The China of Chiang K'ai-Shek: A Political Study

by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

Organizationally the Party is bipolar, with the power concentrated in the entire membership at the base, and in the Chief (Tsung-ts'ai) at the apex. The highest authority of the Kuomintang is the Party Congress (Ch'üan-kuo Tai-piao Ta-hui), which could also be translated as All-Nation Convention of Party Delegates. Party Congresses have been held as follows: I, Canton, 1924; II, Canton, 1926; III, Nanking, 1929; IV, Nanking, 1931; V, Nanking, 1935; and the Emergency Party Congress, Hankow, 1938. Wang Ch'ing-wei organized a rump Kuomintang on the basis of a "Sixth Party Congress" held in 1939; the legitimate Sixth Congress has not yet been called.

The Party Congress is the highest agency of the Kuomintang, and thereby the highest legal authority in China—a position which it now shares with the Party Chief, ex officio its Chairman. The Kuomintang Party Constitution provides that the Congress should ordinarily meet every other year (Art. 27), but permits the C.E.C. to postpone a Congress for not more than one year. This provision has frequently been violated. In actual effect the Congress is neither an effective governing body, nor, at the other extreme, a completely helpless tool. No Party Congress has led to a drastic shift of actual political power.

The barometer of influence functions outside the Congress, and the Congress ratifies and establishes what has actually occurred. The high authority of the incumbent C.E.C. in matters of accrediting delegates, plus its power to appoint delegates from areas not represented (a feature taken from Soviet practice), gives the political Ins a formidable weapon with which to bludgeon down opposition, but since the value of the Party Congress is that of a legitimizing agency, overt interference with Party functions would destroy the utility of the Congress. Its level of freedom and efficacy may be compared with American party conventions. Unwieldy, improvised agencies are not able to meet the challenges of well-knit executive groups, but their very unmanageability preserves to them a freedom of incalculable action. The Party Congress could not in practice exercise its formal, legal power of overthrowing the entire Party leadership and starting the Party off on a new tack; it could, however, so humiliate the incumbents by subtle but obvious political gestures familiar to all Chinese, that the leadership would retire for reasons of health, or because of a yearning to contemplate the cosmos.

The elaborate structure of the Kuomintang is shown on the chart of organization (p. 331). Abstraction of the most essential features of this chart reveals the following:

The Central Executive Committee (Chung-yang Chih-hsing Wei-yüan-hui) is a relatively large body with one hundred and twenty members. The Party Constitution requires that it meet every six months or less. These sessions, the Plenary Sessions of the C.E.C., are by far the best-established political processes in the Chinese state. Actual shifts in power are here fought out, since the C.E.C. possesses authority ample for almost any emergency. The expulsion of Wang Ch'ing-wei was effected through C.E.C. action, and did not require the work of any higher body.

The Central Control Committee (Chung-yang Chien-ch'a Wei-yüan-hui) is an agency which the Chinese adapted from two sources, the Bolshevik pattern of an independent intra-party control system, and the native chien-ch'a power. Similar in function to the Commission of Party Control employed by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union rather than to the Organization Bureau, the Central Control Committee (also termed, in another common translation, Central Supervisory Committee) is in charge of an inspective system. Because of the relative laxness of Kuomintang organization, the work of this Committee is far less than one might expect. It has not been adequate to ensure rigidly strict Party efficiency, diligence, or honesty; neither has it become a terrorist agency inflicting an inviolable Party line. Few faults in politics fail to be virtues as well; inefficiency has its minor compensations. In times of secure power, rigid Party discipline might let the Kuomintang grow into a genuine and full-fledged tyranny; nevertheless, in times of stress, such as the present, the Party stands in need of stiffening and control.

The third agency, the Supreme National Defense Council, is the Party's agent in charge of government. (See above, p. [46] ff.)

Immediately under the Central Executive Committee there are three agencies of vitality and importance. The first of these is the San Min Chu I Ch'ing-nien T'uan (usually translated San Min Chu I Youth Corps, or Kuomintang Youth Corps). A war-time addition to the Party, it became politically possible when the abandonment of appeasement re-aligned government and youth. The Communist Youth Corps (Kung-ch'an Ch'ing-nien T'uan) provided a model and rival. The Constitution of the Corps, together with an appraisal (from the official point of view) of its work, is given below in Appendices [II (B)] and [II (C)]. In terms of practical political effect, the Corps is significant, although far less important than its organization scheme would indicate. It combines some of the functions of a military training system with social and propaganda work. Leftists have complained against it bitterly as an agency of espionage and repression within student groups; others have acclaimed it as a meeting of the Kuomintang and the youth, fruitful in terms of national unity. The importance of the Corps lies in its organization of a broad group of young men, one or more steps up from the bottom of the economic scale, and in the fact that the government and Kuomintang—after years of overriding youth opinion—now find it feasible to organize their own affiliate. Few charges of corruption have touched the Corps, which lies particularly within the purview of the Generalissimo. A minor but active element in the political scene, it stands for the Kuomintang's bid for permanence, and, in the event of internal dissension, would be a valuable prop to the status quo. The political indecision and laxness of China in general has kept the group from becoming either a Hitlerjugend or a frankly democratic C.C.C. (Civilian Conservation Corps) on the American plan; the Corps is at best a laggard bid to young men, and a belated competition with the Left and the Communists.[3]