Organizationally the Party is bipolar, with the power concentrated in the entire membership at the base, and in the Chief (_Tsung-ts'ai_) at the apex. The highest authority of the Kuomintang is the Party Congress (_Ch'üan-kuo Tai-piao Ta-hui_), which could also be translated as All-Nation Convention of Party Delegates. Party Congresses have been held as follows: I, Canton, 1924; II, Canton, 1926; III, Nanking, 1929; IV, Nanking, 1931; V, Nanking, 1935; and the Emergency Party Congress, Hankow, 1938. Wang Ch'ing-wei organized a rump Kuomintang on the basis of a "Sixth Party Congress" held in 1939; the legitimate Sixth Congress has not yet been called. The Party Congress is the highest agency of the Kuomintang, and thereby the highest legal authority in China--a position which it now shares with the Party Chief, _ex officio_ its Chairman. The Kuomintang Party Constitution provides that the Congress should ordinarily meet every other year (_Art._ 27), but permits the C.E.C. to postpone a Congress for not more than one year. This provision has frequently been violated. In actual effect the Congress is neither an effective governing body, nor, at the other extreme, a completely helpless tool. No Party Congress has led to a drastic shift of actual political power. The barometer of influence functions outside the Congress, and the Congress ratifies and establishes what has actually occurred. The high authority of the incumbent C.E.C. in matters of accrediting delegates, plus its power to appoint delegates from areas not represented (a feature taken from Soviet practice), gives the political Ins a formidable weapon with which to bludgeon down opposition, but since the value of the Party Congress is that of a legitimizing agency, overt interference with Party functions would destroy the utility of the Congress. Its level of freedom and efficacy may be compared with American party conventions. Unwieldy, improvised agencies are not able to meet the challenges of well-knit executive groups, but their very unmanageability preserves to them a freedom of incalculable action. The Party Congress could not in practice exercise its formal, legal power of overthrowing the entire Party leadership and starting the Party off on a new tack; it could, however, so humiliate the incumbents by subtle but obvious political gestures familiar to all Chinese, that the leadership would retire for reasons of health, or because of a yearning to contemplate the cosmos. The elaborate structure of the Kuomintang is shown on the chart of organization (p. 331). Abstraction of the most essential features of this chart reveals the following: