The government was composed of a hierarchy of committees, similar to the Soviet system in Russia. The topmost committees of the government were subject to the control of the Central Executive Committee of the Party. The Party secured its authority through a policy of democratic centralism buttressed by the election of a Party Congress from the various branches of the party. Power thus followed a perfectly clear and traceable line; it did not depend upon mock elections or upon indefinite delegations of authority. The party members elected the delegates to the Party Congress; the Party Congress chose a Central Executive Committee; the Central Executive Committee or its Standing Committee controlled the Political Council (policy-making) and the Administrative Council (cabinet), together with the Military Council. These three were the supreme government agencies. The same party authorities appointed and removed all members of all other councils in provincial or municipal governments. There was not the faintest show of popular participation in the government; government had become the exclusive tool of the Party. But by being admittedly a tool, the government possessed definite power. Party agencies opened wide the doors of mass participation, not in the government but in the movement. The Nationalist Revolution won with the assistance of the Communists in 1926-1927 rested on the extension of every conceivable agitational device to every group of the population. The government tied these devices together. Halfway on the road to victory the differences between the Right and Left Kuomintang, and between the Communists and the Kuomintang, became too acute to allow for further operation. In April, 1927, Chiang K'ai-shek, the Nationalist Generalissimo, established a Nationalist Government at Nanking. The Nationalist Government, soviet in form, remained in Hankow for a few more months, transferred again to Canton, and then expired. Even so, the councils of the Nationalist governments at Canton and Wu-han had served their purpose well; they had effected the concentration of power, instead of its division, in the course of a revolution when concentration was at a premium. With the approaching victory and peace, the council form of government began to appear to the Chinese as no less alien than parliamentarism. The Nanking government set out to reconstitute a government both Chinese and modern. NOTES [1] Sun Yat-sen, _How China Was Made a Republic_ (unpublished manuscript written in Shanghai in 1919, now in possession of the present author), p. 40. [2] See above, pp. 43 ff.