ABSTRACT
The ideological leadership and inspiration of the Chinese Revolution had been Western and democratic; repudiated as a sham by the West, it withered and was cast aside by the Chinese revolutionaries themselves. The Kuomintang was then reorganized on the lines of the Russian Communist Party, with political commissars, mass propaganda organs and strict discipline. It no longer claimed to be working for a democratic republic but for a party dictatorship which would govern the country for several years, the period of tutelage, until the people had acquired the necessary knowledge of democracy and political skill to govern themselves. It was not the evils of Chinese society which it mainly aimed to overthrow, but the power and privileges of the foreigner. The recovery of sovereign rights was the chief purpose of the new revolutionary party, the Kuomintang. The events of 1927-1928 ended a phase, the phase of unity between peasant and scholar which had so effectively broken up the warlord world.
