.
What has been said about the groups in the People's Political Council (see p. [76] ff.) applies to these. It is possible, as in American congressional or administrative circles, to distinguish blocs of leaders with differing interests or policy; but clarity fades upon scrutiny. The orientation, even by the participants, is subjective. Lacking continuous institutional form, clustering of leaders is transient, shifting with political events.
It is difficult to appraise the role of the Kuomintang without at the same time assessing the position of the government. The two are inescapably connected. Although the Communists profess recognition of the government, and pledge it loyalty, they offer only comradeship—on their own terms—to the Kuomintang. This arrangement may last for a considerable length of time, but the National Government is a Kuomintang creation; short of violent revolution, Party control will scarcely break in war time. Upon the Party, therefore, depends much of the efficacy of the Government.
Many well-known Leftist writers on China—such as Edgar Snow—make the comment that whereas the National Government is deserving as a government, and worthy of support, the Kuomintang is hopelessly corrupt, a creature of landlords and capitalists, or, of even worse, "feudal elements." Such a distinction, based on strong moral urges and a desire to achieve historical parallels, is untenable in practice. Kuomintang power has weathered more than a decade of adversities. The Generalissimo depends upon it. Analysis of the Kuomintang as the party of the Chinese national bourgeoisie, and ascription of a mass character to the Communists alone, is a fallacy, comparable to a consideration of Earl Browder as the real leader of the American working class.
In point of fact, neither the Kuomintang nor the Communist Party in China is a mass party. Neither ever has been, although each sought mass character in the Great Revolution. Still largely apolitical, the Chinese masses are organized socially, culturally, and economically into a village and guild system which functions through most of the country. The Kuomintang includes a very high proportion of shopkeepers, returned overseas-Chinese, Chinese still resident overseas, Christians, landlords, and Western-returned students. The class composition of the Kuomintang is largely incidental to its functional character. Since the Kuomintang was the party of Westernization, it gathered in revolutionary days Chinese of all classes who were sufficiently modernized to be interested. Naturally the poorest peasants and the coastal proletariat did not constitute a large proportion of such membership. The men who entered did so as Christians, as travellers, as temperamental rebels, rather than as representatives of the bourgeoisie. When the Communists, whom a recent writer[8] with unconscious humor calls the party of the Chinese proletariat, came on the scene, the same social elements contributed to its membership. Once the Communist Party abandoned the Trotskyist line of urban revolt for the leadership of endemic peasant rebellions, its composition changed somewhat, although the Communist leaders of today are socially much like their Kuomintang equivalents. The men who are class-conscious are, like Lenin, historically, philosophically, and morally so; it is a matter of literary necessity, not of fact.
The Kuomintang is in power; the Communist and Left parties are not. As the governing group, the Kuomintang naturally attracts those persons who would seek to enter any government. Since it has not and does not promote rural class warfare, pre-existing class relationships continue. The Party and the Government have sought, not always efficiently or faithfully to the nth degree, to carry out the programs of land reform, democratization, etc., to which they have been committed. The Kuomintang has tolerated widespread sharecropping, land destitution, usury, and rural despotism—because it found these in existence, and was preoccupied with building a national government, a modern army, adequate finance, and with eradicating some of the worst evils, such as opium, bandits, and Communists (who, whatever their ideals, nevertheless helped to impoverish a poor nation by merciless civil war).
If the Kuomintang were out, it too could point to existing evils. Whoever controls government bears the responsibility. A class element is to a certain degree inescapable in any government; illiterate, unqualified persons do not assume leadership even in the Soviet Union until they have escaped their handicaps through training. But to make of the Kuomintang the party of the Chinese landlords and merchants alone is as fallacious as to make the Republicans or Democrats solely the instruments of American capitalism. A comment such as this would be unnecessary in the case of the United States; but persons who are not Marxian with respect to the analysis of current American events often assume a Left approach to China because of impatience with evils which they see but cannot understand.
The final appraisal of the Kuomintang must be based on the practical work of the government and the Party. In 1940, their effective control was wider and deeper than ever before. The Chinese state was more nearly in existence. The armies were undefeated. The growth of China in the past ten years, and the stand made by China at war, has been made under the unrelaxed control of the Kuomintang monopoly of constitutional power, together with its clear primacy in more tangible power—schools, finance, armies, and police.