ABSTRACT
The Communists, needing a word to mean ‘people’ in the sense of ‘masses’ and yet one which would be distinct and unassociated with the terms used by the Nationalist and bourgeois republicans, invented ‘Jen Min’, ‘people’ is reduplicated by adding before it the word ‘jen’ which also means ‘mankind’. The period of nationalism, ‘Kuo Min’, was over, and the People’s Republic, the ‘Jen Min’ era, had arrived. In 1945 the only hope for peace was in the agreement of the two main parties, but that agreement was impossible so long as one party worked for revolution and the other for reaction. The scholars were lost to the Kuomintang through its corruption, nepotism, misgovernment and inefficiency. They were won by the Communists, who in a long period of exile and hardship had learned to practise moderation, to govern honestly and to build a disciplined army.
