Chief among the new devices is the reintroduction of the Small Group, or Party Cell (hsiao-tsu). A comprehensive plan for small-unit organization has been proclaimed; the text is given below, [Appendix II (D)]. This cell system, as explained by the Deputy Secretary-General of the Kuomintang, Dr. K'an Nai-kuang, will provide the roots of the Party with new vigor.[7] The small group provides for further diffusion of Party work, and introduces novel principles of political organization to the Party. Self-criticism, airing of opinion, mutual personal examination—these are expected to stimulate Party work. The war provides the Party with the opportunity to do with ease things which seemed insurmountably slow and difficult before Japanese bombers helped unification. Opium-suppression, bandit-eradication, and similar work of organization and improvement challenges the Party to further effort. The imminence of democracy requires more intensive preparation in discussion and in self-organization for small groups. The hsiao-tsu system is designed to bolster Party morale, improve the Party work, and spread the teaching of Sun Yat-sen.
The new governmental pattern of local government is to be reinforced by the corresponding development of Kuomintang agencies. In the government's plan, rural development operates on four levels: the militia; the school system; the agricultural and industrial cooperatives; and the political organization. The same person in each village or hamlet would be responsible for all four. If he is to be a Party man, he must be effective to be of service and a credit to the Party.
In order to eradicate undesirable personnel, the Kuomintang has increased its Party-purging facilities with what is known as the Party Supervisor's Net (Tang-jên Chien-ch'a Wang). By action of the C.E.C. on June 13, 1940, the sub-district Party organs are to elect one to three members each to serve, with a six months' term, as Control Members. With a power of report on Party discipline, and responsibility for Party conditions, this change was expected to drive undesirables more effectively out of the Party.
Three years from 1940 was set as the final date for the installation of the new system. While the fractionization of a Party may seem to be of minor importance, it actually is a major factor in the potential development of the Kuomintang. In the period of Party government, the more popular organs of Party members tended to slough off, leaving large Tangpu (Party Headquarters) in the hsien or cities. These quite often fell into the hands of local machines, with the consequence that they interfered with government, and promoted the usual evils of party machines. The diffusion of Party work, by letting individuals participate more freely as individuals, may help to break the monopoly of these bureaus, and restore the Party effectiveness with less reliance on supervision from above.
The Kuomintang, in addition to these reorganization devices, is meeting competition from the Left by increasing its membership. Membership figures are not available in war time; the total is probably over two million. In some instances the new members are no particular improvement on the pre-existing group, but in the majority of cases the Party broadens its base of popular support.
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.