Despite the difficulties which it faced, the National Government had many assets. In the realm of ideology, it had the advantage of possessing a state philosophy and a patron saint: the _San Min Chu I_[1] and its author, Sun Yat-sen. In the military sphere, it had at its disposal an army unequaled in China; in the economic, the support of the Chinese bourgeoisie, together with the friendly interest of the capitalist powers. In the province of politics, it carried with it much of the personnel formerly serving the Nationalist Government, soviet in form, to which it claimed succession. Its officials were accustomed to devote themselves seriously to government, so that from the very beginning the Nanking government was inclined to enforce its laws as well as promulgate them--thereby breaking with the usage of the shadow Republic at Peking. Finally, the new government secured full international recognition with the flight of Chang Tso-lin from Peking and the disappearance of the rival regime in the North (1928). Sun's state philosophy fulfilled a cardinal function. Even in its most troubled phases, when military factors came closest to the surface of government, the new government did not lapse into fiction. There was a programmatic index against which Nanking's accomplishments could be tested, and a definite long-range plan to follow. The program enabled the National Government to utilize the forms of revolution for the purpose of stabilizing government--far less dangerous than the practice of their Northern predecessors, to use government in order to further disunited military despotism. The officers of the Kuomintang exhibited a meticulous respect for the dead Leader of their Party. Sun Yat-sen, known by his honorific pseudonym _Chung Shan_, was buried in one of the most magnificent tombs of modern times. In carrying out Sun's legacy, the Kuomintang was pledged to the principles of intraparty democratic centralism and party dictatorship over the rest of the nation. The formal party organization was not seriously effected by the change from a soviet form of government.