The Third Party
The party commonly called The Third Party (Ti-san Tang) was organized by dissident Communists and Left Kuomintang members who wished to keep on collaborating after the major parties broke apart in 1927, thus ending the Great Revolution. Led by the indomitable Têng Yen-ta, who was finally shot to death in Shanghai, the party began illustriously with the participation of Mme. Sun Yat-sen (Soong Ching-ling) and the Left ex-Foreign Minister, Eugene Chen. The formal names of the party varied. From 1927 to 1929, and again from 1930 to 1937, it was the Revolutionary Action Commission of the Chinese Kuomintang (Chung-kuo Kuo-min-tang K'ê-ming Hsing-chêng Wei-yüan-hui); in 1929-1930, the Chinese Revolutionary Party (Chung-kuo K'ê-ming Tang); and after 1937, the Acting Commission for the National Emancipation of China (Min-ts'u Chieh-fang Hsing-chêng Wei-yüan-hui).[15] The party is at present led by Dr. Chang Pai-chün, a returned student from Germany and lieutenant to the late Mr. Têng. It suffers from the official ban on minor parties, but retains, by its own statement, a formal organized membership of about 15,000. (This estimate would, in the opinion of independent observers, need to be discounted.)
The Third Party is a San Min Chu I party. It accepts the legacies of Dr. Sun, in their Left-most phase as they were at the time of his death. The party is strongly anti-imperialist, socialist, and land-reform in its teaching. Its socialism is of an independent kind; the party neither seeks nor wishes collaboration with the Third International, although it is willing to cooperate with the Communists as well as the Kuomintang. It finds its chief political dogma in the last policies of Sun, executed in the period just before his death: (1) a pro-Soviet orientation in international power politics; (2) a Nationalist-Communist entente; and (3) immediate aid for the peasants and workers. It is therefore more like the old Left Kuomintang than the Communists.
At the present time, the party seeks to promote collaboration between the two major parties, thus becoming the second third-party to that friendship, and urges constitutional government. Eventually it would prefer a representative government of the whole people (p'ing min), with the executive agencies composed 60 per cent of peasants and workers, 40 per cent of others, chiefly intellectuals. (The proportion is believed to be Mme. Sun's contribution.) In past practical politics, The Third Party took part in the Foochow insurrection of 1933-34, but has on no other occasion obtained power. It is not expected to attain major status.