To counsels of caution, advocates of immediately responsive institutions reply that the Chinese common people are better democrats than their rulers, citing concrete cases in proof. They mention the general strikes, strong peasant cooperation, the startling phenomena of coordinate mass action--tens and hundreds of thousands strong--in political protest, boycotts, or civic immobility. (In past years many a warlord has been stopped by empty streets and closed houses: no business, no traffic, no talking, no meetings--only the silence, and somewhere, conspicuously inconspicuous, a committee of plenipotentiaries!) They refer to the Frontier Area, the Border Region, the New Fourth Zone, the guerrillas, the industrial cooperatives, and the wealth of leadership called up from the millions by the war. They quote to the Kuomintang its own professions of democracy, and the words of its late Leader. Told that the masses do not understand modern administration, modern economics, modern war, and that the peasantry and workers would proceed to arbitrary class legislation, economic levelling, and social revolution, they reply, "What do you want--democracy?" It is most unlikely that the Communists would sweep the country under free elections, but they and other dissidents, as the political Outs, would be free to criticize the incumbents in a way sure to bring support and involve new alignments of power. Some Kuomintang leaders wish to shut out any group with foreign connections; the Chinese face--despite their definite movement toward constitutionalism--the question of the limits of democratic toleration. CHAPTER II THE POLITICAL ORGANS OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT By constitutional stipulation, and by dogma legally established, the National Government of the Chinese Republic is a Kuomintang Party-dictatorship over the Chinese nation. This rule is formally dictatorship by a minority democracy over the absolutely governed majority, since the Party constitution requires intra-Party democracy. No pretense is made of further formal democracy. Actual experience of the past ten years has shown the government to be a broad, loosely organized oligarchy in which the Party, the Government, the Army and regional military, and independent leaders (such as bankers, college professors and presidents, secret society chiefs, community spokesmen) have shared power. The center of gravity has stayed somewhere near Chiang K'ai-shek, who as co-leader and then formal Chief (_Tsung-ts'ai_, "general ruler") of the Party and creator of the central army has combined two of the chief sources of influence. Variety in the sources, nature, and incidence of political power in recent Chinese affairs has, however, not destroyed the constitutional theory: Party-dictatorship pledged to national democracy.