Revolution, The Founding Of Statehood

This dissertation is a study of the ideology of the Kuomintang (KMT) left during the year of 1928. This year witnessed a period of heated ideological debate in the KMT. Hu Han-min's return to China in 1928 led to the formation of the Chiang-Hu alliance, the KMT left under the leadership of Wang Ching-wei had now lost the power in the party headquarters. This eventually led to a polarization of the party into the left and the Nanking leadership. The KMT left, armed with a systematic ideology of its own, became the most actively organized political force within the party to challenge the Nanking regime, and propounded an alternative programme to the official line imposed by Chiang Kai-shek. The leftist theory based on the analysis of the nature of the Chinese society and the Chinese revolution, including the argument of the direction and leadership of the National Revolution, the class base of the KMT, and the idea of reorganization of the KMT.The intention of this study is to provide a description to the left theories in 1928 fully and clearly, to examine the meaning and significance of the leftist alternative formulated by Ch'en Kung-po, Shih Ts'un-t'ung and other intellectuals with strong Marxist-oriented overtone, and try to give an answer to why the KMT left eventually failed in its opposition against the Nanking leadership. The study will suggest that in one side, the failure of putting the theories into practice limited the political force of the KMT left, and in the other side, the political struggle influenced the development of the Leftist ideology. To examine the relationship between the political ideas and political actions is one of aims of this study.