Reorganization was effected through the assistance of the Communists during the period of the Canton-Moscow entente (1923-1927).(212) Under the leadership of the extraordinarily able Michael Borodin, the Soviet advisers sent from Russia completely re-shaped the internal structure of the Kuomintang and won for themselves positions of considerable confidence and influence, which they lost only when they attempted to transform the principles and objectives of the Party as thoroughly as they had the organization.
The Kuomintang of today, which is irreconcilably opposed to Marxism, still bears the imprint of Communist design.(213) Though the working details of the Party organization do not, for the most part, appear directly relevant to the principle of _min ch’üan_ of Sun Yat-sen, the arrangements for Party control illustrate the curious compromise between Chinese and Western democratic patterns, on the one hand, and the revolutionary requirements of absolutism, on the other, which have made Chinese republicanism seem a sham, if not a farce, to Western scholars who expect to find in China the same openness and freedom in democratic government to which they are accustomed at home.
During the life-time of Sun there was no question of an elective headship for the Party. In spite of the fact that the party stood for democracy, it seemed impossible that any alternative to Sun Yat-sen himself should be considered. Sun Yat-sen’s complete willingness to continue as head of the Party without troubling to have himself elected from time to time has been variously interpreted: his friends term it the humble and natural recognition of a celebrated fact; his enemies regard it as the hallucination of an egotism as distorted as it was colossal. The truth would appear to be that Sun regarded the initiation and the guidance of the Nationalist revolution as his particular mission in life. He was, in a sense, the intellectual proprietor of the Three Principles. Unselfish in all personal matters, he had few doubts of his own capacity when he had discovered what he believed to be his duty, and unquestioningly set out to perform it. In the lawlessness and tumult of the revolution, it would have seemed absurd for Sun Yat-sen to submit to the periodical formula of reëlection for the sake of any merely theoretical harmony of action and theory.
