The National Salvationists are an operating force in China, and the Communists, while a minority party, are not a minor party in the American sense. Unhappily, the existence of minuscule parties among both patriots and pro-Japanese elements suggests that multi-party constitutionalism is likely to degenerate into innumerable party fractions, splinter parties, and novel, unstable groups. The Kuomintang and the Communists possess their respective monopolies of power; the National Salvationists have a popular and sincere cause. The other parties exist in part because they obtain recognition. As long as Chinese political processes depend on leadership by personality, individuals will be free to form their own parties, while the geographical, cultural, and economic diversity of the country holds out little hope for the appearance of two or three China-wide democratic parties. Far more likely is it that, with the presumable advent of constitutionalism, the Kuomintang-Communist alignment will continue, while the present minor parties will gain some ground, and innumerable new parties will appear in order to profit by democratic guarantees of minimal representation, or to fulfill functions exercised by fraternal societies in the United States.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Miff, P., Heroic China, New York, 1937, p. 14. This valuable pamphlet is by one of the Comintern's leading expounders of Marxism as applied to China. Trotskyist Marxism is represented by a far fuller, more careful work by Harold Isaacs, cited, together with the following, cited on p. 20, n. 16. Edgar Snow, the distinguished American journalist, operates on the basis of an independent, unacknowledged type of Marxism, which shows itself in consistent prejudice against the Kuomintang, and in a soul-hungry search for a dialectical, inner meaning of things with which to supplement common-sense observation; his "Things that Could Happen," Asia, Vol. XLI, No. 1 (January 1941), employs Hegelianism at tenth-remove to analyze the future. It leads to a frequent implication of motives and to subjective interpretations which rearrange fact as it ought to be in terms of a rational economic dialectic (i.e., an occult pattern which provides a uniform key to all human experience). Thus, in his Red Star Over China, p. 306, he ascribes the massacre of Reds by Kuomintang officers to the fact that the officers were the sons of local landlords, enraged by expropriation of the land. Land-expropriation is a class motive; a moment's reflection would reveal that previous massacre of the officers' families by Communists would be a better common-sense motive for blood-thirstiness. This feature of diluted Marxism would not be worth mentioning were it not common to so many books about Communists written by self-proclaimed "non-Communists" habituated to the dialectic. It is found in the writings of Agnes Smedley, Victor Yakhontoff, Anna Louise Strong, and I. Epstein, to mention but a few.
[2] Sheean, Vincent, Personal History, New York, 1937; Malraux, André, Man's Fate, New York, n.d.
[3] Kung-ho-kuo is the Western-type term for Republic; the Kuomintang uses Min-kuo or Folk-realm. Su-wei-ai is a phonetic representation of "Soviet"; the characters, not intended to have meaning, are unconsciously humorous in that their lexicographical signification is "Revive (and) maintain dust!"
[4] Based on the Party Constitution, Kung-ch'an-tang Tang-chang [Party Constitution of the Communist Party], [Chungking?], XXVII (1938), p. 1-21. The entire Constitution is reprinted below as Appendix II (E), p. [359].
[5] Harold Isaacs, in the work cited, has many passing references to this phenomenon; his caustic indictment of Ch'en Shao-yu (Wang Ming), p. 438 ff., is a case in point. Note Ch'en Tu-hsiu, Li Li-san, Chang Kuo-tao—in China, as in Russia, most of the founders and early leaders of the Communists have been set aside.
[6] Snow, Edgar, work cited, p. 348 ff.
[7] Twin Stars of China, cited, p. 66. Major Carlson adds to this description in his The Chinese Army, cited, p. 35 ff. Most enthusiastically, he attributes to the Red Leaders honesty, humility, selflessness, truthfulness, incorruptibility, and a desire to do what is right. He praises their superb tactical abilities, their efficiency as organizers, their competence as leaders. He accepts the statements made by the Communist leaders as matters of good faith, and does not question their sincerity. Since he is the only qualified military visitor to put his impressions on record, these appraisals are valuable.
[8] Snow, Edgar, Red Star Over China, cited, p. 111-167.