ABSTRACT
The eight-year War of Resistance, 1937-1945, witnessed the catastrophic decline of the Kuomintang's fortunes and the striking improvement of the Chinese Communist Party's prospects. The KMT's sudden immersion in the life of the rural interior, far from the great treaty ports and industrial-financial concentrations of the lower Yangtze, blocked the mainstream of prewar Kuomintang spatial and economic strategy. Of the provinces left to the Kuomintang after the great retreat, Szechwan was unquestionably the most important. Szechwan after the collapse of Ch'ing authority-had passed through twenty-five years of political disintegration, militarization, warlordism, and social insecurity. In Szechwan, one of the national authority's first tasks was to dominate the provincial government, long controlled by Szechwan's powerful native militarists. In Szechwan more powerful considerations compromised the New Hsien System from the start. For one thing, the government's need for the material and human resources of Szechwan was supremely urgent and could not wait until the New Hsien System was operating at full steam.
