NANKING TO FORMOSA
Griggs, Thurston
Nanking to Formosa THE GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS OF CHINA, by Ch'ien Tuan-sheng. Harvard University Press. 526 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Thurston Griggs THIS book is really a study of the Nanking...
...The fault lay not with Sun Yat-sen's planning, but with its implementation...
...Dir...
...Evidences of Chiang's shrewdly self-aggrandizing tendencies go back to 1923 when he was a student in Moscow...
...Ch'ien concludes that China yearns for democracy, but that it has remained Utopian and has not been institutionalized successfully as yet...
...Chiang Kai-shek is a man of strong will, fortified by an unusual amount of shrewdness and sagacity . . . But he became the leader of a party of servile men . . . not a party of men and ideas...
...Ch'ien wrote in 1948, the book is a bit thin concerning the Communists...
...the legislative branch was a sham: budgeting was a facade, and finances were chaotic and manipulate, with no effective audit...
...Ch'ien sketches in detail the steps by which KMT's "tutelage" of the nation developed into party dictatorship...
...There are outstanding sections on wartime and postwar practices and policies, on the domestic use of military power, and on political parties...
...Ch'ien says has been regarded as "democratic" in recent years...
...This mesalliance of Confucianism and democracy cannot continue successfully, he says...
...Only a few experts on China or government will read it from cover to cover...
...This leaves it an exploitable dream, which, together with some egalitarian reforms at the grass roots level, evokes mass sentiment supporting a new elitist ruling group...
...It is significant because it dissects the present Formosa government and because it gives background for the Communists' accession to power last year...
...How this applies today is left to the reader...
...Factions within the KMT, with parallel secret services, were permitted so that the leader alone could arbitrate between them and link them up...
...Since Dr...
...Ch'ien says...
...Reviewed by Thurston Griggs THIS book is really a study of the Nanking Kuomintang regime (1927-1949), including some background material on its development...
...The Party and the army interfered with government at every level...
...Under the Communists this elitist leadership is expanding...
...In the Nanking period China was neither completely unified nor peaceful...
...Only parties which tended to be monopolistic have lived...
...Ch'ien's remarkable compendium is a reference work—in many respects parallel and supplementary to the State Department's White Paper...
...Only through the person of Chiang did the branches of government harmonize...
...Since about 1860, foreign powers have supported strong regimes in China regardless of their other merits or demerits and have paid the price, Dr...
...Probably it will remain the authoritative scholarly work on the Nanking Government, its structure, its constitutional formulation, and its ways...
...For about 20 years the same leaders remained in power...
...The KMT regime was one of "democratic" centralism ". . . absorbed primarily in building up and then maintaining in power one person or group...
...Governmental institutions were so structured as to give increased responsibility to fewer and fewer persons...
...The Political Council monopolized legislation...
...It gives profound interpretations based on many detailed items of fact, but it is repetitious...
...They outline a heritage of autocratic monarchism backed by Confucian ideology, which Dr...
...Background chapters I-IV are traditional summaries for readers unfamiliar with China...
...Charts, chronology, documents, bibliography, Chinese characters, and an index are appended...
...True representative democracy never developed even in one county...
Vol. 15 • January 1951 • No. 1
