The Project Gutenberg eBook, The China of Chiang K'ai-Shek, by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek

THE CHINA
OF
CHIANG K'AI-SHEK:
A Political Study

BY
PAUL M. A. LINEBARGER
Duke University

GREENWOOD PRESS, PUBLISHERS
WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT

The Library of Congress has catalogued this publication as follows:

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony, 1913-1966.
The China of Chiang K'ai-shek; a political study.

Reprint of the 1943 ed. published by World Peace Foundation, Boston.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. China—Politics and government—1912-1949.
2. Chiang, Kai-shek, 1886-.I. Title.
DS774.L48 1973320.9'51'04273-725
ISBN 0-8371-6779-5

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Copyright 1942 by World Peace Foundation

Originally published in 1943
by World Peace Foundation, Boston

Reprinted with the permission
of World Peace Foundation

First Greenwood Reprinting 1973

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 73-725

ISBN 0-8371-6779-5

Printed in the United States of America

TO MY MOTHER
With Love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgments, for a work of this type, are always insufficient and often ungracious. Today, political and military conditions forbid mention of some of the persons to whom I am most indebted. Furthermore, it is unfeasible to thank those teachers and friends who have prepared me in years past for the present work. Nevertheless, courtesy and candor demand that I indicate the extent of my obligation, and tender these inadequate thanks.

For interviews, hospitality and other kindnesses shown me in Western China I wish to thank Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang K'ai-shek; Their Excellencies, Sun K'ê, Yü Yu-jen, H. H. Kung, Wang Ch'ung-hui, Chang Chia-ngau, T. F. Tsiang, Yeh Ch'u-tsang, Kan Nai-kuang, Ch'ên Kuo-fu, Wang Shih-chieh, Ch'u Chia-hua, Hollington Tong, and Ma Chao-chun; Major Generals J. L. Huang and Ch'u Shih-ming; Bishop Paul Yu-pin; and Messrs. Foo Ping-shêng, Chên Ming-shu, Lo Chia-lun, Edward Bing-shuey Lee, Han Lih-wu, P. C. Kuo, Ch'ên Chih-mai, Kinn-wei Shaw, James Y. C. Yen, Wang Shen-tsu, Shuming T. Liu, Jen Shieh, Li Ch'in-shui, and Ma P'in-ho. Among the foreign community, I wish to thank the American Ambassador, Mr. Nelson Johnson, and Mr. E. F. Drumwright for their kind reception; and to thank Mr. Tillman Durdin, Mr. Theodore White, Mr. George Fitch, Dr. J. B. Tayler, Professor Frank Price, and Professor and Mrs. J. B. Slocum.

I feel myself peculiarly fortunate in having three such good, loyal friends as Drs. Chu Djang, Miao Chung-yi, and Yin Pao-yü, whose kindnesses to me have continued ever since our student days together at the Johns Hopkins.

Dean Shen Ch'un-lu, Mr. Tso T'ao-fên and their associates in the National Salvation movement; Colonel Ch'in Po-k'u of the Communist Party; Mr. Chang Peh-chuen of the Third Party; Dr. Carson Chang of the National Socialist Party, and other spokesmen for minority and unofficial groups were most generous with their time and information.

Messrs. You Shoo-tseng, Yang Chun, Wu Hsüeh-ping, Hawthorne Chen and others translated Chinese materials for or with me. Save for their help, so liberally and painstakingly rendered, this book would have been delayed for months if not years. These gentlemen are not to be held responsible for the selection of materials, nor for the translations in their present form, since I have sought to check and revise this work as far as time and my imperfect command of written Chinese have permitted.

The International Peace Campaign (China Branch), The People's Foreign Relations Association, The Chinese-American Institute for Cultural Relations, and other institutions in Free China were generous with their hospitality and facilities. I owe particular thanks to the Central Bank of China for the high courtesy shown me through the Chief Secretary and the following gentlemen: Mr. T. T. Wang, Chief of the Engineering Division; Mr. Ch'ên Yin-sung, Manager, Kiating Branch; and Mr. Yang Hsia-tz'ŭ, Manager, Chengtu Branch. The officers of the Bank went to enormous pains to ensure my timely, safe return to Chungking when I was ill, hurried, tardy, and in danger of missing my prearranged bookings back to America. Special acknowledgment must also be offered to Mr. C. C. Chi, for his unfailing kindness in providing interviews and trips, and to the China National Aviation Corporation for their unusual courtesies.

In Hong Kong, I was assisted by Dr. Eugene Chen, Dr. Wên Yüan-ning, Dr. Ch'en Han-seng, and Mr. Liu Yu-wan.

In Shanghai, Mr. T. Nakada of the Japanese consulate-general was most helpful.

In Nanking, Messrs. Wên Chung-yao, Kiang Kang-hu, Tsu Min-yi, Lin Pai-shêng, Li Shêng-wu, Hsü Liang, George Wên, P. C. Huang, T'ang Leang-li, K. S. James Woo and L. K. Kentwell were most hospitable. Mr. M. Kimura, of the Japanese Embassy in Nanking, was kind and courteous. I wish to thank these gentlemen for their friendliness to an alien scholar who had just come from the other side of the war.

In Tokyo, Messrs. Yokachiro Suma, Yoji Hirota, Kaneo Tsuchida, and Nobuo Fujimura of the Foreign Office were hospitable and informative.

Mr. Robert Kempton, Mr. George Giffen, and Dr. Louis Wilkinson showed me great kindness on my journey.

In the United States, I am indebted for introductions and advice to Dr. Hu Shih, the Chinese Ambassador; Professor George Taylor, of the University of Washington; and Mr. Frederick V. Field, of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

My colleagues and friends at Duke University have been very helpful. Professors Homer Dubs and Paul H. Clyde, my colleagues in the Far Eastern field, read the manuscript and made invaluable suggestions; Professor Dubs' command of Chinese has saved me from many predicaments. Professor Robert R. Wilson has been unfailing in his encouragement, sympathetic interest, and facilitation of my plans.

The Duke University Research Council has assisted me with annual grants for the collections of documentary materials on Chinese politics. Save for this, I have received no financial aid or subsidy from any institution, person, or government whatever.

Mr. J. C. Yang, Mr. and Mrs. R. E. Hosack, Mrs. Freda Townsend, and Mrs. Margaret Linebarger have assisted me with manuscripts and proof.

I wish to thank the Director, Dr. S. Shepard Jones, and the staff of the World Peace Foundation for their patience, and helpfulness during the preparation of this work for the press. Miss Marie J. Carroll has been especially helpful.

All opinions and statements herein expressed are my own, unless clearly indicated as quotation. These acknowledgments are a record of thanks. I assume sole and complete responsibility for the contents of this book.

P. M. A. L.

Durham, North Carolina
March 31, 1941

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The National Government of the Republic of China, located at the auxiliary capital of Chungking, is one of the most important governments in contemporary world affairs. It has provided fairly effective unification for the largest nation on earth, and has fought a great power to a standstill.

The present work is an analysis of this government. Not a biography of Chiang K'ai-shek, it is instead a delineation of the institutions, the parties and movements, and the armies which today determine the Chinese destiny. Free China, mutilated as it is, is still far more populous and complex than the Soviet Union or Germany. Its political institutions cannot be reduced to the terms of one man's caprice, and the personality of Chiang—while brilliantly conspicuous—is not the entire picture of China. Generalissimo Chiang works, perhaps because he wishes to, certainly because he must, within the framework of a triune organization: the National Government, the central armies and the Kuomintang. These institutions have developed to their present efficacy only by means of thirty years of war, preceded by almost thirty years more of conspiracy. They have become the norm of contemporary China and, whatever their particular future, significant determinants of China's eventual development.

The Chinese Political Inheritance: Some Continuing Aspects

Because of cultural and historical differences between China and the West, the application of identical terms to both is probably either wrong or meaningless. Nevertheless, Westerners can live in China, deal with the Chinese, scrutinize their affairs, and transpose these to such Western descriptions as may suit the purpose. In reading of China, however, one should keep in mind the fact that the words are English, freighted with special meanings, and are used not by scientific choice but for lack of others. Part of this difference can be bridged if one recalls the salient peculiarities of China as against the Western world.

No other society comparable in size, duration and extent has ever existed; the Chinese Empire, from the beginning of the Ch'in (221 B.C.) to the end of the Manchus (A.D. 1911), remains the greatest social edifice mankind has yet brought forth. As such, its modern successor is everywhere stamped with archaic catholic traits which are today both obsolescent and futuristic. To these must be added the characteristics of China as a special area—a cultural zone seeking national form; fragmented economies working their way out of backwardness in technology and helplessness in world economics; a people in quest of government which will give them power without enslaving them. This modern "Chinese Republic," a Western-form state only by diplomatic courtesy in the years succeeding 1912, has been the widest zone of anarchy in the modern world; the Japanese attack on its emergent institutions has helped immeasurably to re-identify the Chinese-speaking people and the officers who presume to govern them.

To understand Chinese government in war time, one might first check the outstanding points of old Chinese development and their modern derivatives.

Pre-eminently, China has been pro forma Confucian ever since the tenth century after Christ. This has meant an ordering of classes in society based on the ideal of scholarship and public administration, rather than on ideals of valor, piety or acquisitiveness. By setting the requirements of the examinations, and through concealed but sharp discouragement of heterodoxy or wilful originality, the governing mechanism made of itself a vast machine of scholars which—because its authority rested in tradition, in language, in social usages—was able to ride out domestic revolution and foreign invasion, and was in a position to ensure its own perpetuation despite political or military interruption.

The traditions of scholastic bureaucracy working in a pluralistic society have left the Chinese people largely independent of the routine functioning of government. The Western state becomes the articulation of society. The government of old China was pseudomorphic as a state, having only some of the functions of the Western state, and its governing power was the residual capacity of an organization devoted to the ends of ceremony, exemplarization, education and the cultivation of personality. Administration was confined chiefly to revenue collection, flood control and defense. In the West, the most important purposes of society are framed in law after discussion, and are executed as policy; in China these purposes, defined by the Confucian ideology, were known throughout the society, with scholar-officials as their expositors. Fulfillment was by no means a prerogative of government alone. By contrast with the Confucian standards, the Western states, whether democracies or not, are capricious, despotic and nonmoral; by Western standards, Chinese society was unresponsive, sanctimonious and amorphous.

This political excellence and stability was accompanied by economic phenomena which are, by modern standards, less desirable. Overcrowding and a slow rate of progress have been fairly constant features of Chinese society since the Han. Owen Lattimore has recently appraised the economics behind the dynastic cycle in China.[1] Each community in old China was cell-like, largely autonomous and autarkic. Hence, the increase of wealth was sought within the cell, and not within a larger framework of economic advance—such as commerce or invention would provide—and the economically predominant class (the landowners) possessed a vested interest in overpopulation (which cheapened agricultural labor and maintained a high, even urgent, demand for food products). Equilibrium was reached, and a cycle of diminishing returns initiated, when population began to outrun the land's subsistence maximum. This drop in returns, in the face of continued population rise, led to peasant rebellion, distributism and a reinauguration of the same type of state—made necessary by the monopoly of managerial expertness (essential to water conservancy, land wealth and the familiar intensive cultivation) in the ideographically literate class. Control of the richest water-conservancy region meant the hegemony of China.

The impact of Western imperialism has struck China in the past century, during the critical or revolutionary phase of this immemorial cycle. Chinese politics took the color of a back-country struggle. The centers of modern power were beyond Chinese administrative reach. The emergent Chinese state, deprived of its foci of power in the metropolises, was promised control thereof only when it had become an effective and complete state—a condition largely unobtainable without control of Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow, and the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

In theory, the Chinese Republic was established January 1, 1912. In practice, the name Republic has masked a mêlée of governments and power-organizations, ranging from bandit gangs with pretentious political color to authentic regional governments administering large areas. This culminated in the National Government which, beginning as a conspiracy, becoming the leading regional government, is now in the position of de facto government for virtually all Free China, the Chinese dominions, and much of the occupied area. None of these governments has ever held an election based on wide suffrage; none has systematically subordinated policy to law; none has possessed a treasury, fleet or air force worthy of a second-class power, until the present war. Out of these unpromising materials the counter-attacking Chinese state has arisen; only by legal formula is it the same Republic as its predecessors; only by courtesy is this the Year XXX (1941) of the Republic.[2]

The governmental developments of the Republican era fall conveniently into four periods: the period of establishment, 1911-1916; the period of tuchünism, 1917-1926; the rule of the National Government, 1927-1936; the period of invasion, 1937 to the present. The turning points between these periods are, respectively, the fall of the Manchu Empire of China (1911), the death of the dictator-President Yüan Shih-k'ai (1916), the Great Revolution under Kuomintang-Communist leadership (culminating, 1927), and the Sian affair (December 1936) followed by full-scale invasion (July 1937).

The present governments of China are accordingly the successors of a wide variety of decaying imperial administration, experimental modernism and outright confusion. Any change in China had to be made at the expense of the haves—the Western powers and Japan. Japan, in seeking the control of China, is fighting China and the Western powers; China, in fighting back, must fight Japan, and behind Japan the whole structure of imperialism. Most Chinese have abandoned hope of surviving as a people without eventually triumphing as a state. In the past, they absorbed conquerors whose bases were transferred to China; today, they cannot accommodate invaders who come as transients from an overseas base. The Chinese war of resistance is a revolution. It is a continuation of the Nationalist revolution, begun against the Manchus, continued against the imperialist powers, and now directed against the Japanese and their Chinese associates. At the same time, this revolution struggles to incorporate in its dynamics the drive of an endemic peasant rebellion, Communist in its extreme phase. Nationalist in supreme emphasis, the revolution finds its highest expression in the articulation of an effective state—something not known in China for twenty-two centuries.

China at the Outbreak of War

Sun Yat-sen's legacy of doctrine included a program of revolution by three stages:

(1) the military conquest of power by the Kuomintang;

(2) the tutelary dictatorship of the Kuomintang while democracy was being instilled and adopted from the bottom up; and

(3) constitutionalism, requiring abdication of the Kuomintang in favor of a popularly elected government.[3]

Upon coming to power in Nanking, the National Government had begun promising a short period of tutelage and had made various gestures in favor of experimental popular government. A Provisional Constitution was adopted by a Kuo-min Hui-i (commonly termed, National People's Convention) in 1931, operating under complete government supervision; a transition instrument, self-acknowledged as such, it anticipated a Permanent Constitution upon the accomplishment of constitutional government in a majority of provinces (Articles 86, 87).[4] Although the Kuomintang has ruled parts of China for more than fifteen years, and is by profession the party of democracy, it has not yet relinquished power. The period of tutelage is still legally in force.

In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war, this monopoly of governmental power by the Kuomintang was not only an important political irritant but also an obstacle to effective Chinese unity. Discontent was aggravated by inelasticity of the Party. Overweighted with petty bureaucracy, it offered too few up-channel opportunities for potential leaders. Since Nationalists were the Ins, Kuomintang membership carried privileges rather than obligations. Many distinguished and active citizens either refused to join, or let their purely nominal membership ride along. The Party was saved from complete decline because it included most of the government personnel, and new recruits to government service gave it some freshness, vigor and inward criticism.

The leading difficulty of both state-building and democratization had been overcome by the creation of a government which was well-designed, functioning de facto and able to meet most of the specialized problems of modern administration. The regime was far from being a crude hierarchy of soldiers and taxgatherers, but had accrued about its policy-making core the essential staff and line services of modern rule. Inadequacies lay not in absolute lack of species of personnel or structure, but in the relative weakness of many key functions. During the third decade of the Republic the then Nanking Government, under Chiang's leadership, gave China its first modern national government.

Despite this beginning, which—without the invasion—stood a very good chance of evolving into a paternalistic oligarchy in democratic form, such as Brazil, there were enormous difficulties still facing genuine China-wide government. First among these difficulties was the question of regional autonomy—lingering vestiges of tuchünism, reinforced by a vigorous provincialism. Whole regions of China were under the merely nominal control of the National Government.

The second difficulty was that of personal politics. Modern China has had ample politics of principle. It is a rare ideological cult, of any kind, anywhere, which does not have its Chinese affiliates. No other nation has known such a wide choice of doctrines, each represented by armed forces and by definite political leadership. At the same time, this ideological struggle was and is paralleled by the politics of individuals and cliques. This made the National Government function as an oligarchy based on three patterns of control:

(1) ideological eminence, orthodoxy, appeal and timeliness;

(2) military or economic control of power in the form of soldiers or cash, the two being for the most part interchangeable; and

(3) governmental incumbency.

A man like Hu Han-min could owe his importance almost altogether to his past associations with the Party and with Dr. Sun, to his authority as an exponent of the San Min Chu I, and to his appeal to the sense of prestige, dignity and stability on the part of other people who did not possess such power, which was exercised in the name of the Kuomintang and its ideology. T. V. Soong, in money matters, or Chang Hsüeh-liang, in military matters, were important because they had under their immediate influence so much cash or so many troops, the availability and mobility of which from day to day determined their actual share of power. Lastly, these same men possessed political authority by narrowly lawful means, i.e., by the governmental offices which they held.

Thirdly, the government was deeply out of harmony with an overwhelming majority of college students, much of the professional and intellectual classes, and a broad section of the articulate farmer and labor groups. In the pre-war years of strain, unofficial persons could follow world fashions in ideas associated with Leftism. Although the full Western pattern of Right, Center, and Left was not imposed upon Chinese politics, many of the most active publicists wrote in these terms. There was, accordingly, a traditional China and a Leftist China; the latter faithfully imported European concepts and did much to change the language of Chinese political struggle. The government—itself Left from the point of view of the pre-existent order, yet committed to modes of thought and policy formally little more radical than the American New Deal—was constantly recalled to the most cold-blooded of realpolitische considerations.

Fourthly, the student movement—in some phases a part of the general Leftist drive—proved a constant source of difficulty and trouble. Chinese students (both collegiate and secondary) are self-conscious, frequently arrogant inheritors of the Chinese tradition of rule by literati. Their influence over the masses is impressive; their patriotism, however unreflective, is ardent; and their interest in international affairs is violent.[5]

Fifthly, Chinese society, accustomed to acting independently of government, urged varied foreign policies and sought wars. Almost every kind of organization, from archaic guilds and secret societies to business groups, sought to wage its own attack on Japan. Uncanalized, counter-attacked, dammed up, these efforts might have undone the government. Toward the end, the government raced frenziedly with time, losing power through unpopularity, and increasing power through rearmament and technical preparation. The vigorous extra-governmental pressure of a populace accustomed to spontaneous mass action is a factor which qualifies and will probably continue to qualify Chinese foreign policy. It is often left out of account in Western comment on China.

Sixthly, in the winter and spring of 1936-37, the National Government was under pressure from its own subjects to begin the negotiation of national unity, starting with a Communist armistice and continuing with the incorporation of as many regions as possible into the sphere of the government; but despite such increasing pressure, the government took no effective step in this direction until after the kidnapping of Chiang at Sian.[6] As a result of this melodramatic affair, however, the National Government revised policies which had become traditions ten years old and agreed to an armistice with the Communists. The Kuomintang—bearing full responsibility for an actual emergent state—found intra-Chinese diplomacy as perplexing as foreign.

Thus, at the outbreak of war, the National Government had reached a higher level of actual political and administrative power than its predecessors, but was faced with grave problems. In any other country the government would presumably have been on the verge of ruin. Controlling only major sections of its internationally recognized territory; faced by autonomous provinces, half-legal military satrapies and outright warlord despotism, all backed by vehement provincialism, great distances, linguistic difficulties and mutual geographical isolation; unpopular with its own student, intellectual and professional elites; ridden by personal politics; just emerging from a ten years' civil war—with these handicaps, a second-rate power undertook to challenge the greatest power of Asia to an irreversibly fateful war. The Chinese went further: they sought in the war not only victory, but unity, democracy and prosperity as well! This background of purpose makes China's internal politics richly meaningful in relation to the world scene.

The Beginning of Active Hostilities

After nearly six years of military and political conflict, a full quasi-war[7] broke out with the episode at Loukouchiao on the night of July 7-8, 1937. It was the evident intention of the Japanese to end an unsatisfactory state of affairs (i.e., Chinese control) in that area once and for all, although they were perfectly willing to express temporary amity and ad interim non-aggression toward what was left of China. The National Government, after a few days of uncertainty, began real preparations for war. Since the government's appeasement policy had accustomed many to think of resistance in terms of the Left, there was an enormous inflation of Leftist sentiment, not deflated for about eighteen months.

While new mass organizations were formed, the Chinese military command framed a plan for a three-stage war:

(1) a period of resistance by heavy regular forces fighting positionally;

(2) a period of stalemate wherein enemy forces, immobilized by opposing regular armies, found lines of communication, supplies and business harassed by guerrillas and saboteurs;

(3) a period of counter-attack in which the Chinese, having prepared themselves technologically during the stalemate and having weakened the enemy by a test of endurance, should drive the Japanese back into the sea.

The strategy of this type of war was based upon the plan of retreating in space in order to advance in time—that is, to yield area slowly and purposefully, without too great cost to oneself, in order to outlast the enemy and reach victory. In thus purchasing time by the mile, the Chinese could not afford to yield intact cities, factories, communications, mines, docks, warehouses and the other goods of business; such cessions would only profit Japan: hence the scorched earth policy. The strategy was obviously suited to a country rich in territory and population, but poor in matériel. It not only made both regulars and guerrillas effective against Japan but made each truly reliant upon the other. Without the Nationalist regular armies, who in attempting to suppress the Communists had done almost everything which the Japanese now had to do—guarding railroads, pacifying disaffected and hostile rural areas, promoting industries and watching agitation—the Japanese forces might disperse enough to enable Japan to patrol and pacify enough of China to pay for the occupation. Chiang had to hold the Japanese together, immobilize large bodies of their troops, keep their war expenses up, and wait for the time to counter-attack. Meanwhile the guerrillas, together with the Communist veterans, were to prevent the Japanese from settling down, to worry them with agitation, to sabotage their economic efforts and to wear them out for Chiang's révanche.

One of the first governmental changes in wartime was the re-institution of an effective propaganda service under the Political Department of the Military Affairs Commission. In this Department, many of China's most active controversialists, censored or exiled for years, found officially sanctioned scope for their energies. Formal unity came slowly. Although Shanghai was attacked on August 13, 1937, it was not until September 10 following that a fairly definitive arrangement was reached in regard to the Communist-occupied zone in the Northwest.

The settlement transformed a pre-existing armistice into an intranational alliance; technically it amounted to submission by the Communists and their incorporation into the national government and armies. The area of the Chinese Soviet Republic assumed the name Special Regional Government of the Chinese Republic (Chunghua Min-kuo T'ê-ch'ü Chêng-fu), which it had been using informally for months; the Chinese Red Army became the Eighth Route Army (Pa-lu-chün); and the Chinese Communist Party accepted the San Min Chu I as the constitutional state ideology of China, abandoning immediate measures of class war and expropriation. The settlement was in the form of a Communist reply to Kuomintang terms offered in February 1937 and the reply of the Generalissimo as Chief of the Kuomintang to the Communist declaration.[8]

For the first few months the war kept its quasi-European pattern. The greater part of the fighting was done in the Shanghai area, while Japanese forces proceeded down from North China. The Japanese still had some expectation of localizing the North China and the Shanghai conflicts. At most, they expected the war to be a short one, not extending beyond the capture of Nanking. Occupation of the capital was counted on for the ruin of the central government, the end of Chiang and the reversion of China to a condition of malleable anarchy.

December 1937 was the blackest month of the war for the Chinese. The Japanese advanced toward Nanking, with Chinese resistance crumbling; part of the armies withdrew in good order, but on occasion there were hopeless, panicky routs. To this month the Japanese looked for victory, and were so confident that they formed the pro-Japanese Provisional Government of the Republic of China, in Peking on December 11.[9] Four days later the Japanese forces entered Nanking, and the ensuing fortnight set the record for atrocity in the modern world. The Japanese forces were preoccupied with their own disorder. The National Government escaped up-river to Hankow, where it promptly began to function under the three-headquarters plan: some offices at Hankow, some at Changsha and some at Chungking. The presence of the foreign affairs, propaganda, and military agencies at Hankow made this the practical capital of China, although Nanking was and is the constitutional capital.

The Hankow Period

The greatest part of the year XXVII (1938) was spent in continuation of slow retreat and heavy frontal resistance. Until October communications with the outside world were wide open through the railroad to Canton. Heavy supplies could arrive by the shipload. Hundreds of Japanese air attacks on the railroad disrupted schedules but never led to serious suspension of service. Leftist influence became overwhelming in Hankow. That city had been the capital of the ill-fated Wu-han Kuomintang-Communist government, which fell with the secession of Chiang to Nanking eleven years before; its connotations still lingered. Even conservative Kuomintang leaders, who had gone to lengths of appeasement at which Neville Chamberlain would have blanched, tried to talk like Negrin or Alvarez del Vayo.

In January 1938, two organizations were formed which, along with the Communist zone in the Northwest, were to be among the most active agencies of guerrilla leadership. The first of these was the New Fourth Army (Hsin-ssŭ-chün), which emerged in the area just south of the Japanese forces at the Yangtze mouth. It was composed of peasant and student militia, of regular army fragments, and of some Kuomintang volunteers, under the leadership of Communist remnants which had hidden away, banditti-fashion, when the Red Army trekked Northwest. Its emergence was recognized by legal order of the National Military Affairs Commission.[10] The other organization was the Provisional Executive Committee of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopei Border Region (Chin-ch'a-chi Pien-ch'ü Lin-shih Hsing-chêng Wei-yüan-hui), established by a conference at Fup'ing, January 8-15, and authorized by central government mandate. This agency also sprang from Leftist organizations—in this case, a bold, determined, student-peasant guerrilla army—which had first developed despite government opposition. It was designed to provide an emergency guerrilla government for those portions of the three provinces which were under occupation by the Japanese. Unoccupied portions of the provinces retained their existing administrations.

In the next month, February 1938, there was established an agency of supreme importance, the Supreme National Defense Council.[11] This replaced the Central Political Council,[12] which had exercised routine functions of the Party's sovereign control over the government; like its predecessor, the Supreme National Defense Council tended to act as the supreme governmental organ, although it was technically a Party organ. The Council provided and provides a unified civilian-military control for the duration of the war; but the Kuomintang shares its power with other groups only in the consultative organs of state, not in the executive.

March 1938 followed with another political step forward—the Emergency Session of the Kuomintang Party Congress. The Party Congress had the functions of a special constituent assembly in part, and in part those of a restricted parliament; in this session two further actions were taken. The first was the adoption of the momentous Program of National Resistance and Reconstruction (K'ang-chan Chien-kuo Kang-ling),[13] which provides a plan for the war and commits the Kuomintang and the National Government to a policy of victory, of industrialization, and of economic reform as a means to war.

The second step taken by this important Congress was the provision for a People's Political Council (Kuo-min Ts'an-chêng Hui, also translatable as People's Advisory Political Council). This was the first breach in the Kuomintang monopoly of government since the establishment of the Party dictatorship.[14] The government, through the constitutional fiction of appointing members as representative individuals, provided a rough, approximate, but fair representation of the active political forces in China.

While the Emergency Session of the Party Congress took these steps for further national defense, the Japanese were collecting a coterie of ex-politicians, friends of Japan, and old men to serve as the Reformed Government of the Republic of China at Nanking. They disregarded the anomaly of having two "Chinese" national governments—the Provisional Government in Peiping being undisturbed by these measures—and continued to seek the division of China, even on the level of the pro-Japanese States. The Reformed Government was established on March 27, 1938.

The autumn of 1938 brought another phase of discouragement. Relying on the prestige of British power and the nearness of Hong Kong, the Chinese were not watchful in the Canton area. The Japanese landed almost unopposed. Chinese negligence, corruption, and a little treachery worked in their favor. The landing forces performed almost superhuman feats of endurance in forced marches overland; on several occasions Japanese advance troops ran so far ahead of schedule that Japanese warplanes, thinking them disguised Chinese, strafed them![15] Canton fell without a major battle. Hankow, the great radical capital, scene of the 1926-27 Leftist upsurge and of the anti-Fascist enthusiasm of 1938, was entered by the Imperial Japanese army, and the entire Wu-han area was lost to China.

Not only was the Hankow period ended. By breaking the last rail connection of the Chinese government and the outside world, and by driving the Chinese leadership into the remote interior, Japan shut off the ready play of international influence on domestic Chinese politics. Foreign visitors became more rare. The government, moving to the mountain fastnesses of Szechuan, found a home on the great Gibraltar-like promontory of Chungking city, tiered along cliffs above the Yangtze and Kialing rivers. The last withdrawal was a final test of strength. Hankow, six hundred miles up-river, was commercially, architecturally, and politically a coastal city. It was still an outpost of world imperialism and of modern technology. With the next remove the Chinese government found itself beyond tangible Western influence; for the first time since 1860 the capital was out of the military reach of Western powers, and in a city which had only slight traces of Western influence.

The Chungking Period

The Chungking period began with the transfer of further government offices to the West, to join President Lin Shên, and marks a distinct phase in the process of government-building in China. As the Chungking regime, the National Government took new forms of temper and character. Government, Kuomintang, Communists—all were in the position of an inner-Asiatic state, without convenient access to the sea, seeking to fight an oceanic nation whose trade reached every port in the world. Foreign imperialism could no longer be blamed for the demoralizations of the hour; foreign aid was too tenuous and remote to qualify the inner play of Chinese political growth. Politically, the Chinese had to stand on their own feet.

The second phase of the war had begun. Chinese armies stood front-to-front against the Japanese, and kept hundreds of thousands of invading troops immobilized. The guerrillas got to work. Most of all, the machinery of modernization began functioning; all the programs had been completed, and the task was clear. The international developments of the time—the first American loan, $25,000,000 in 1938; the brief Manchoukuo-Outer Mongol war of 1939, wherein Japan and Russia fought each other through their respective dependencies; even the outbreak of the European war—were remote from this far inland scene. Military events had some effect, but nothing comparable to the Japanese victories at Shanghai, Nanking, Canton, and Hankow recurred. The Japanese invaded Kwangsi in the fall of 1939; they left a year later, when their drive into French Indo-China made it unnecessary to cut those colonies off from China. In South Hunan the Japanese suffered catastrophically when they advanced boldly and contemptuously into non-modern areas and were encircled by the Chinese. Even the flight and treason of Wang Ch'ing-wei at the year's end of 1938, and his open cooperation with Japan in March 1940, did not change the general picture. The emphasis was no longer on sudden changes, on personality, on dramatic shifts of power. It was on construction—on the development of a modern, democratic, technically equipped Chinese state out of the vast resources of China's hinterland. The China which was to win had to be created before it could counter-attack.[16]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Lattimore, Owen, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, New York, 1940, p. 45 and passim. The author, a noted geographer, presents significant new analyses of the interconnections of Chinese economics and culture.

[2] Detailed descriptions of the political history of the period are to be found, inter alia, in Holcombe, Arthur N., The Chinese Revolution, Cambridge, 1930; MacNair, Harley F., China in Revolution, Chicago, 1931; and, most popularly, Escarra, Jean, China Then and Now, Peiping, 1940. Descriptions of the government are Wu Chih-fang, Chinese Government and Politics, Shanghai, 1934; Lum Kalfred Dip, Chinese Government, Shanghai, 1934; and Linebarger, Paul M. A., Government in Republican China, New York and London, 1938.

[3] This is given in the Chien Kuo Ta Kang (Outline of National Reconstruction), of April 12, XIII (1924), particularly points 3, 5, 6, 7, and 23. Translations are to be found in Hsü, Leonard Shihlien, Sun Yat-sen: His Political and Social Ideals, Los Angeles, 1933, and Wu Chih-fang, work cited, p. 430 ff.

[4] For the text of this constitution, see Wu Chih-fang, cited, p. 430 ff.

[5] In particular, see Freyn, Hubert, Prelude to War: The Chinese Student Rebellion of 1935-1936, Shanghai, 1939. Reference to contemporary Left-liberal and Left publications in Europe and America will disclose numerous sympathetic eyewitness accounts of the troubles and the fortitude of the students. Some of these accounts now possess a wry, inadvertent humor in their characterization of Chiang as a willing accomplice of Japan.

[6] For the Generalissimo's own diary of the kidnapping, together with a narrative by his wife, see Chiang, Mme. Mayling Soong, Sian: A Coup d'Etat, bound with Chiang K'ai-shek, A Fortnight in Sian: Extracts from a Diary, Shanghai, 1938. The Chinese edition of this appeared as Chiang Wei-yüan-chang [Chairman Chiang], Hsi-an Pan Yüeh-chi [A Fortnight's Diary from Sian], Shanghai, XXVI (1937). A first-hand Western account is Bertram, James M., First Act in China, New York, 1938. Edgar Snow, in Red Star over China, New York, 1938, p. 395 ff., gives an account sympathetic to the Left; Harold Isaacs, in The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, London, 1938, p. 445 ff., presents a penetrating Trotskyist critique. An excellent factual summary of this crucial year, written by a well-known writer who visited the scene at first hand, is to be found in Bisson, T. A., Japan in China, New York, 1938.

[7] "War" used to mean the reciprocal application of violence by public, armed bodies; private and informal homicide was termed "murder" or was otherwise clearly designated. Today these distinctions are less clear. The author must enter a caveat lector: no term is employed in other than a general (i.e., literary) meaning, except upon special notice. The Sino-Japanese hostilities differ greatly from war in several interesting but technical respects; they are a very special Japanese invention. Yet it would be cumbersome to refer to Chinese changes in Conflict-time, or to speak meticulously of armies engaged in an Incident.

[8] See Council of International Affairs, The Chinese Year Book, 1938-39 [Hong Kong], 1939; article by Chu Chia-hua, "Consolidation of Democracy in China," Chapter IV; "Reconciliation with the Communists," p. 339-40. This Council is an informal and extra-legal offshoot of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs; accordingly the annual, rich in official materials, provides insufficient data on Communist, guerrilla, and unofficial activities. See also, Epstein, I., The People's War [Shanghai], 1939, p. 88 ff., for an excellent, clear account of this period.

[9] See below, p. [193]. See also Taylor, George E., The Struggle for North China, New York, 1940, in the Inquiry Series of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

[10] See Epstein, I., work cited, p. 235 ff. and The Chinese Year Book 1938-39, cited, article by the late P. C. Nyi, "Plans for Political and Economic Hegemony in China"; this includes a full administrative description of the Border Region, p. 254 ff. The North China zone is arbitrarily translated "Border Region," to distinguish it from the quondam Chinese Soviet Republic in the Northwest, translated as "Frontier Area."

[11] See below, p. [46].

[12] See chart on p. [47]. Descriptions of the pre-war Central Political Council are to be found in the texts cited on p. 5, n. 2, and in the first two issues of The Chinese Year Book, 1935-36 and 1936-37, Shanghai, passim.

[13] See Appendix, p. [309].

[14] See below, p. [69]. This is to be distinguished from the various constitutional conventions, the proposed national congress (kuo-min ta-hui) which exists only in contemplation of the constitutional drafters, and the Kuomintang Party Congress.

[15] An engrossing first-hand account of this is to be found in Hino, Ashihei, Sea and Soldiers, Tokyo, 1940. This, with its three companion volumes, Mud and Soldiers, Flower and Soldiers, and Barley and Soldiers, Tokyo, 1939 and 1940, forms an eloquent, humane, sensitive narrative of a young Japanese writer serving with the Imperial forces in China. The series ranks with the great narratives of the European war of 1914-18, and expresses the Japanolatrist devoutness, the naïveté, and bewildering courage of much of the Japanese infantry, but does so through the medium of a literary craftsmanship rare in any army.

[16] The literature of the war and of the struggles of Free China has already reached an enormous extent. The present work makes no attempt to present a step-by-step account of the interplay of personal politics, the progress of the armies, or to provide a first-hand personal account. Observers other than the author have presented these topics exceedingly well. A few of the outstanding works may be mentioned, however; a Shanghai press line usually signifies that the book was reprinted there from a British or North American edition. Epstein, I., The People's War, London, 1939, is a spirited, detailed account of development down to the spring of 1939, particularly useful for the New Fourth Army and the Border Region. Among accounts of the war are Bertram, J. M., Unconquered, New York, 1939; Oliver, Frank, Special Undeclared War, London, 1939, containing interesting accounts, in particular, of Japanese military and political behavior in China. Andersson, J. G., China Fights for the World [Shanghai], 1939; Utley, Freda, China at War [Shanghai], 1939, a significant personal account with special interest for the Hankow period; Mowrer, Edgar, Mowrer in China, Harmondsworth (England), 1938, published in America as The Dragon Wakes, New York, 1939; Booker, Edna Lee, News Is My Job [Shanghai], 1940, a reminiscent anecdotage; Lady Hosie, Brave New China, [Shanghai], n.d., a far more informed work than most of the autobiographical accounts, by the daughter and widow of two British Orientalists, herself a distinguished literary writer on China. On the North China situation, four popular works stand out: Snow, Edgar, Red Star Over China, New York, 1938, the great "scoop" on the Communists; and three other books based on first-hand reconnaissance: Bisson, T. A., work cited above; Hanson, Haldore, "Humane Endeavour" [Shanghai], n.d.; and Carlson, Evans Fordyce, Twin Stars of China, New York, 1940, the work of the U. S. Marine Corps Observer in the guerrilla area, unique in its value as professional military interpretation. Gunther, John, Inside Asia, New York, 1939, contains much of great interest. Very special viewpoints are represented in the account of a National-Socialist German observer, Urach, Fürst A., Ostasien, Kampf um das Kommende Grossreich, Berlin, 1940; the commentary of two British poets, Auden, W. H., and Isherwood, Christopher, Journey to a War, New York, 1939; and the reportage of a distinguished Soviet fellow-traveller, Strong, Anna Louise, One-Fifth of Mankind, New York, 1938.

Chapter I
THE CONSTITUTION

The constitutional system, basic in most Western states, plays a peculiar, subordinate role in China. Consideration of the issue of constitutionalism high-lights the most practical aspects of the issues of full democracy. Although the purely legal aspects of constitutional development are still unimportant in the internal power politics of China, further constitutional development involves a very real shift in the domestic balance of power. The fullness of national unity, and therefore the effectiveness of resistance against Japan, depend in part on the successful solution or compromise of the problems of constitutionalism.

Ever since the beginnings of political modernization in China, demands for constitutional government have included a written constitution as an imperative prerequisite. The formidable Empress Dowager was troubled in her last days by the Imperial constitution, a rather unimaginative plagiarism of the Japanese Constitution of 1889. Since the Republic began in 1912, China has continued constitutional drafting, amendment, replacement, and suppression; many of these constitutions have gone into legal effect. Law being what it was, practical politics flowed on untroubled.[1] Only with the establishment of the National Government at Nanking did constitutional structure and actual government develop similarities.

The Yüeh Fa of 1931

In 1931, after three years' operation under an Organic Law, the National Government adopted the Yüeh Fa (Provisional Constitution),[2] designed to cover the period between the first stage of the revolution, military conquest, and the final one of constitutional government. This intermediate period was formally labelled the stage of political tutelage, although in fact the military unification of the country continued. The Provisional Constitution, designed for five years' use, has continued in force to the present (March 1941). It possesses the merit of attempting to make actual practice and constitutional form correspond. Grandiloquent, unenforceable provisions concerning elections are omitted, and full exercise of the powers of sovereignty are frankly entrusted to the tutelary Party, the Kuomintang. Such a constitution, formally making the Kuomintang different from and higher than any other party in China—and, for all that, in the world, since the Fascist, National Socialist, and Communist parties are not formally the constitutional superiors of their respective governments—and giving the Party unrestricted authority, has provided China with government realistic if not libertarian.

The constitutional basis of the present Party-dictatorship in China is well summarized by the distinguished constitutional commentator, Dr. Wang Shih-chieh:

According to Sun Chung-shan's[3] Chien-kuo Ta-kang [Outlines of National Reconstruction], China should pass through a period of political tutelage under the Chinese Kuomintang,[4] before the stage of constitutional government be reached. The National Government is merely an organization through which a true republic may be formed. Hence, in order to demonstrate the structure of the National Government clearly, we must first understand the meaning of tang chih [party government].

"Party government," so-called, signifies that the whole system of government is under the control or dictatorship of one political party only. The only difference between party government and dictatorship is that the former is under the dictatorship of an entire political party, while the latter is under that of a single person. Party government is of course different from democracy, inasmuch as with democracy, all policies are to be decided by the entire body of citizens, while with party government, policies are to be decided by all the members of the particular party only. In other words, the entire party as one man can exercise political dictatorship, without taking into consideration the opinions of those who are not the members of the party. Any resolution passed by that party is considered a law not only in fact, but sometimes even in name; moreover, the party may cancel or change a law by a resolution passed in a meeting.

The above-mentioned points are phenomena common to countries under party governments.

After the Chinese Kuomintang has come into power, the system of party government is not only a fact, but even prescribed in laws. The Laws Governing the System of Organization of the National Government of the Republic of China promulgated for the first time on July 1, Year XIV (1925) were originally formulated by the Political Council of the Chinese Kuomintang. Article I in this code of laws provided: "The National Government discharges all the political affairs of the entire country, under the direction and superintendency of the Chinese Kuomintang." The said code has been constantly amended since its first promulgation, but this article has always remained unchanged. By the summer of Year XVII (1928), when the successful Northern Expedition undertaken by the National Revolutionary Army unified China under one government, the period of political tutelage of the Chinese Kuomintang began with the formulation and promulgation of the Outlines of Political Tutelage on October 3, Year XVII (1928). Article I of the said "Outlines" provided: "During the period of political tutelage of the Republic of China, the National Party Congress of the Chinese Kuomintang will take the place of the National Convention to lead the people and enforce all policies." By the beginning of June, in Year XX (1931), when the Provisional Constitution for the period of political tutelage was promulgated, the Outlines of Political Tutelage were again formed into a part of the Provisional Constitution, thereby giving party government a constitutional recognition. Besides the Outlines of Political Tutelage, Article 72 ("The National Government [Council of State] has a President and a certain number of state councillors, appointed by the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang."), and Article 58 ("The Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang is vested with the power of interpreting this Provisional Constitution.") of the Provisional Constitution, and Article 10 ("The National Government has a President, twenty-four to thirty-six state councillors, a President and a Vice-President of every Yüan, appointed by the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang."), and Article 15 ("Before the promulgation of the Constitution, the Executive, Legislative, Judicial, Examination and Control Yüan will each be responsible to the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang.") of the Laws Governing the System of Organization of the National Government (December 30, Year XX [1931]) now being enforced, form the legal basis for party government.[5]

Under Kuomintang trusteeship, demands have been heard within and without the Party, for the promised abdication of the Party and for the initiation of popular government. Since the Kuomintang, unlike European one-party groups, established itself only for the formal purpose of democratic training, and was pledged to tolerate multi-party government as soon as possible, the continued monopoly of power was a frustration of the Party ideology and programs. The frustration was serious; involving much loss of popular sympathy for the government, this and appeasement rather demoralized the Party in the years preceding the invasion.

The Draft Permanent or Double Five Constitution

The Legislative Yüan brought forth on May 5, 1936 (in Chinese chronology, 5/5/XXV, or double-five twenty-five), the celebrated Hsien-fa Ts'ao-an (Draft Permanent Constitution), which was promptly dubbed the Double Five Constitution. Ever since its first promulgation, this document has formed the center of all Chinese constitutional debate, and—with very minor modifications—still stands as the official proposal for a permanent constitution, awaiting ratification by the Kuo-min Ta-hui (National [Constituent] Congress), when and if that long-postponed body ever convenes.[6] The Draft Constitution is the joint work of many outstanding legal scholars. A product of collective research and study, it thereby resembles collective private codification of municipal and international law in the West more than it does the creation of a deliberative assembly. The celebrated Chinese jurist, Dr. John C. H. Wu, prepared the first informal draft,[7] and the 5/5/XXV version represents the fourth draft of the Legislative Yüan. The preparation of the various drafts has not, from the scholastic point of view, been secretive or private; but broad popular participation has neither been offered nor solicited.

The Constitution consists of eight Chapters, comprising one hundred and forty-seven articles. Chapter I defines the Chinese state as "a San Min Chu I Republic" (Art. 1), declares sovereignty to be "vested in the whole body of its citizens" (Art. 2), defines the territories of the republic, specifies racial equality for the "races of the Republic of China," designates the national flag, and declares Nanking to be the capital. Chapter II covers, in nineteen very specific articles, the entire field of private rights and of the civic privileges of individuals. Most specifications carry the qualification, "in accordance with law" or "except in accordance with law." Since law is defined further in the Constitution as "that which has been passed by the Legislative Yüan and promulgated by the President," the qualification impresses many persons as sinister rather than encouraging. Except for this point, the specific constitutional guarantees exceed in number and specificity those of almost any other modern constitution.

The Kuo-min Ta-hui (either "National Congress" or "People's Congress") is the subject of Chapter III. This body has a function unlike that of any Western agency; the nearest equivalent is the National Assembly of the Third French Republic. This Congress is an electoral and constituent body with fundamental legislative powers. It is not intended to usurp the functions of the Legislative Yüan by fulfilling the role of a United States Congress, French Deputies and Senate, or a British Parliament. Meeting once every three years for a one-month session, it will be manifestly unable to act as a routine Western-type legislature.

The Central Government is the topic of the fourth Chapter. The first section of the Chapter describes the Presidency; the remaining five, the five Yüan. This applies the five-fold separation of powers. Sun Yat-sen held that a three-fold separation of powers, as known in the West and applied to American government, was efficacious; he also considered that the Imperial Chinese separation of powers (an implicit one only) was also desirable. The West had executive, legislative, judicial; old China combined these three into the governing power, and joined thereto the examinative power and the chien-ch'a[8] power. (The chien-ch'a power involved the functions of the traditional Chinese censorate; overt and active expressions are found in auditing and in the lodgment of impeachment charges. The term is fundamentally untranslatable, but if the tribunician connotations of Censor or the emergency meaning of Control be recalled, either of these terms will serve.) Sun Yat-sen combined the Western and the old-Chinese separations, developing a theory of the five powers. The Draft Constitution, like its two working predecessors, is a five-power constitution, with five great Yüan (Boards, Presidencies, or Courts), each headed by a Yüan-chang (Yüan President). The fourth Chapter, by including the President and all five Yüan, almost covers the full reach of Chinese government.

This Chapter contemplates the creation of a strong President. In the Organic Law of 1928, the five Presidents of the Yüan were relatively less strong, and the Chairman of the Kuo-min Chêng-fu Wei-yüan-hui (National Government Council; or, Council of State) was the key figure in the government. Most of this time, Chiang himself was Chairman. In the 1931 Provisional Constitution, now in force, the Chairman of the National Government—termed President by courtesy—is an officer comparable to the President of the Third French Republic; the President of the Executive Yüan is a more active officer: Chiang K'ai-shek is President of the Executive Yüan. The new President, under the Draft Constitution, is one of the world's most powerful officers. Holding office for six years, eligible for re-election, commander of all armed forces, declarer of war, negotiator of peace, treaty-maker, chief appointing and removing officer of the state, holder of an emergency power greater than that conveyed by Article 48 of the German Weimar Constitution, and superior to the executive, legislative, judicial, examinative and control branches of the government—such a President is fully responsible to the triennial People's Congress, and to that only! Since the proposed President may be recalled at any time by the People's Congress, he is in that respect similar to parliamentary chiefs of state.[9]

The President of the Executive Yüan, together with his subordinates, is to be appointed and removed by the President of the Republic. The Yüan includes Cabinet Ministers—appointed to their posts from among a special group of Executive Members of the Yüan, thereby providing a simple, rational equivalent of Cabinet and Privy Council, as in Japan or (less similarly) in Great Britain.

The Legislative Yüan is an interesting semi-cameral legislative body, which seeks to embody the better features of legislative research organs and of representative bodies. The Judicial Yüan rationalizes the structure and administration of courts and of judicial process.

The Control [or Censor] Yüan is, like the Legislative Yüan, a quasi-cameral body, with indirect election of members by the People's Congress from territorial electorates. Its functions are audit, inquiry, and impeachment, with such ancillary powers as practice to date has already indicated.[10]

Chapter V of the Draft Permanent Constitution deals with local government. The institutions of provincial government are wittingly minimized, because of recent trouble with provincial satrapies and the dangerously centrifugal effect of provincial autonomism. In contrast to this, government at the district (hsien) level is designed in strict accordance with the realities of twenty-odd centuries' experience. It is probable that no other constitution in the world provides for such careful guarantee of district, county, canton, or Kreis autonomy. The old Imperial Chinese system was a loose pseudo-centralized federation of two thousand near-autarkic and near-autonomous commonwealths; the Draft Constitution attempts to reinstitute (at the political level) this vigorous cooperative independence of the hsien. The hsien meeting, extrapolitical, unsystematic, and occasional in the past, is made the foundation for the new legal structure. (These proposed reforms are now being anticipated under the Provisional Constitution and current statutory changes.[11])

Chapter VI provides that the economic system shall rest on Sun Yat-sen's principle of min shêng (q.v., below). Willing to apply whatever worked best, Sun himself had no theoretical objections to capitalism, communism, state socialism, or any other economic doctrine. Hence, proletarian ownership of the means of production is not guaranteed; yet state ownership is not restricted, and is specifically required in the case of "all public utilities and enterprises of a monopolistic nature" (Art. 123). Henry George's influence on Sun is shown by mandatory taxation of unearned increment (Art. 119). Room for free future adaptation from corporative economic techniques successful in the outside world is assured (Art. 125): "Labor and capital shall, in accordance with the principles of mutual help and cooperation, develop together productive enterprises." It is likely that any imaginable economic system would be constitutional on this basis, provided that it was initiated by due legal procedure and without hardships irresponsibly imposed.

Chapter VII, on Education, opens: "The educational aim of the Republic of China shall be to develop a national spirit, to cultivate a national morality, to train the people for self-government and to increase their ability to earn a livelihood, and thereby to build up a sound and healthy body of citizens" (Art. 131), and continues, "Every citizen of the Republic of China shall have an equal opportunity to receive education" (Art. 132). State, secular control of educational policy is assured. Articles 134 and 135 provide for tuition-free elementary education for children and free elementary education for previously non-privileged adults. (The constitutional guarantee concerning tuition is indicative of the scholastic traditions of the Chinese, of the modern educational revolution, and is reminiscent of Art. 12 of the 1931 Constitution of the Chinese Soviet Republic: "The Soviet Government in China shall guarantee to all workers, peasants, and the toiling masses the right to education. The Soviet Government will, as far as possible, begin at once to introduce free universal education.")[12]

Chapter VIII deals with the interpretation and enforcement of the Constitution. It was a labor of love by shrewd legal theorists, and defines terms with great clarity. Interpretive power is vested in the Judicial Yüan.

The Issue of Constitutional Change

Nowhere in China is there outright denial of a need for constitutional change. The need exists; the Double Five Draft is the government's answer. Yet there are few patent demerits in the existing constitutional system; the present political structure is more realistic, more broadly national, more expressive of effective opinion than any other in modern China. The question arises from commitments (dating back to the Empire) promising to create actual constitutional government. The National Government was established on the basis of this pledge. The democratic ideology, whatever sects it may include, has a clean sweep of the field of doctrine in China. No one seriously advocates monarchy, separatism, or permanent dictatorship. The only question is: how and when?

At the close of the third session of the advisory People's Political Council, Chiang K'ai-shek replied to demands for immediate broadening of popular control over the government by reaffirmation of his adherence to the democratic dogma of Sun Yat-sen, together with the following warnings:

The democracy which Tsung-Li [The Leader, i.e., Sun Yat-sen] wished to establish was of the purest kind without the slightest vestige of make-believe or artificiality. Unfortunately, the Chinese people, having inherited all the evil practices handed down throughout the numerous dynasties of autocratic rule, were then at a low ebb both in intelligence and in vitality. The people were used to disorganization and selfishness....

We have to wait until our lost territories have been recovered and domestic disorders liquidated before we can have political tutelage and prepare ourselves for constitutionalism....

People at that time [the inauguration of the Republic in 1912] made the mistake of neglecting the necessary procedures and instead they rivalled each other in talking about democracy.... As a result, democracy has remained an ideal....

We must make it clear to our people that democracy is not a synonym for lack of law and order, or for anarchy.

The public opinion on which democracy is based must be sound, collective, and representative of the majority of the people's wills. The freedom which democracy endows on people should not conflict with public welfare, nor should it go beyond the sphere as marked by laws of the State. With our nation facing the worst invasion in history, we must teach the people to respect the absolute authority of laws of the State.[13]

The clamor for a constitution continued. The difficulties of introducing mass suffrage to Western China were apparent to everyone, but many leaders felt that the advantages of constitutionalism would outweigh the inescapable loss of efficiency, and would mobilize public opinion behind the war and further democratic progress. The Generalissimo found this view hard to reconcile with his military, direct notions of doing first things first, as he saw them, but he yielded in the fourth session of the People's Political Council and accepted the demand. He stated:

In China ... [democratization] is a tremendously heavy task which cannot be completed within a few days. I think that the Constitution and laws may as well be promulgated at an earlier date. But, gentlemen, please do not forget the Tsung-li's painful consideration ... [of the necessity of an intermediate stage of real democratic training]. Political tutelage does not end with the training of the citizens by the government. It requires training of the citizens by themselves.

Today we should understand our object: to start the building of a constitutional government. This means laying a permanently sound basis for the nation. We are not concerned with the time of starting constitutional government. Whether to start it early or later does not matter much. What we are really concerned with is, do we have a real intention of forming a constitutional government? If we are truly so minded, we might as well promulgate the Constitution before the labor of political tutelage is completed.[14]

Chiang thus reconciled the beginning of constitutionalism and the continuance of political tutelage, although implying acquiescence, not recommendation. A theorist holding all men to be driven by "a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death,"[15] might consistently suppose that Chiang merely dissimulated an inward lust for authority; more plausible is the postulation that a man who has for years lived with and for a doctrine, giving his life and future reputation to the fulfilment of a program, would incline to prudence and realism in climaxing that doctrine and program. In Chiang's case this is Sun Yat-sen's San Min Chu I. Chiang's reluctance to apply democracy then and there is understandable whatever the inmost motive; so, too, is his yielding to a widespread demand.

The convening of a special Kuo-min Ta-hui as a national constituent assembly was set for November 12, 1940; this day was chosen because it was traditionally the seventy-fourth birthday of Sun Yat-sen. Administrative machinery for preparation of a hall, secretariat, publications, and other necessities was established and set in motion. Following the severe fires of August 19-20, and the subsequent large-scale demolition of above-ground downtown Chungking by raids, indefinite postponement of the Congress was announced on September 25—on the grounds that military hazard prevented adequate assembly of delegates, and no reasonably safe place for such a meeting could be found.

Meanwhile, recent years have seen an uproar of constitutional debate. This may be summarized briefly, with the case against the Constitution stated first:

Constitutionalization would lead to the legalization of other parties, instead of a mere condition of non-prosecution; this would disrupt the orderliness required of a people at war. Why add discord in war time? Reply: legitimization of other parties is not a struggle for power but an act of union. It would widen the periphery of cooperation.[16]

Sun Yat-sen required three stages of the revolution: conquest, tutelage, constitution. China is not ready for mass suffrage. The majority of the people are not yet literate. Public opinion is just developing. The nation is, in fact, still in the period of military recapture of national territories. Reply: Sun Yat-sen must not be interpreted mechanically. If this is done, tutelage will never end, and Sun's cherished democracy will remain forever in the future. Furthermore, the guerrillas, the Border Region, and other instances have shown that the Chinese masses can and will practice democracy right now. Again, the issue has already been decided; the government has been committed to the immediate inauguration of the Constitution. First it was to be 1939; the elections were held in part, until the war finally stopped them on August 13, 1937. It is too late to raise the issue: is China ready? Everyone—government, Kuomintang, independent groups—has decided that China is.

Why change constitutions? The present one is satisfactory. If a war-time amplification of the Yüeh Fa is needed, it can be found in the Program of Resistance and Reconstruction.[17] If a convocation of the talents is needed, the People's Political Council is already there. What is the use of a constitutional change in war time? Reply: the constitutionalist movement is no new development. The Program was a democratic advance. "Besides, formation of the People's Political Council was a step toward democracy. The constitutional movement was not forced on the government, but was an outgrowth of the war; it has not appeared overnight, but has a clear historical background. As soon as the Sino-Japanese hostilities broke out, it was evident that more democratic rule was necessary. As the war became prolonged, the preliminary steps proved inadequate. A more perfect constitution, whereby the whole people can be mobilized, is imminent. This fact was duly recognized by the people and is the motive power of the present constitutional movement." (This is the comment of an independent writer.)[18]

A pointed question is raised and answered by Tso Tao-fen, one of the Seven Gentlemen (Ch'i Chüntzu) who led the National Salvationists:

Some say that as a matter of fact, the people themselves do not want a constitution. And—to put it more bluntly—that the people do not know what a constitution is. Therefore, the constitutional movement represents the desires of only a minority of the people, not the majority. You have a certain element of truth if you say that most of the people do not know what a constitution is, but it is not true that they do not want a constitution. In the present war period, the burden on the people is enormous. They should not be denied any privileges to which they are entitled. All the proposed constitutional stipulations concerning the duties, rights, economic status, and education of the people have an immediate effect on and relation to the people. Why do they not want a constitution? If you proceed to ask one of the common people, say a peasant, and you talk with him, professorially as though you were in a classroom, about the constitutional movement, he may be at a loss. But if you bother to ask him about his daily life—the work he is doing, his hopes, his bitterness, the cruelties inflicted on him by unscrupulous officials and landlords and gentry—and if he enjoys the freedom of speech, he will give you a good talk!... If you say that the people do not know what a constitution is, you should enlighten them about the close relationship between themselves and the constitution, not discontinue the constitutional movement.[19]

Other questions relate to specific points in the Draft Constitution. In the opinion of some, the phrase "according to law" which follows every guarantee of popular rights is a dangerous phrase, particularly in view of the neat but arbitrary definition of "law" (Art. 139). Others, remembering the Weimar Article 48, mistrust the emergency power of the President. The President's sharing of the budgetary, pardoning, and war powers with the Legislative Yüan seems illogical to some critics, who feel that these powers should be within reach of a more popular body, not a technically legislative organ.

Further discussion deals with the competence of the Kuo-min Ta-hui. Many of the critics, particularly those of the Communist and independent Left group, believe the long-heralded epoch of democracy would open badly if it began with mechanical ratification of a dictated constitution. A Communist leader said, "We want a Constitution, a democratic Constitution—a real democratic Constitution!" and pointed out that the first Congress was too large, not truly representative of the common people, and not given enough time to work out a constitution by its own action; its task, as he supposed the government intended, would be to rubber-stamp the Double Five Draft. In his opinion, this Draft had many defects—chief of which was unresponsiveness of the central government to popular control. The proposed Congress could not do much with a mere triennial check; the five-power system as projected was unsatisfactory. Democratic rights were insufficiently assured. He added that the Communist Party of China was for a democracy, but that the Double Five Draft was not "the constitution of a democracy."[20]

Furthermore, the representativeness of the proposed constitution-adopting Kuo-min Ta-hui is called into question. The present plan calls for 665 delegates from geographical constituencies, 380 from occupational, 155 "by special methods," 240 by government appointment, and a large number of Kuomintang Party-officers ex officio (241 by a recent count).[21] The present administration would obviously have a whip hand over all proceedings. The division into groups has been criticized. A demand, for example, for 120 women members has been made. Under the circumstances, with 1681 members already scheduled, mere additional size could be no handicap.

The question of qualifications has also been raised. About 900 of the representatives had been elected when war broke out. These include men who have since died, or have changed their opinions, or are reported missing, and even a few traitors. Are all the available elected representatives to be gathered together, years later? or is a new election to be held? Whatever occurs, the supreme agency on qualifications is the Election Committee for Representatives to the People's [Constituent] Congress, attached directly to the Council of State.

The constitutional issue in China is no simple problem of reaction versus progressivism. The vast majority of the population is not literate, and is unprepared to deal with a complicated machinery of opinion and election. Wire-pulling, corruption, adherence to form instead of deed—these are all widespread in China. Democracy abruptly established might frustrate further improvement, since sham-democracy would have established itself. The opponents of sudden action also press the telling point that the common people do not know they want immediate democracy, although believing in the term as a symbol and approving its trial application. The Generalissimo remains clearly mistrustful about creating new organs of opinion, or using new political processes; he would prefer to wait until the nation is unified, better administered, and more literate. Hence his and the Kuomintang's insistence on indirect elections, remoteness of policy-making authorities from the electorate, and self-sufficient government.

China did have, it is argued, an excellent democratic constitution in 1912, many more in the warlord years. All had admirable balances of power, guarantees to the individual, libertarian and progressive provisions. Like Chinese social legislation, they lifted China to the level of the rest of the modern world—de jure, and that only! These elevated documents remained elevated; life went on beneath them, and the tragic gap between law and life was so enormous that no one thought of bridging it. The nation would have been humiliated by legislation which limited the working day to fourteen hours, prohibited the mutilation or slavery of children, or required that torture be administered in the presence of a physician. Hence it had eight, ten, or twelve-hour laws, good child legislation, and absolute prohibition of torture for any purpose; these were unenforceable.

To counsels of caution, advocates of immediately responsive institutions reply that the Chinese common people are better democrats than their rulers, citing concrete cases in proof. They mention the general strikes, strong peasant cooperation, the startling phenomena of coordinate mass action—tens and hundreds of thousands strong—in political protest, boycotts, or civic immobility. (In past years many a warlord has been stopped by empty streets and closed houses: no business, no traffic, no talking, no meetings—only the silence, and somewhere, conspicuously inconspicuous, a committee of plenipotentiaries!) They refer to the Frontier Area, the Border Region, the New Fourth Zone, the guerrillas, the industrial cooperatives, and the wealth of leadership called up from the millions by the war. They quote to the Kuomintang its own professions of democracy, and the words of its late Leader. Told that the masses do not understand modern administration, modern economics, modern war, and that the peasantry and workers would proceed to arbitrary class legislation, economic levelling, and social revolution, they reply, "What do you want—democracy?" It is most unlikely that the Communists would sweep the country under free elections, but they and other dissidents, as the political Outs, would be free to criticize the incumbents in a way sure to bring support and involve new alignments of power. Some Kuomintang leaders wish to shut out any group with foreign connections; the Chinese face—despite their definite movement toward constitutionalism—the question of the limits of democratic toleration

FOOTNOTES:

[1] On the Manchu constitutional programs, see Columbia University Studies in Political Science, Vol. XL, No. 1: Yen, Hawkling L., "A Survey of Constitutional Development in China"; Vinacke, Harold Monk, Modern Constitutional Development in China, Princeton, 1920; Cameron, Meribeth, The Reform Movement in China, 1898-1912, Stanford University, 1931; and Hsieh, Pao Chao, The Government of China (1644-1911), Baltimore, 1925. The earlier constitutional developments under the Republic are summarized in Escarra, Jean, Le Droit Chinois, Paris and Peiping, 1936, which includes excellent bibliographies; Tsêng Yu-hao, Modern Chinese Legal and Political Philosophy, Shanghai, 1934, Ch. VI, "The Law of Modern Chinese Constitutions"; a characteristic proposal for a pre-Kuomintang constitution is Bau, Mingchien Joshua, Modern Democracy in China, Shanghai, 1927; and the works of Lum, Wu, and Linebarger, cited above.

[2] The text of the Yüeh Fa is to be found in The China Year Book, 1932, Shanghai, 1932, and in Lum, work cited, p. 161 ff., and Wu Chih-fang, work cited, p. 410 ff. The Chinese texts of all outstanding Chinese constitutions, from the Imperial programs down to the Double Five Draft of the Hsien Fa are to be found in Wang Shih-chieh, Pi-chiao Hsien-fa, Shanghai, 1937, p. 699-796.

[3] I.e., Sun Yat-sen; Chung-shan was a revolutionary alias, which became a ceremonial posthumous name.

[4] The term "Chinese Kuomintang" is not a redundancy; the original is Chung-kuo Kuo-min-tang, "Central-Realm Realm-people-association," and could be translated as the Chinese Nationalist Populist Party, National Democratic Party, the Nation's People's Party, etc. Several Japanese organizations have had exceedingly similar names; hence the formal style for the Kuomintang is always prefaced by China.

[5] Wang Shih-chieh, work cited, p. 649-50.

[6] The Double Five Draft Constitution is to be found in Chinese in Wang Shih-chieh, work cited, and in English in Council of International Affairs, Information Bulletin, Vol. III, No. 10 (April 11, 1937), Nanking; Hsia, C. L., "Background and Features of the Draft Constitution of China"; in Legislative Yüan, "Draft of the Constitution of the Republic of China," Nanking, 1937; in The China Year Book, Shanghai, and The Chinese Year Book, Shanghai and Hong Kong, v.i. and v.d. The latest version of the Draft Constitution is reprinted below. Appendix I (A), p. [283]; the latest Chinese annotated version of this is the Legislative Yüan, Chung-hua Min-kuo Hsien-fa Ts'ao-an Shuo-ming-shu (An Elucidation of the Draft Permanent Constitution of the Chinese Republic), [Chungking], XXIX (1940).

[7] For a critique and appreciation of the final Draft Constitution, see Wu, John C. H., "Notes on the Final Draft Constitution" in Tien Hsia Monthly, Vol. X, No. 5 (May 1940), p. 409-26. (Dr. Wu is one of the most extraordinary personages of the modern world; he has taken all knowledge—East Asiatic and Western—for his province. He writes a spirited, graceful English and is capable of discussing anything from modern politics or abstruse points of Anglo-American law to ancient Chinese hedonism or the philosophical implications of the Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Dr. Wu, in a bomb-shelter, possesses much of the moral poise and profound personal assurance for which such Westerners as T. S. Eliot seek in vain.) See also Hsia, C. L., "A Comparative Study of China's Draft Constitution with That of Other Modern States," in The China Quarterly, Vol. 2, 1936-7, No. 1 (Summer), p. 89-101 and Hoh Chih-hsiang, "A History of Constitution Making in China," the same, Vol. 1, 1935-6, No. 4 (Summer), p. 105-117.

[8] For a more extended discussion of this point, see the author's The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen: An Exposition of the San Min Chu I, Baltimore, 1937, p. 218 ff., and also p. 96 ff.

[9] See Sun Fo [President of the Legislative Yüan, and son of Sun Yat-sen], "The Spirit of the Draft Permanent Constitution," in The China Quarterly, Vol. V, No. 3 (April 1940), Shanghai, p. 377-84.

[10] See Appendix I (F), p. [318]-[24], below.

[11] See below, p. [106] ff., and Appendix I (G), p. [324].

[12] This constitution is available in Yakhontoff, Victor A., The Chinese Soviets, New York, 1934, p. 217-21, and in Kun, Bela [prefator], Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic, New York, 1934, p. 17-24. The writer has been unable to secure the Chinese text of this document.

[13] China Information Committee, Chungking, News Release, No. 351 (February 25, 1939), p. 2269-71.

[14] [Chiang K'ai-shek], Tsung-ts'ai Chien-kuo Yen-lun Hsüan-chi (The Party Chief's Utterances on Reconstruction), Chungking, 1940, p. 237-43. The Generalissimo concluded his speech with a homiletic touch which is so characteristic that it may be included here; it also explains his relative lack of interest in the Constitution: "Lastly, I have another point to tell you gentlemen. I have already repeated this, again and again, many times. Desiring to complete our revolutionary work and national reconstruction, and to have a constitutional government as seen in many modern states as soon as possible, I often study the causes of the weakness and disorder which exist in our country.... [He cites the traditional political vigor and excellence of the centuries before the time of Christ, with the "degeneration" and "departure from order" of the following centuries.] The departure is not simply due to the failures in politics and education and to the deprivation of the popular rights by a few tyrannical kings and lords since the Ch'in and Han periods. It is due to the fact that before the Chou, we had government by law [fa chih] as a mere supplement to government by social standards [li chih, also translatable as ideological control, or control through moral indoctrination]. We had social organization as the foundation of political organization. Everything was then well-organized and well-trained. Everywhere, in schools, in armies, in families, in society, order and the forms of propriety [i.e., social standards] were regarded as most important. No citizen could evade his duty and obligation."

[15] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, New York and London, 1934 (Everyman's Edition), p. 49.

[16] The writer is indebted for much of the material in this chapter to Dr. Djang Chu, of the New Life Movement Headquarters, Chungking, who supplied it to him in the form of a lecture and other memoranda. Dr. Djang is, of course, not responsible for any reinterpretations here made.

[17] See Appendix I (D), p. [309].

[18] Liu Shih, "Chung-kuo Hsien-chêng Yün-tung-ti Chi-ko Chieh-tuan" (Stages of the Chinese Constitutional Movement) in Li-lun yü Hsien-shih (Theory and Reality), Vol. 1, No. 3, November 15, 1939, p. 13 ff.

[19] From Tso Tao-fen, "A Few Questions Regarding the Constitution" in Ch'üan-min K'ang-chan Shê [The United Front Club], Hsien-chêng Yün-tung Lun-wên Hsüan-chi (A Symposium on the Constitutional Movement), Chungking, 1940, p. 1 ff.

[20] Statement of Col. Ch'in Po-k'u at the Chungking office of the 18th [Communist] Army Corps Headquarters, on July 29, 1940, to the author.

[21] China at War, Vol. IV, No. 5 (June 1940), p. 79 ff.

Chapter II
THE POLITICAL ORGANS OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT

By constitutional stipulation, and by dogma legally established, the National Government of the Chinese Republic is a Kuomintang Party-dictatorship over the Chinese nation. This rule is formally dictatorship by a minority democracy over the absolutely governed majority, since the Party constitution requires intra-Party democracy. No pretense is made of further formal democracy. Actual experience of the past ten years has shown the government to be a broad, loosely organized oligarchy in which the Party, the Government, the Army and regional military, and independent leaders (such as bankers, college professors and presidents, secret society chiefs, community spokesmen) have shared power. The center of gravity has stayed somewhere near Chiang K'ai-shek, who as co-leader and then formal Chief (Tsung-ts'ai, "general ruler") of the Party and creator of the central army has combined two of the chief sources of influence. Variety in the sources, nature, and incidence of political power in recent Chinese affairs has, however, not destroyed the constitutional theory: Party-dictatorship pledged to national democracy.

The state machinery—as it has been since promulgation of the Provisional Constitution, 1931—is among the most elaborate in the modern world, but is nevertheless effective. One may justly regard the present government as the most efficacious, generally powerful, and growing Chinese government since the mid-eighteenth century. This government is pre-eminently the creation of the Kuomintang, and of Kuomintang leaders. A war which threatens China's national existence accordingly threatens the leaders as government officers, as Party members, as patriotic citizens, and as members of the Chinese race. At the time that they fight an alien enemy, they must simultaneously increase state power and diffuse it so that a democracy may emerge and survive.

China's leadership is therefore posed a two-fold problem: to perpetuate a regime, successful in one period of relative peace, through years of invasion to a period of even deeper peace; and to permit popular access to policy-forming agencies, allowing freer operation of pressures, without endangering resistance and reconstruction thereby. To the Western political scientist, it is amazing that they have carried into the years of catastrophic war a unique, complex constitutional system, treasuring it like an ark of the covenant. This is the five-power system.

The Five-Power Constitution

The five-power constitution (wu-ch'üan hsien-fa) is a legacy of Sun Yat-sen, and is one of the cardinal dogmas of the San Min Chu I. Distinctively, two new powers are added to the familiar three: namely, the examinative and the control powers. Westerners might question the importance of segregating the impeaching, auditing and critical powers, unifying them into a new agency of government, along with a glorified, independent civil service system. Yet the five-fold division is to China a key point of governmental development.

The five-power system is based on the notions Sun Yat-sen had of democracy. He anticipated by a generation the need of strengthening democratic machinery to compete with Caesarian techniques. Merely to have qualified the suffrage, or to have narrowed the limits of popular action, would not have sufficed, for it was authentic democracy—government both representative and popular—which he desired, not an empty shell of nominal republicanism. In an effort to solve this dilemma, he employed the concepts ch'üan and nêng,[1] which may be translated "power" and "capacity," although the rendering would necessarily vary in accordance with the connotations to be encompassed.[2] He felt that it was a major discovery to apply in modern politics a distinction between the power which the people should have over government and the capability they had of operating the machine of state. Abandoning the state to the vagaries of public opinion, allowing the citizens free access to the powerful, complex controls of modern governance, or assuming that anyone and everyone had an expert's qualifications on all political subjects—this would, in Sun Yat-sen's opinion, wreck the government. Nevertheless, the people had to reserve a final power over policies and personnel of government, although they are themselves unqualified to operate the state mechanism. Hence the people were to exercise the four powers over the government: initiative, referendum, election, and recall. Compensatingly, the government was to possess the five rights over the people, based on the new separation of powers. To Sun, as a Chinese, the state was not the hand of the people; it was a separate institution above other institutions, democratic only in allowing access to itself and in justifying its authority by the ultimate sanction of popular vote. The new government could not be kept clean, prompt, and high-minded by the freak, casual operation of popular censure, nor staffed by whomever a mass fancy threw into office. It was, instead, to be a traditionally Chinese self-perpetuating bureaucracy, differing from the past only in being controlled and revised by popular instead of imperial will.

Accordingly, the ideal toward which the Chungking government strives may be epitomized as perfect bureaucracy subject to complete popular control. The two powers new to the West—examination and control—are to replace public opinion at levels of obscurity, technicality, and persistence where outside criticism could not reach; the plan of Sun Yat-sen provides for as much use of power through voting as is found in any Western state. This attempted solution strikes near the core problems of any modern government, wherever it may operate and whatever its conditions.

The five-power constitution posits a government of educated, expert men, in which qualifying examinations will precede election for administrative posts, and in which the examination and control yüan will—professionally, officially—replace the haphazard play of sentiment, anger, fancy, envy upon which Western peoples count to keep their democracy healthy and intact. The United States Government is the most complex and important institution in the United States, possessing inquisitorial powers wider and deeper than those of any private person or institution. Yet the Americans have no unceasing, professional, expert investigation of their government by their government, nor does a merit system extend to offices where it might have the drastic effect of thwarting operation of public opinion locally or temporarily debased.

This function, specializing power to strengthen it, explains the war-time survival of the five-power system as a fundamental theory of state. The Chinese have suffered from weak government for decades. Absence of dictatorship was largely owing to an inability to designate a dictator. The five-power system was preceded by a Nationalist government which employed the soviet form of organization—the one instance outside the Soviet Union of such application.[3] This had been set up for rapid, decisive action; thirteen years' preliminary application of the five-power system has shown this to be no less swift and effectual. Even the Communist leaders in China today are reconciled to the retention of the five-power system, although they would certainly like to modify its present organization.[4]

Reference to the general chart of government organization (see p. [330]) shows the intricate pre-democratic system of government now applied. Consideration of the sources of policy in such a structure have, therefore, to appraise not merely two agencies—executive and legislative, with only a glance at the judiciary—as in America, but to examine a whole hierarchy of Party, general governmental, military-governmental, and autonomous policy-making agencies. Were it not for the thousands of miles, the unrelatedness in cultures, the complexities of language, and the inescapable awareness of race, Americans might long since have looked to China as the decisive, fresh political experiment of our times.

One further trait of the Chinese, which in Japan has been carried to the point of a national mania, is the respect for the constitutional (or Imperial) system as a symbol of purity and order. Western governments are like machines in common use; they operate for the general convenience and subject to the criticism of their members. Even dictatorships try to seem practical. The Confucian traditions of government by indoctrination, and particularly that of government indoctrinating through conspicuous example, motivated heavy ceremonialization of state functions. This often led a Chinese Emperor to become more and more majestic and aloof, to strive for archetypal perfection, until he became so much a model that he disappeared from public sight altogether, swilling and carousing himself to death in the gardens of the Forbidden City; his successors, if they came from the people, would seem practical and workable for a few generations, until they too succumbed to their own majesty. Some atrophy through majesty occurs even in the relatively new Chinese National Government, arrested but not eradicated by war-time vigor.

The Supreme National Defense Council

The highest political agency in China is the Supreme National Defense Council (Kuo-fang Tsui-kao Wei-yüan-hui).[5] This is not a part of the government, de jure, since it is the war-time replacement of the Kuomintang Central Political Council (Chung-yang Chêng-chih Wei-yüan-hui), the high Party organ charged with exercise of the Party's sovereign powers in government. The liberalization of the policy-framing agencies in war-time cannot be better illustrated than by the fact that this new Supreme National Defense Council reportedly includes non-Party members, and acts in fact as a central board or council of government, superseding not only the Kuomintang Central Political Council but its governmental counterpart, the Council of State (Kuo-min Chêng-fu Wei-yüan-hui) as well. Reference to the chart below will clarify the relationship of these agencies:

The KUOMINTANG, as a Party,
exercises sovereign powers through
[The CENTRAL POLITICAL COUNCIL, superseded in war-time by]
The SUPREME NATIONAL DEFENSE COUNCIL,
which transmits commands
to
The COUNCIL OF STATE, highest governmental agency, which transforms these commands into government orders applicable
to
NATIONAL, PROVINCIAL, or LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES,
in the form of
ORDERS, ORDINANCES, and LAWS

The power of the Kuomintang is exercised by its Chief [Tsung-ts'ai] and its Central Executive Committee, Central Committee, and their respective Standing Committees (discussed below, p. [125] ff.).

Secretiveness in a nation's highest policy-making organ is somewhat unusual in the modern world. In most states the invisible government of practical acquaintance and association between leaders provides a meeting ground, and traditions require a formal, open exercise of public authority. As a matter of fact, a few generally accepted data concerning the Supreme National Defense Council are readily apparent to the observer in Chungking. In the first place, it is what its title implies—the highest agency of political control. Its meetings are the constant source of new policy and tangible control. Secondly, one finds a universal belief that the Generalissimo, who attends these meetings in the multiple capacity of Chairman of the Council, Party Chief of the Kuomintang, President of the Executive Yüan, Chairman of the People's Political Council, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Navy, and Air Forces, etc., faithfully employs Council meetings for very real debate and discussion of government and Party policy, and for the conduct of the war. He is not believed to take any important step arbitrarily, without consulting the Council. (In the past, he has been known to act with dramatic and concealed swiftness, opening his mind to no one before the crucial consummation of his plans, but at the present time this has apparently disappeared.[6])

Third, the Council, while extending beyond the men who are primarily Party leaders and including military and political figures who (irrespective of nominal Party membership) are independent, has transformed the arcanum of Party power into a body more representative of the entire nation. Fourth, significant in connection with the Japanese charge of Chungking Bolshevization, the Communists and other Leftists, while fairly represented in advisory and even in military bodies, are presumed to have no representation whatever on the Supreme National Defense Council, nor is such representation regarded as probable in the near future. Chiang K'ai-shek has at hand a counselling and co-governing body whose fundamental purposes are completely one with his own.

A nice consistency would demand that the Supreme National Defense Council (as a Party agency) should transmit its commands to the Council of State (its government counterpart) for transformation into law. This is actually done, whenever possible, but the frequency of crises and of needs for immediate action have—in the period of hostilities—led to the occasional issuance of commands direct to the Ministry or other governmental organ concerned.[7] To the degree that the Supreme National Defense Council does so, it becomes a directly governing authority, and instead of perpetuating Party authority over government, it is itself government.

Since a cloud of military secrecy covers the functions of the Council, some notion of its operation and working authority may be found by analogy with the role of the Central Political Council, which it has displaced. According to the leading Chinese constitutional writer on the subject, the Central Political Council (also called [Central] Political Committee)—for which read Supreme National Defense Council today—acted as follows:

According to Article IV of the Principles Governing the Organization of the C. E. C. [of the Kuomintang] passed ... December 6, XXIV (1935), "the Central Executive Committee organizes a Political Committee, composed of a Chairman, a Vice-Chairman, and nineteen to twenty-five members, appointed by the Central Executive Committee, from among the members of the Central Executive Committee and the Control Committee." ... "During a session of the Political Committee, the Chairmen and Vice-Chairmen of the Central Standing Committees, the President of the National Government, the Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the Five Yüan, and the President and Vice-President of the Military Affairs Commission should be present, while the leading members of the special technical committees under the [control] Political Committee, and other higher officials of the National Government may be notified if necessary to attend the sessions." [The author explains that, on the basis of actual experience, "may be notified" signifies "shall attend if matters relevant to their functions arise.">[ ...

It was originally fixed that the Political Committee should meet once every week, but since December XXIV (1935), it holds meetings either weekly or fortnightly. The number of members required to constitute a forum is not fixed, and resolutions have never been put in the form of motions requiring formal vote. Regarding the proposition of a motion, and the discussion of motions proposed ex-tempore, the Political Committee has never fixed any rigid regulations; moreover, even if a rule had been established at one time, it has not been followed closely later. Before being put to a decision, a motion is either studied and examined beforehand, or it is not. There is no definite rule as to whether every motion should be so studied or not, but the Committee possesses the power to decide this point ad hoc. The entire wording of a motion passed in a meeting is rarely fully read, and is then read in the following session as the minutes of the previous session. Hence the Chairman and the Secretary-General have a certain liberty in the framing of the wording of resolutions. Judging from above circumstances, important resolutions passed in the Political Committee must actually represent the opinions of the Chairman and a small number of influential members.... [Italics added in translation.][8]

Many of these features may reasonably be conjectured to have continued in the Supreme National Defense Council, although the regular meetings—whatever others there may be—seem to be considerably less frequent, occurring presumably about once in five weeks.[9] In the matter of authority, again, some continuity may be supposed between the earlier agency and the later. Wang Shih-chieh continues:

The authority of the Political Committee (or the Political Council) has undergone very few changes since its establishment. To speak concisely, the Political Committee is the highest directing organ of all governmental policies. Putting it in more detail, we may say that this Committee has the power to decide the basic principles of legislation, of governmental policies and their execution, and has also the power to appoint and dismiss governmental officials.... [A footnote adds the following detail.] According to the outlines of organization now being enforced, there are still five kinds of affairs that should be discussed and decided by the Political Committee: (1) the basic principles of legislation, (2) the general plans of executing government policies, (3) important plans concerning military affairs, (4) financial plans, (5) the appointment of officials of the Especially Appointed category and of other governmental officials, and (6) [sic] cases submitted for discussion by the Central Executive Committee. The first four may be collectively classified under the two names of execution and legislation.[10]

Only from such description by analogy may the foreigner penetrate to the inmost source of Chinese policy. This ambiguous and all-powerful agency, a Party organ which controls government, a committee constellated about its charismatic Chairman, is the heir both of the Grand Council of the Manchu Empire and of the soviets established by Nationalists during the entente with Soviet Russia. Should the fortune of war remove the Generalissimo from the scene, this Council would become the storm center of power; under his guidance and leadership, this agency above all others distinguishes China from an outright dictatorship. Chiang, unlike many other national leaders, has consistently shrunk from the regalia of arbitrary power. In the highest matters, and at the ultimate control, his action is veiled in the Supreme National Defense Council. The actual play of personalities and power is hidden from us, his contemporaries. Only the future may discover the exact degrees and modus operandi of his authority.

The President of the National Government

The term National Government (Kuo-min Chêng-fu) is employed in two senses. In the broad sense, it refers to the entire central government of China. In the narrow sense, it is a synonym for National Government Committee (Kuo-min Chêng-fu Wei-yüan-hui), commonly translated as Council of State. The highest governmental officer of China is the Kuo-min Chêng-fu Chu-hsi—literally, the Chairman of the National Government. Since this officer is the formal head of the National Government in both senses of the term, his office may with equal appropriateness be described as Chairmanship of the Council of State and as Presidency of the National Government. The latter has been most commonly accepted, although it obscured the clarity of the Chinese governmental pattern. It is essential to note, however, that in the National Government period there has been no President of the Chinese Republic; the highest officer has been the President of the National Government of the Chinese Republic, and as such the titular head of the Chinese state for international purposes. This officer possesses prestige rather than power, and is roughly analogous to the President of the Third French Republic.

In his official capacity, the President acts as chairman of the meetings of the Council of State, performs the ceremonial functions entailed by his office, and serves as the custodian of the symbols of continuity and legitimacy. Wang Shih-chieh writes: "... the Chairman more or less occupies a nominal position. At most, he can give occasional advice, only within certain limits, to the Executive or other Yüan, with no power at all to decide or to reject the policies adopted by the Yüan. As a matter of fact, from the end of the Year XXI (1932) down to the present, since the man filling the office of Chairman [President] of the National Government is very calm and law-abiding, he has never interfered in the activities or policies of the various Yüan."[11] This officer has been the veteran Kuomintang leader, Lin Shên, long a resident of the United States, a key man in overseas affairs of the Party, and a person of much dignity, charm, poise and prestige. With a long beard and a humane, scholarly demeanor, President Lin has fulfilled most admirably the requirements of his office.

Generalissimo Chiang regularly reports on government activities to Lin Chu-hsi, addressing him attentively and respectfully. This is no perfunctory sham, but appears to be a very real search for advice and guidance. The two men are close associates and have been such for many years; the Generalissimo gives every indication of regarding his venerable colleague with affectionate esteem. During the Chungking bombings, the President has commonly resided in a secure place outside the city. He is not needed for the daily prosecution of the war, but both the office and its incumbent are strongly stabilizing factors in the National Government. (The Japanophile Wang Ch'ing-wei, establishing his duplicate regime in Nanking, left the Presidency open for many months, pirating Lin Shên's name. Finally Wang gave himself the title, although he patently would have preferred Lin.)

The Council of State

The Council of State (Kuo-min Chêng-fu Wei-yüan-hui, National Government Committee) is the formal governmental core of the Chinese Republic. Even in peacetime, however, its importance was seriously undermined by the vigorous activity of the Central Political Council. The members of the State Council are commonly persons who do not hold other important office; hence the Council does not include the most effective leaders. Although its sphere of activity is wide, its role as ratifier of the decisions of the Supreme National Defense Council reduces its plenary powers to a shadow. Amnesties, general appropriation bills, appointments and removals, solemnification of legislation adopted by the Legislative Yüan, and inter-Yüan problems are all within the scope of the State Council's authority, but except for the power of organizing and supervising the central independent agencies, subordinate only to itself, there has been little practical power for it to exercise.[12]

The independent agencies under the Council of State, together with the latter's relation to the Yüan and the Military Affairs Commission, are best shown on the chart on p. 55.[13]

Minor agencies are thus attached directly to the Council of State, which also serves as a link and common formal superior to the five Yüan and the Military Affairs Commission. Authority of the Council is directed primarily upon these agencies which, while minor, serve useful needs. The Offices of Military (Tsan-chün Ch'u) and of Civil Affairs (Wên-kuan Ch'u) are transmission and ceremonial agencies, charged with the formal correctness of state documents and ceremonies; the military office was originally designed to carry on more important functions, including an independent inspectorate of troops, but now seems to be restricted to matters of protocol. Chinese government has for centuries operated on the basis of a two-way current of written materials: memorials, petitions, and other communications come from the provinces and dominions to the metropolis; orders, laws and other commands flow outward in response.[14]

The other four agencies directly dependent on the Council of State are all of important character, but likely to be impaired by a period of crisis. The Academia Sinica (Kuo-li Chung-yang Yen-chiu Yüan) serves scientific and educational work through its own research bureaus, through systems of extended aid, and through a program of publications; despite war, it has continued, making heroic efforts to preserve the national cultural vitality and continuity. The three remaining agencies are of less importance, although the Planning Committee for the Western Capital (Hsi-ching Ch'ou-pei Wei-yüan-hui) found its work considerably extended when, on October 1, 1940, Chungking was formally denominated an auxiliary capital of the Chinese Republic, and a long-standing anomaly—that of the city's uncertain status—was removed.

The Council of State could be regarded, therefore, as a mere excrescence upon the design of government were it not that ceremonial and formal functions, indispensable to any government but particularly salient in China, can be delegated to it, and the actual policy-making agencies thereby stripped down to maximal utility and efficacy.

The Executive Yüan

The Executive Yüan is the political organ which includes the ministries, and is therefore roughly analogous to a cabinet, just as the Council of State is in loose parallel to a Privy Council. Together with the Supreme National Defense Council and the Military Affairs Commission, it exercises actual control over the National Government in war time. Its growth involves executive giantism, and atrophy for the remaining Yüan. The President (Yüan-chang) of the Executive Yüan (Hsing-chêng Yüan) is the highest executive officer of the government. This post has not always been held by Chiang K'ai-shek. At various times Wang Ch'ing-wei (now in Nanking) and H. H. K'ung (now Minister of Finance and Vice-President [Fu-yüan-chang] of the Yüan) have held this office.

The Executive Yüan may be compared to a parliamentary cabinet in respect to its relations to the President of the National Government, but it possesses no authority whatever over the Supreme National Defense Council, nor over the Kuomintang C. E. C. and the Kuomintang Congress. It cannot ask for its own dissolution, nor demand the dissolution of the higher policy-making agency whose will it executes.[15] It resembles a cabinet, therefore, in its service as a consultative and unifying agency for the entire executive, but differs in its lack of controlling interdependence with a broad parliament. Again, the Yüan is unique among national executive agencies in the modern world with respect to its division of the task of policy-making and policy-supervising. Most cabinets consist of meetings of the heads of executive ministries or departments, with the chief executive officer presiding, but have no elaborate secretarial or administrative machinery interposed between the cabinet and its direct subordinates (departments or ministries). The Executive Yüan is peculiar in possessing two elaborate staff agencies which handle as much routine work as possible, act as a clearing house for policy and general administration, and pre-digest a maximum of problems. The outline on p. 58 illustrates the difference.

All matters short of the most critical moment are referred to one or the other of the two staff organs (Mi-shu Ch'u or Secretariat, under a Secretary-General; and Chêng-wu Ch'u, or Office of Political Affairs,[16] under a Director of Political Affairs), which are nominally separate but actually almost fused, with the Director serving as a sort of assistant Secretary-General. All official business (other than crucial matters raised by the members of the Meeting) comes to these agencies, where it is studied, assorted, and usually settled provisionally, pending only formal ratification by the Meeting of the Executive Yüan.

The Executive Yüan Meeting occurs once weekly, most commonly on Tuesday.[17] Each Meeting is presented with a formidable agenda, prepared by the Secretary-General, and divided into three categories: reports, matters for discussion, and appointments. The membership of the Meeting consists of the Yüan President and Vice-President, the Ministers heading the executive Ministries, and the Chairmen of Commissions having the rank of Ministry.[18] The work of the Meeting is carried on in a business-like fashion. The Generalissimo, as incumbent Yüan President, takes great interest in the work of the Yüan, and makes faithfulness and punctuality in attendance a matter of high importance. Because of the Japanese air raids over the capital, the exact place and hour of the weekly meeting are not announced, nor are the proceedings public.

In giving effect to the decisions reached by the Yüan Meeting, the Yüan itself issues orders in its own name for matters which are of general interest, or which cannot be handled by any single Ministry or Commission. If the problem is within the province of a particular agency, the Yüan—through its Secretariat—addresses the appropriate form of intragovernmental communication, and the decision is then set forth as the order or act of the agency involved. The following subjects are within the jurisdiction of the Executive Yüan:

(1) laws or legal problems submitted for promulgation by the Legislative Yüan;

(2) the budget, also passed pro forma by the Council of State and put into legal form by the Legislative Yüan;

(3) declarations of war and peace, on the motion of the Legislative Yüan;

(4) appointment and discharge of the higher ranks of officials;

(5) matters which cannot be settled by a single Ministry or Commission;

(6) other matters which the Yüan President sees fit to introduce for discussion or decision.

The Executive Yüan has far outstripped all other Yüan in war-time growth. Its central position, the urgency of most government business, and the need for speed have led to this. Executive exercise of the ordinance-making power has led to the gradual desuetude of the Legislative Yüan, which has found ample work in the preparation of the Draft Permanent Constitution and the attempt to systematize legislation in view of rapid territorial and administrative change. The Executive Yüan, by controlling personnel, usually short-circuits the functions of the Examination and Control Yüan; and the Judicial Yüan has never had practical political parity. Hence, the five-power system must be regarded as a system with strong executive, weaker legislative, examinative, and censoral, and dependent judicial divisions. Above the five powers, the Supreme National Defense Council exercises its august authority; within them, the Executive stands forth; and to them, in the course of the war, a new agency, almost comparable to a sixth yüan, has sprung forth with an elaborate bureaucracy of its own: the Military Affairs Commission.

The Military Affairs Commission

Some sense of the perpetual urgencies underlying Chinese government in the past decade may be obtained by consideration of the Military Affairs Commission.[19] A similar agency was one of the political wheels on which the Nationalist-Communist machine rolled victoriously North in the Great Revolution of 1925-27. After the organization of a relatively stable government at Nanking, the separate military commission was due for absorption into the coordinate pattern of government; instead, it has lingered under one form or another for almost twenty years, growing great in recurrent crises, while the Ministry of War (which was to have absorbed it) has become its adjunct. War led to sudden distension of the Commission, and the creation of an agency comparable to a sixth yüan, if not to a duplicate, shogunal government in the Japanese sense. The Commission had its own head, its own Pu (Ministries or Departments), its own staff and field services. Duplicating the regular government on the one side, and the party administration on the other, it flowered into bureaucracy so lavishly that a fourth agency—co-ordinator for the first three—began to be needed.

Simplicity of government structure has not been a part of the Chinese tradition; the quasi-state of the Empire had been as elaborate as its more potent European counterparts; and the foliation of government at war cannot be taken as prima facie proof of inefficiency. Personnel is provided by giving each officer two, five, even ten jobs; the work is done—delegation and counter-delegation frequently cancel out—and the creation of new agencies does not inescapably involve confusion.

The Military Affairs Commission consists of a Chairman—the Generalissimo (Tsung-ssŭ-ling), who is Chiang K'ai-shek—and seven to nine other members, all appointed by the Council of State upon designation by the Supreme National Defense Council.[20] The key officers of the armed forces are ex officio members, and the Commission is charged with the military side of the prosecution of the war. Its power has been liberally interpreted. New agencies have been attached to it as they arose; now it deals with social work, relief, education, agitation, propaganda, espionage, government-sponsored "social revolution," and many economic matters in addition to its narrowly military affairs.

The work of the Commission falls into two parts. On the one hand, it is the supreme directing agency for all the armies; on the other, the managing agency for a variegated war effort away from the combat lines. The Commission's work in theory covers all armies, but in practice confines its supervisory powers to the forces in Free China and—less clearly—to the major guerrilla units in the occupied areas.

The Commission's governmental structure coordinates military and political functions. The Chief of the General Staff serves as assistant to the Chairman of the Commission. The Main Office serves to smooth interdepartmental affairs and to act as a central clearing point for orders and other transmissions. Beneath the Commission and the main office, there are twelve divisions with the rank of Pu. The Department of Military Operations (Chün-ling-pu) serves as a military planning and strategic agency. The Department of Military Training (Chün-hsün-pu) supervises training facilities, military schools, and in-service training.[21] The Directorate-General of Courts-Martial (Chün-fa Chih-hsing Tsung-chien-pu) and Pensions Commission (Fu-hsüeh Wei-yüan-hui) are explained by their titles; the pension program is probably behind that of every Western power, and the personal grants made by the Generalissimo under his own extra-governmental arrangements are more effective than governmental pensions. The Military Advisory Council (Chün-shih Ts'an-i-yüan) acts as a research and consultative body, in no sense cameral. An Administration of Personnel (Ch'uan-hsü T'ing) applies some principles of the merit system. A Service Department (Hou-fang Ch'in-wu-pu) is in charge of transportation, supplies, and sanitation. The National Aviation Commission (Hang-k'ung Wei-yüan-hui) has won world-wide fame for its spectacular work in procuring a Chinese air arm, and in keeping Chinese air power alive against tremendous odds of finance, transportation, equipment, and personnel; Mme. Chiang's association with and interest in its success has been of material aid. Finally, on the strictly military side, there is the Office of the Naval Commander-in-Chief (Hai-chün Tsung-ssŭ-ling-pu), formerly the Naval Ministry, controlling the up-river remnants of the navy. The War Ministry (Chün-chêng-pu) occupies an anomalous position in this scheme. Subordinate to the Executive Yüan, it is also subordinate to the Commission, so that in effect it is a Ministry twice over, and is even shown as two ministries on occasion.[22] General Ho Ying-chin, as Minister of War, is subordinate to the Generalissimo as Wei-yüan-chang (Chairman) of the Commission.

The two remaining agencies of the Commission are of considerable interest. A system of having political commissars in the army, a Soviet device, was adopted by the Kuomintang forces when first organized under Chiang K'ai-shek, and political training accounted for much of that success of the Northward drive (1926-27). After the Nationalist-Communist split, political training as such fell into considerable disuse, and was replaced by ethical training provided by the Officers' Moral Endeavor Corps.[23] With the renewed entente, and war of national union for defense, a Political Department (Chêng-chih-pu) was established. A graceful tribute to Communist skill in combining war and agitation was paid when Chou En-lai, the celebrated Red general, was designated Vice-Minister of this Department. One of the Generalissimo's most orthodox and able subordinates was made Minister. The Political Department extends its function in an enormous sweep across China, and renders aid in military education within the armies, in civilian organization, and in war propaganda. Active and omnipresent, it is an excellent instance of functioning national unity.

The Party and Government War Area Commission (Chan-ti Tang-chêng Wei-yüan-hui) is a coordinate agency for propaganda, relief, and social, economic and military counter-attack within the war area (the occupied zone), rather unusual in being a formal amalgamation of Kuomintang and government administration. Through this agency most of the guerrilla aid is extended, and the Nationalists seek to rival the Communists and independents in the number of Japanese they can destroy, or the amount of damage they can do. The more active branches of this Commission are a part of the Party structure, but the dual function of the Commission enables it to coordinate Party and Army work. The very role of the Commission is indicative of the fact that the Kuomintang is trying to meet rivalry by patriotic competition and not by suppression. Its integration with the military makes it a perfect example of the triune force which Nationalist China is bringing to bear on the enemy—army, government, and Party all seek to reach into the occupied zone, to articulate spontaneous mass resistance, to maintain the authority of the central government pending the révanche, and to uphold the existing political system, canalizing social change into evolutionary rather than class-war lines.[24]

The Judicial, Legislative, Examination and Control Yüan

The appearance of an actual three-power administration—army, government, Party—has led to the sharp relative decrease in importance of the four further Yüan. The Judicial Yüan (Ssŭ-fa Yüan) was even in peace time the least important of the five divisions of the government, failing to display—as an American might expect—a tendency toward effective judicial independence to counterweight the executive and legislative. The Legislative Yüan (Li-fa Yüan), while exceedingly active in the years between the Mukden and Loukouchiao incidents, has been reduced in importance by the coming of hostilities. Its work has been confined largely to drafting the Permanent Constitution, and continued codification of administrative law—particularly for coordination of central government and war area (occupied China) affairs.[25] The Examination Yüan (K'ao-shih Yüan) has attempted to continue in the field of civil service reform, and the Control Yüan (Chien-ch'a Yüan) has maintained war-time efforts.

The Legislative Yüan, under the Yüeh Fa of 1931, consists of a Yüan-chang, a Fu-yüan-chang, and forty-nine to ninety-nine members (Li-fa Wei-yüan), appointed by the Supreme National Defense Council for a two-year term upon nomination by the Yüan President. The term's shortness increases the dependence of members upon the President, and transforms the Yüan to a legislative study institute. Furthermore, the newly-developed People's Political Council has assumed the function of representation. The President of the Yüan retains sole and arbitrary power over the agenda, the final decision, and the allocation of personnel, although the incumbent, Dr. Sun K'ê, is one of China's leading moderates and an exponent of constitutional process, not likely to exercise arbitrary power.

Apart from its significant constitutional powers, which remain unimpaired, the Yüan finds much of its work performed at present through ordinances of the Supreme National Defense Council, administrative action of the Executive Yüan, or commands by the Military Affairs Commission. The jurisdiction retained includes:

(1) general legislation;

(2) the budget;

(3) general amnesty;

(4) declaration of war (never exercised);

(5) declaration of peace;

(6) "other important matters" (which, in practice, has referred to the more open and solemn aspects of treaty-making, and whatever topic may be assigned the Yüan by the highest Party agency). [26]

The Judicial Yüan serves as an administrative and budgetary agency for four agencies. The Ministry of Justice (Ssŭ-fa Hsing-chêng-pu) is, obviously, the prosecuting agency, attached to the executive in the United States, but made a part of the general judicial system in China. The Administrative Court (Hsing-chêng Fa-yüan) is an agency only potentially important; so is the Commission for the Disciplinary Punishment of Public Officers (Kung-wu-yüan Ch'êng-chieh Wei-yüan-hui). The Yüan President is ex officio chief magistrate of the Supreme Court (Tsui-kao Fa-yüan). Wang Shih-chieh says of this Yüan:

Because of the fact that the Judicial Yüan is itself not an organ of adjudication, and since all affairs concerning prosecution at law are handled by the Ministry of Justice, the actual work to be performed by the Judicial Yüan is very simple and light. In addition to framing the budget for the Yüan itself and approving the general estimates of the organs under it, the Judicial Yüan has only three further duties to perform: (1) to bring before the Legislative Yüan legislative measures connected with the Judicial Yüan and its sub-organs; (2) to petition the President of the National Government with respect to such cases as special pardon, commutation of sentence, and the restoration of civil rights; and (3) to unify the interpretation of laws and orders, and changes in judicial procedure.[27]

With peace, reconstruction and prosperity, the Judicial Yüan might acquire importance through its control of the administrative and technical aspects of the court system. Meanwhile, courts are more closely associated with their respective levels or areas of government than with one another in a unified judicial system.

The Examination Yüan, with a President and Vice-President, is composed of a central Yüan office, which supervises two organs: the Ministry of Personnel (Ch'uan-hsü Pu), operating a selective promotion system, and the Examinations Commission (K'ao-hsüan Wei-yüan-hui). In absolute numbers, few examinations have been held. In practice, standard recruitment technique continues to involve introduction, influence, or family connections. The familiarity of such devices in China at least gives them a high polish, and precludes utter inefficiency. Under the circumstances, the Examination Yüan finds scope for valuable, creative work in the preparation of administrative studies and analyses of very considerable importance.

The Control Yüan is of interest to Westerners, because of the novelty of its functions. Through the courtesy of the Yüan President, a full official memorandum on the structure and procedure was prepared, surveying the work of the Yüan during the course of the war. This is reproduced as Appendices [I (E)] and [I (F)] below.[28] Some of the unofficial observers, both Western and Chinese, felt that the Yüan possessed further enormous possibilities of activity, and that the need for controlment was very great indeed. In general, the Yüan resembles its legislative, judicial and examination coordinates, in that the war-time executive growth has relegated it to a secondary position.

Decrease in the importance of the yüan system during hostilities cannot be taken, by a too simple cause-and-effect argument, as proof of the unwieldy or impractical character of this five-power system. Measured on a scale of other world governments, success is slow; but it is enormous in contrast to other Chinese central political institutions. At present, it is most improbable that the form of government will be changed, save in the event of catastrophe beyond all reckoning

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Sun Yat-sen, San Min Chu I, Shanghai, 1927, henceforth cited as "Price translation," p. 296 ff.; or d'Elia, Paschal M., S. J., The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen, Wuchang, 1931, p. 348 ff.

[2] An attempt to correlate Sun's democratic theory with Western concepts is made in the present author's Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen, cited, p. 107-9. The notion is clearly put in L'Esprit des Lois, Book 11, ch. 2.

[3] See Holcombe, Arthur N., The Chinese Revolution, Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1930, passim, for the outstanding elaboration of this curious experiment, and for a lucid delineation of the genesis of the National Government.

[4] Statement to the author by Col. Ch'in Po-k'u, interview cited, p. [38], n. 20, above.

[5] The names of agencies and offices in the discussion of government and Kuomintang organization are taken from K'ao-shih Yüan [Examination Yüan], Tang Chêng Chien Chih T'u-piao [Charts of Government and Party Development and Organization], Chungking, XXIX (1940), passim. This work has not yet been published, since it is a draft printing, to be revised and re-edited before formal publication. The author was allowed to consult a copy through the courtesy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Wang Ch'ung-hui, and the kind assistance of Mr. C. C. Chi of the Party-Ministry of Publicity. These charts, provisional as they are, are by far the most systematic presentation of modern Chinese government structure which the author has ever seen. For a brief commentary on the Council, see the one-paragraph section, The Supreme National Defense Council in Tsiang Ting-fu, "Reorganization of the National Government," Chinese Year Book 1938-39, cited, p. 356. Dr. Tsiang, whose other writings on Chinese government have been models of clarity, candor, and concreteness, is obliged to state: "As its major functions are involved in the prosecution of the war, military necessity compels the writer to withhold the details of its organization and work for a later issue."

[6] For a biased but bitterly graphic portrayal of Chiang's tiger leaps in politics, see Isaacs, Harold, work cited, passim. Mr. Isaacs' portrayal of Chiang shows him as ambitious, able, and villainous in his need for power and his hostility to the proletariat. The Trotskyite viewpoint is a usefully different one from that obviously adopted by the present author.

[7] Statement to the author, August 1, 1940, in Chungking, by Dr. Wang Shih-chieh, Secretary-General of the People's Political Council and Party-Minister of Publicity.

[8] Wang Shih-chieh, Pi-chiao Hsien-fa, cited above, p. 658 ff.

[9] For example, the date of the law given in Appendix I (G), p. [324], below, is given as August 31, 1939, and it is stated to have passed the Council on that date at the 14th Regular Session; since the Council had been established seventeen months previously, some notion of the frequency or length of sessions may thus be derived.

[10] Wang Shih-chieh, Pi-chiao Hsien-fa, cited, p. 662. The author adds that though the Central Political Council possesses ample authority to interfere in the specific work of the Judicial, Examination, and Control Yüan, such authority was rarely exercised, the Executive and Legislative Yüan constituting the prime objects of its attention.

[11] The same, p. 666.

[12] The same, p. 667-68. The following materials on the independent agencies are also adapted in general from Wang Shih-chieh's work, although interviews, other materials, and the practical experience of the author have been taken into account. From 1930 to 1937 the author's father, Judge Paul Linebarger, was Legal Advisor (Kuo-min Chêng-fu Fa-lü Ku-wên), directly subordinate to the Council of State, and throughout this period the author served as Private Secretary to the Legal Advisor, being authorized by the Council of State to take charge of the American office of the Advisor during the latter's absences from the United States.

[13] Adapted from the Examination Yüan, Tang Chêng Chien Chih T'u-piao, cited; various issues of The Chinese Year Book, Shanghai and Hong Kong; and [The China Information Committee] An Outline of the Organization of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Government, Chungking, 1940.

[14] For a description of this function in the T'ang dynasty, see des Rotours, Baron Robert, La Traite des Examens, Paris, 1932, passim; and see Fairbank, J. K., and Têng, S. Y., "Of the Types and Uses of Ch'ing Documents," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 1940), particularly p. 5 ff., for the Manchu empire.

[15] Wang Shih-chieh, Pi-chiao Hsien-fa, cited, p. 671.

[16] Not to be confused with the Office of Civil Affairs (Wên-kuan Ch'u), adjunct to the Council of State, described above.

[17] A brilliant and informative discussion of the practical work of the Executive Yüan is to be found in Tsiang Ting-fu, "Executive Yüan," The Chinese Year Book 1936-37, cited, p. 241-6.

[18] For these Ministries and Commissions, see the following [chapter]. These are not to be lumped with the Party-Ministries and Commissions which, if anything, are even more complex in structure, but whose titles follow the same scheme of terminology as that of the government.

[19] Chün-shih Wei-yüan-hui. The Chinese Year Book, v.d., cited, and most of the official publicity from Chungking translates this term as "National Military Council," which is far from the original, literally "military-affairs-committee." "National Military Council" is also easily confused with the Supreme National Defense Council. Hence the present translation is employed, following Tsang, O. B., A Supplement to a Complete Chinese-English Dictionary, Shanghai, 1937, and the original.

[20] See Ho Yao-tsu, "The National Military Council," in The Chinese Year Book, 1938-39, cited, p. 361-3; Carlson, Evans Fordyce, The Chinese Army: Its Organization and Military Efficiency, New York, 1940, p. 26 ff.; and frequent references in China At War and the News Release of the China Information Committee, both semiofficial, particularly the issue of the latter for July 15, 1939. A list of the highest military personnel and brief outline of the General Staff may be found in Woodhead, H. G. W., editor, The China Year Book 1939, Shanghai, n. d., p. 216-17, and p. 225.

[21] Descriptions of the subordinate organs of all these agencies but the Pensions Commission and the War-Area Commission will be found in Ho Yao-tsu, cited immediately above. The translations of the titles here given, however, are those of the author.

[22] As an instance, see Outline of the Organization of the Kuomintang ..., cited above, p. [54], n. 13.

[23] This is a semi-official agency sponsored by the Generalissimo. See below, p. [149]. The new war-time change is well illustrated by the following statement: "Special commissioners were assigned to every group army, and political departments in the divisions were augmented. Enough political directors were assigned to every company of troops withdrawn from the front for reorganization, and to Chinese forces behind the enemy lines. In addition, political corps were formed to organize and train civilians. Because of the lack of personnel, so far there have been no political officers in units engaged in military operations.

"Conscious and hard-working, the political officers have done much to remove irritations which used to occur between the commanding officers and the political men....

"Political work in the army formerly consisted in a weekly or fortnightly talk by the officers, whereas now well-planned lessons on political subjects, reading classes, discussion groups, individual conversations and twilight meetings are conducted with clockwise regularity. Singing, theatricals, cartooning, sports, are promoted among the soldiers so long as they do not jeopardize their discipline. Among the civilians, the political officers have also been active. The organization of people's service corps, self-defense units in areas close to the war areas and money contributions to the war chest from people in the rear are a few of their accomplishments." China Information Committee, News Release, October 2, 1939.

The comment of Generalissimo Chiang in the interview on p. 371 is, despite its laconicism, relevant to this topic. A further discussion is available in Chên Chêng, "Three Years of Political Training Work," The China Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Autumn 1940), p. 581-5.

[24] The official view of this work, silent on the competition of the Communists and independents, is found in Li Chai-sum, "Chinese Government Organization behind the Enemy Lines," last citation above, p. 595-600.

[25] Statement to the author by Sun K'ê (Sun Fo), President of the Legislative Yüan, Chungking, July 17, 1940. A summary of the work of the Yüan will be found in various issues of The Chinese Year Book; in Escarra, Jean, Le Droit Chinois, cited above, containing bibliographies; and in Tyau, M. T. Z., "The Work and Organization of the Legislative Yüan," The China Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Christmas Number, 1936), p. 73-88.

[26] Wang Shih-chieh, Pi-chiao Hsien-fa, cited, p. 676 ff.

[27] The same, p. 691.

[28] See p. [313] and p. [318].

Chapter III
CONSULTATIVE AND ADMINISTRATIVE ORGANS

The outbreak and continuance of war has left the fulcrum of power relatively untouched. The highest organs of state are primarily in Kuomintang hands; the Party Chief of the Kuomintang is, even at law, governmentally more important today than in 1937; and the constitutional monopoly of power remains under the Kuomintang. Even changes in the highest organs—such as establishment of the Supreme National Defense Council and the Military Affairs Commission—have left very little impress on the sources of power. Reforms have altered only the mode of power, not its tenure.

Modifications have, however, been introduced at the level of government just below the apex. These are important in two remarkable ways. The People's Political Council (Kuo-min Ts'an-chêng Hui) admixed an ingredient of representation which (save for the Party) had been lacking since the dubious, betrayed, inaugural years of the Republic. Furthermore, sweeping administrative reorganization and reinvigoration made possible the vitalization of the central government in the course of the war, so that despite Japanese pressure and rising Leftist rivalry, the National Government is, on any absolute scale, becoming more powerful year by year.

The People's Political Council

The People's Political Council was established by order of the Emergency Session of the Kuomintang Party Congress held in Hankow, March 1938. Its creation was a compromise measure between the proposal for a European-type United Front government, based on popular elections to a National Convention, and a continuation of the Kuomintang monopoly of government hitherto prevalent. Like many similar compromises in other countries, the institution has proved its viable and useful character. Without exaggeration, it may be stated to be the closest approximation of representative government which China has ever known. Simple, improvised, legally an instrument promising little independence or élan in its work, the Council demonstrates the effectiveness of the Chinese when purpose accompanies design. Formally the least representative of the Chinese constitutional parliaments, congresses, or conventions, the Council is the first to get down to business and—almost unexpectedly—to represent!

Membership, originally set at 150, was raised before the First Session to 200, and again in the autumn of 1940 to 240.[1] The number, unlike the 1681 tentatively projected for the People's Congress, is small enough to allow genuine discussion and to avoid unwieldiness. Attendance, considering war-time hazards, has been very good, with between two-thirds and four-fifths of the members usually present.

Although the Council was designed to meet quarterly by its fundamental Statute,[2] it soon changed to semi-annual sessions and has actually met at intervals running from six to eight months. Each session lasted for ten days (legislative, not calendar).[3] As the Council sessions recurred, the Council became more and more free and representative. Despite the narrowness of its legal foundations, the Council has provided invaluable exercise in the arts of democratic discussion.

As a technique of representation, the Council's recruitment system is novel. The membership was, while the Council's total was at 200, divided into the following four categories:

Group A: representatives of the Provinces and Special Municipalities—88;

Group B: four representatives for or from Mongolia and two for or from Tibet—6;

Group C: representatives for or from the overseas Chinese—6;

Group D: representatives of cultural, professional, and economic bodies, or persons who have been active in political leadership—100.