The Kuomintang is in power; the Communist and Left parties are not. As the governing group, the Kuomintang naturally attracts those persons who would seek to enter any government. Since it has not and does not promote rural class warfare, pre-existing class relationships continue. The Party and the Government have sought, not always efficiently or faithfully to the _n_th degree, to carry out the programs of land reform, democratization, etc., to which they have been committed. The Kuomintang has tolerated widespread sharecropping, land destitution, usury, and rural despotism--because it found these in existence, and was preoccupied with building a national government, a modern army, adequate finance, and with eradicating some of the worst evils, such as opium, bandits, and Communists (who, whatever their ideals, nevertheless helped to impoverish a poor nation by merciless civil war). If the Kuomintang were out, it too could point to existing evils. Whoever controls government bears the responsibility. A class element is to a certain degree inescapable in any government; illiterate, unqualified persons do not assume leadership even in the Soviet Union until they have escaped their handicaps through training. But to make of the Kuomintang the party of the Chinese landlords and merchants alone is as fallacious as to make the Republicans or Democrats solely the instruments of American capitalism. A comment such as this would be unnecessary in the case of the United States; but persons who are not Marxian with respect to the analysis of current American events often assume a Left approach to China because of impatience with evils which they see but cannot understand. The final appraisal of the Kuomintang must be based on the practical work of the government and the Party. In 1940, their effective control was wider and deeper than ever before. The Chinese state was more nearly in existence. The armies were undefeated. The growth of China in the past ten years, and the stand made by China at war, has been made under the unrelaxed control of the Kuomintang monopoly of constitutional power, together with its clear primacy in more tangible power--schools, finance, armies, and police. THE NEW LIFE MOVEMENT AND OTHER AFFILIATES