Many well-known Leftist writers on China--such as Edgar Snow--make the comment that whereas the National Government is deserving as a government, and worthy of support, the Kuomintang is hopelessly corrupt, a creature of landlords and capitalists, or, of even worse, "feudal elements." Such a distinction, based on strong moral urges and a desire to achieve historical parallels, is untenable in practice. Kuomintang power has weathered more than a decade of adversities. The Generalissimo depends upon it. Analysis of the Kuomintang as the party of the Chinese national bourgeoisie, and ascription of a mass character to the Communists alone, is a fallacy, comparable to a consideration of Earl Browder as the real leader of the American working class. In point of fact, neither the Kuomintang nor the Communist Party in China is a mass party. Neither ever has been, although each sought mass character in the Great Revolution. Still largely apolitical, the Chinese masses are organized socially, culturally, and economically into a village and guild system which functions through most of the country. The Kuomintang includes a very high proportion of shopkeepers, returned overseas-Chinese, Chinese still resident overseas, Christians, landlords, and Western-returned students. The class composition of the Kuomintang is largely incidental to its functional character. Since the Kuomintang was the party of Westernization, it gathered in revolutionary days Chinese of all classes who were sufficiently modernized to be interested. Naturally the poorest peasants and the coastal proletariat did not constitute a large proportion of such membership. The men who entered did so as Christians, as travellers, as temperamental rebels, rather than as representatives of the bourgeoisie. When the Communists, whom a recent writer[8] with unconscious humor calls the party of the Chinese proletariat, came on the scene, the same social elements contributed to its membership. Once the Communist Party abandoned the Trotskyist line of urban revolt for the leadership of endemic peasant rebellions, its composition changed somewhat, although the Communist leaders of today are socially much like their Kuomintang equivalents. The men who are class-conscious are, like Lenin, historically, philosophically, and morally so; it is a matter of literary necessity, not of fact. [Footnote 8: For a Marxian analysis of the Kuomintang, carefully stripped of frank Marxian verbiage, see "Wei-Meng-pu," "The Kuomintang in China: Its Fabric and Future" in _Pacific Affairs_, Vol. XIII, No. 1 (March 1940), p. 30-44. The author _a priori_ defines the Kuomintang as the party of the national bourgeoisie in China, in effect exhorting it to fulfill its historic mission of completing the national democratic revolution, whereupon socialism [i.e., Stalinism] may historically follow. Nevertheless, its comment on personalities is informing in terms of practical politics.]