In the next month, February 1938, there was established an agency of supreme importance, the Supreme National Defense Council.[11] This replaced the Central Political Council,[12] which had exercised routine functions of the Party's sovereign control over the government; like its predecessor, the Supreme National Defense Council tended to act as the supreme governmental organ, although it was technically a Party organ. The Council provided and provides a unified civilian-military control for the duration of the war; but the Kuomintang shares its power with other groups only in the consultative organs of state, not in the executive. [Footnote 11: See below, p. 46.] [Footnote 12: See chart on p. 47. Descriptions of the pre-war Central Political Council are to be found in the texts cited on p. 5, n. 2, and in the first two issues of _The Chinese Year Book, 1935-36_ and _1936-37_, Shanghai, _passim_.] March 1938 followed with another political step forward--the Emergency Session of the Kuomintang Party Congress. The Party Congress had the functions of a special constituent assembly in part, and in part those of a restricted parliament; in this session two further actions were taken. The first was the adoption of the momentous Program of National Resistance and Reconstruction (_K'ang-chan Chien-kuo Kang-ling_),[13] which provides a plan for the war and commits the Kuomintang and the National Government to a policy of victory, of industrialization, and of economic reform as a means to war. [Footnote 13: See Appendix, p. 309.] The second step taken by this important Congress was the provision for a People's Political Council (_Kuo-min Ts'an-chêng Hui_, also translatable as People's Advisory Political Council). This was the first breach in the Kuomintang monopoly of government since the establishment of the Party dictatorship.[14] The government, through the constitutional fiction of appointing members as representative individuals, provided a rough, approximate, but fair representation of the active political forces in China. [Footnote 14: See below, p. 69. This is to be distinguished from the various constitutional conventions, the proposed national congress (_kuo-min ta-hui_) which exists only in contemplation of the constitutional drafters, and the Kuomintang Party Congress.] While the Emergency Session of the Party Congress took these steps for further national defense, the Japanese were collecting a coterie of ex-politicians, friends of Japan, and old men to serve as the Reformed Government of the Republic of China at Nanking. They disregarded the anomaly of having two "Chinese" national governments--the Provisional Government in Peiping being undisturbed by these measures--and continued to seek the division of China, even on the level of the pro-Japanese States. The Reformed Government was established on March 27, 1938.