The Crime of Counterrevolution Was Invented by the Kuomintang! One Bullet from Song Jiaoren Stopped 392 Seats, Sun Yat-sen Made Party Members Give Fingerprints in Loyalty, Only One in a Thousand Chinese Was a Party Member, the Purge Mostly Killed Their Own People, the Gold Yuan Note Was Printed 420,000 Times Over in 11 Months! The CCP Party Constitution Has No Return of Power to the People

This episode traces the historical trajectory of the Kuomintang (KMT) from the founding of the Tongmenghui, the assassination of Song Jiaoren, Sun Yat-sen's reorganization, and the KMT's defeat on the mainland, to its relocation and transformation in Taiwan. By comparing the constitutions and financial ledgers of both the KMT and the CCP, it analyzes why the KMT only learned the first half of dictatorship—lacking grassroots organization and destroying its own foundation through purges—and points out its shared origins with the CCP as well as its ultimate contrasting outcome of returning power to the people in Taiwan.

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Observing things as they truly are, rejecting fragmented cognition. Today is October 10, 2026, which is Double Ten Day in Taiwan and the 115th birthday of the Republic of China. In last year's Double Ten episode, I talked with everyone about Taiwan's democratic history. In that episode, I said a sentence: the KMT and the CCP are essentially twin brothers from the same mother, and in the end, it was just the one with lower bottom lines that won. Some people might ask, on what grounds can you say that? Well, on this year's Double Ten, I will settle the account of this statement clearly for everyone. Speaking of how the KMT collapsed on the mainland, today we cast aside all political narratives and look at only two things: one is the party constitution, and the other is the ledger. I am neither trying to rehabilitate the KMT nor am I trying to kick it while it's down. What I want to say is this: a party that wanted to establish a dictatorship only learned the upper half of dictatorship, but failed to learn the lower half. What kind of state was it in? Let's start from the very beginning.

The predecessor of the Kuomintang was called the Tongmenghui, which was founded in Tokyo in 1905. What kind of entity was the Tongmenghui? In fact, it wasn't that grandiose. At first, it was just several anti-Qing groups coming together to form a partnership, with only one common goal: they all wanted to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. At that time, the internal management of the Tongmenghui was also extremely chaotic; some people clamored to depose Sun Yat-sen, while others simply walked out to set up their own factions. Therefore, when the first shot of the Wuchang Uprising was fired in 1911, the headquarters of the Tongmenghui could not command anything at all. On one hand, it indeed had little to do with the people of the Tongmenghui; on the other hand, the Tongmenghui itself was engaged in internal strife, and its influence was entirely made up for later by propaganda. So the situation was that the Tongmenghui became very famous later on, but that was after the Qing government was overthrown. When actually overthrowing the Qing government, it really had little influence.

Well, it is said that if you wanted to exchange fame for power back then, there was only one path: elections. On August 25, 1912, Song Jiaoren merged the Tongmenghui with four other small parties at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing, giving it a new name: the Kuomintang. The sole purpose was to win a majority of seats in the first National Assembly. The rule at that time was called a responsible cabinet, which simply put meant whoever held more seats in the National Assembly could form a cabinet and serve as premier, while the president had to step aside. To make up the numbers, what did Song Jiaoren do? He directly cut the Tongmenghui's original platform. Equalization of land rights was gone, equal rights for men and women were gone too, leaving only a few vague, high-sounding statements. There were five points in total, translated into plain language: political unification, local autonomy, assimilation of all ethnic groups, care for people's livelihood, and international peace. Yes, just these five points.

Then how was membership in the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) determined? At the very beginning, it was quite lax. Whether you were an old bureaucrat or a constitutionalist, as long as you signed your name, you were a Kuomintang member. Voting took place at the time as well, and the franchise was quite similar to that in the United States back then: to vote, you first had to be male, at least 21 years old, and had lived locally for at least two years. That alone wasn't enough; property requirements were added as well. What were they? You either had to pay more than two yuan a year in direct taxes, or hold real estate valued at over 500 yuan in your name. The final fallback requirement was graduating from elementary school. In the end, when the votes were counted, this machine worked remarkably well. Out of 596 seats in the House of Representatives, the Kuomintang won 269; out of 274 seats in the Senate, it won 123. Combined, the two houses totaled 392 seats. It became the largest party. But that was where the problem lay: these lawmakers joined the party solely for a seat in parliament. If these people could join your party today, they could join someone else's tomorrow, so the party had no control over them whatsoever. Thus, if one were to characterize the Kuomintang at that time, it was simply a machine built to win seats, lacking deep political cohesion, and highly reliant on Song Jiaoren's personal charisma.

Later, this setup proved to be extremely fragile—so fragile that a single bullet could bring it to a halt. And that bullet soon arrived: at 10:45 p.m. on the night of March 20, 1913, at the Shanghai–Nanjing Railway Station in Shanghai. Song Jiaoren was preparing to board a train to Beijing when he was shot from behind; he passed away in the early morning of March 22. This case is one of the few historical events described virtually identically in both Kuomintang and CCP textbooks. Both claim that Yuan Shikai ordered the assassination. Today, let me show you what the actual evidence looks like. Three days after the incident, the concession police arrested the shooter, a man named Wu Shiying, along with Ying Kuicheng, who had hired him. Ying Kuicheng was a boss in the Shanghai Green Gang. From his home, the police seized a batch of telegrams and letters. At the other end of these telegrams were two men: one was Hong Shuzu, then a secretary in the Ministry of Internal Affairs—essentially an intermediary passing messages between Beijing officialdom and Shanghai gang circles—and the other was Zhao Bingjun, who was Premier of the State Council at the time. So, what could this batch of telegrams prove? They proved that the Premier's cipher codebook had been given to a Green Gang boss, and they also proved that starting in February 1913, this line of communication had been working on one thing: smearing Song Jiaoren.

What about Ying Kuicheng? He patted his chest and made grand promises to the folks in Beijing, claiming he could dig up dirt on Song Jiaoren and print 100,000 pamphlets to distribute, and then held out his hand to demand money from the Beijing government. However, the promised material was never delivered. He took the money but couldn't deliver the goods, and the matter reached a stalemate. On March 13, Hong Shuzu sent a telegram to Ying Kuicheng containing just five characters: 'Destroy Song, reward with medal of honor' (毁宋酬勋位), meaning that if you take Song Jiaoren out, the higher-ups will confer a medal upon you. Ying Kuicheng replied that very day, saying that if Song Jiaoren wasn't dealt with, there would be big trouble. Consequently, the gunshot went off on March 20. On March 21, Ying Kuicheng—a guy who couldn't keep a secret to save his life—immediately sent a telegram to claim credit, with just four characters: 'Bandit chief eliminated' (匪魁已灭). As for Yuan Shikai, from beginning to end, there is not a single telegram showing that Yuan Shikai ordered the killing. Moreover, after February 22, Hong Shuzu explicitly instructed Ying Kuicheng not to send any more telegrams to the State Council. The scholar who investigated this case most thoroughly is Professor Shang Xiaoming of Peking University, who even published a book on it titled *Retrial of the Song Case*. His conclusion is that smearing Song Jiaoren was indeed spearheaded by Yuan Shikai, but the step to murder originated with Hong Shuzu. At most, Yuan Shikai simply lacked the wits to foresee it. Other scholars believe Ying Kuicheng was the first to propose murder; to this day, academia has no definitive consensus on who initiated the idea. Therefore, what is my assessment? Saying Yuan Shikai personally ordered the hit lacks sufficient evidence. But claiming this had nothing to do with Yuan Shikai is something I don't buy either, because his subsequent actions clearly show he wasn't clean either: Hong Shuzu fled Beijing immediately after the crime, and Yuan Shikai only ordered arrests three days later. That bastard Zhao Bingjun refused to appear in court no matter what, and the shooter, Wu Shiying, was silenced, dying in the detention center on April 24. And just like that, the entire path of judicial pursuit was severed.

For the Kuomintang (KMT), who the actual killer was was not the most critical issue. What was the most critical? It was that with Song Jiaoren's death, there was no second person in the party who could turn those 392 seats into a cabinet. On the late night of April 26, Yuan Shikai bypassed the Parliament and signed a loan of 25 million British pounds with a foreign banking syndicate. It wasn't until July that the KMT launched the War to Punish Yuan, but they were defeated in less than two months. This failure directly led to Yuan Shikai ordering the dissolution of the KMT on October 4, and the credentials of 438 members of Parliament were directly revoked. Thus, the election machine of the KMT failed from start to finish to organize any respectable resistance. Sun Yat-sen drew a conclusion from this defeat. What did he think was the cause? Well, he believed the defeat was caused by KMT party members being disobedient. That's quite a leap of logic. So he tried to figure out how to make party members obedient. Consequently, on July 8, 1914, Sun Yat-sen started anew in Tokyo and founded an organization called the Chinese Revolutionary Party, and Sun Yat-sen got to work.

What kind of work? To join the party, one had to make an oath, and this written oath had to explicitly state obedience to Mr. Sun in black and white, complete with handprints. Furthermore, members were divided into three tiers based on how early they joined. If the revolution succeeded later, these three tiers of members would correspond to three tiers of citizens, with rights diminishing tier by tier. What about those who didn't join the party? Article 13 of the bylaws stipulated that non-members had no civil rights during the revolutionary period. Starting to see the shadow of the CCP, aren't you? Also, when many people who support the regime talk about overseas Chinese being "second-class citizens," I always smile knowingly. That treatment is actually quite good—because second-class is at least better than fourth-class or no class at all. Under today's regime, even fitting into Sun Yat-sen's fourth tier might be a struggle. I even wonder if the term "second-class citizen" originated from here. As a result, who was enraged by these miraculous party bylaws? Huang Xing was enraged and resolutely refused to agree. He was one of Sun Yat-sen's die-hard comrades-in-arms, but he believed this system was completely unequal and that taking oaths with handprints was a complete humiliation to human dignity. Afterwards, he turned around and left for the United States. This party never accomplished much in the end. Sun Yat-sen himself wrote in a letter in April 1914 that only about 500 people had sworn the oath before and after. But this thing left two inheritances for the Kuomintang: first, a party member's loyalty was not to the platform, but to the leader himself; second, a party membership card was not just a piece of paper, but a credential of privilege. What are these two things called today? You can compare and match them yourselves.

However, having loyalty without organization was still useless, because it still couldn't win the country that Sun Yat-sen wanted. Professor Wang Qisheng of Peking University looked into the KMT's assets before its reorganization. It claimed to have 200,000 members, with Guangzhou alone claiming 30,000. When it came time to actually register them on paper, only 3,000 came to register in Guangzhou. At this moment, which fly was attracted to the scene? Well, the Soviet Union came knocking on the door. On March 8, 1923, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party decided to provide Sun Yat-sen with about two million Mexican silver dollars to support him. This was Sun Yat-sen's first sovereign-level venture capital investment. On October 6, the Soviet advisor Mikhail Borodin arrived in Guangzhou. Then in January 1924, the KMT held its First National Congress, and the new party bylaws were drafted by Borodin, the Soviet advisor. Wang Qisheng compared these party bylaws clause by clause with the 1919 bylaws of the Russian Communist Party. What was his conclusion? The structure was basic identical, and most of the articles were copied wholesale. The features you see in the CCP today were all installed in the KMT during this reorganization, and installed step by interconnected step.

What did Sun Yat-sen say at the congress? He asked why the Russian Revolution succeeded. Because Soviet Russia placed the party above the state; the party was above the nation, so the guns didn't belong to the state, but to the party. These were Sun Yat-sen's exact words back then, recorded in both official and unofficial histories. Wasn't the KMT's First National Congress held in January? In June of the same year, the Whampoa Military Academy was established. Party representatives were dispatched into the military. Later regulations explicitly stated that orders issued by military officers only took effect if signed by the party representative, directly subjecting the gun to the party in nature. From that day on, those who opposed the party were no longer political opponents, but criminals. Then in March 1927, what did the Wuhan Nationalist Government promulgate? Something called the Regulations on the Crime of Counter-revolution. The term "counter-revolutionary" was written into Chinese law for the very first time. The creator of this charge was actually not the Communist bandits, but the KMT. Later, when the KMT and the CCP turned against each other, both sides used the exact same charge to arrest and kill each other. This charge remained in the CCP's Criminal Law until 1997, after which it was renamed what? The Crime of Endangering State Security. Yes, the crime of counter-revolution was the predecessor to this charge.

To catch counter-revolutionaries, you needed people to go catch them, so secret service organizations came into being. On the Kuomintang side, the party headquarters maintained a Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, abbreviated as Zhongtong—yes, that very thing. As for the military, it maintained a Military Council Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, abbreviated as Juntong. As for the chief, that was Dai Li. It was the same on the CCP side: they had the Special Branch (Teke) and the Security Bureau. The secret agents on both sides were not national police; rather, they were all party men, or rather, the leader's men. Finally, one last thing was missing: this entire apparatus needed one person to have the final say. In the party constitution drafted by Borodin, a special chapter was added specifically for Sun Yat-sen, titled Director-General. What did it say inside? It stated that regarding matters decided by the Central Executive Committee, the Director-General had the final decision-making power. Even the Russian Communist Party's constitution didn't have this clause; this was the 1914 fingerprint pledge turned into written articles. In 1938, the Kuomintang established the position of Director-General (Zongcai), handing this power over to Chiang Kai-shek. By 1928, this entire apparatus was formally written into the state system, under the name 'Political Tutelage'. What did Political Tutelage mean? It meant that the common people did not yet know how to run their own affairs, and since they didn't know how, the Party had to step in and run things on their behalf first. Once they taught you, power would be returned to you. The Program of Political Tutelage passed on October 3 of that year made it crystal clear. How was it written? It read: The National Congress of the Kuomintang shall exercise political power on behalf of the National Assembly. Even though you never voted, the Party voted on your behalf. Doesn't this sound very familiar today? People often hear the saying that the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were trained by the same master. Does it all line up now?

So the question arises: with the same teacher and the very same textbook, why did one side win and the other lose? Setting aside the factor of the Japanese invasion of China back then, analyzing it politically, what was the reason? The Kuomintang only learned half the art of dictatorship—this was stated by Wang Qisheng himself. He noted that when the Kuomintang learned from the Soviet Union, it actually only mastered the superficial upper half of the playbook. Which half did they learn? Well, they learned the top half: ideas like the party above the state, the party controlling the gun, and the leader having the final say—that kind of stuff. And which half did they fail to learn? The bottom half: namely, building the Kuomintang's organization layer by layer all the way down into the villages. Look at the numbers: in the sixth year after the Nanjing government was established, fewer than 40 percent of provinces across the country had officially established Kuomintang party branches, and fewer than 17 percent of counties had officially formed county party headquarters. In 1935, the ratio of Kuomintang members to the national population was 1 to 300; if you exclude nominal military members and overseas members, it was 1 to 990. In other words, out of 1,000 Chinese people, there was barely one Kuomintang member. Furthermore, these members were heavily concentrated, huddled together exclusively in the cities. How did Wang Qisheng summarize this? He said: there was a party at the top, but none at the bottom; there was a party in the cities, but none in the countryside. For the CCP, it was the exact opposite. Party branches were established directly down in the villages and military companies—that is what I mean by only learning "half the playbook." The Kuomintang took every single bit of the flak and condemnation a dictatorship deserved, yet it failed to acquire any of the real organizational capability a dictatorship should possess. But what happened to the grassroots base they initially had? Well, the Kuomintang wiped it out with its own hands. On April 12, 1927, Chiang Kai-shek launched the Party Purification Movement in Shanghai. "Purifying the party" meant purging Communists and leftists from the Kuomintang. Because of the previous First United Front, many Kuomintang members had joined while holding dual membership as Communists. The method used was extremely brutal: simply arresting and killing them. How many people were killed? Well, there are two sets of figures. According to statistics from the CCP, by the first half of 1928, more than 310,000 people had been killed. Somehow, whenever the CCP talks about massacres, their numbers almost always hover around 300,000. But what did the statistics from charitable relief agencies at the time show? Over 40,000 were killed and over 40,000 were arrested—a massive discrepancy between the two numbers. Let me show you an even more solid set of numbers: before the party purge, the Kuomintang claimed to have more than 1 million members, but by the time of another survey in October 1929, only a bit over 600,000 remained, a drop of more than 30 percent. Meanwhile, in April 1927, total CCP membership across the whole country was less than 60,000. In other words, the vast majority of those purged were not Communists at all. Who were they? They were the Kuomintang's own young cadres who were best at working at the grassroots level. By March 1928, regular civilian Kuomintang members inside the country dropped to a mere 220,000. Wang Qisheng called this an "adverse selection": those capable of mobilizing the masses were either killed, driven away, or became disillusioned and quit the party. And who came in to fill the void? A bunch of opportunists settling personal scores under the cover of the purge, or cynical scoundrels blowing with the wind. From that point on, the Kuomintang's center of gravity shifted entirely to the military. In October 1926, military party members accounted for less than 4 percent of total membership. By January 1937, that proportion was 61 percent. At that time, there were over 520,000 regular civilian members in the country, while military members numbered roughly 1.01 million—almost double. The party constitution back then stipulated the hierarchy as the party governing the state, and the state governing the military; in reality, this order was completely reversed: the military controlled the state, and the state controlled the party. The most important title in Chiang Kai-shek's hands was not the Chairman of the National Government, but the Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission. That is why people usually heard him addressed in movies and TV shows as "Weizuo"—referring specifically to his post as Commission Chairman. If you graduated from Whampoa, you belonged to his direct clique, and you could call him "Headmaster." Even so, the actual territory Chiang Kai-shek could effectively govern was extremely limited. American scholar Lloyd E. Eastman ran the calculations: in 1929, the territory truly governed by the Nanjing government accounted for only 8 percent of the country's land area and 20 percent of its population. On the eve of the War of Resistance, it was only 25 percent of the land and 66 percent of the population. Outside this sphere, Chiang Kai-shek was at most a relatively large warlord. Look around: there was Yan Xishan in the north, Bai Chongxi in the south, and people like Han Fuju and Zhang Zongchang in North China. That guy Zhang Zongchang was hilarious—he came from a completely uncultured, roughneck background, yet obsessed every day over writing poetry. Rhyming lines like: "Rioters' power always boils over like a pot; could it be they're steaming buns or what? If not steaming buns, why is power always boiling like a pot?" Well, that was his masterpiece; all his work was pure nonsense like that.

Let's continue looking at the ledgers. To know whether a regime has penetrated the villages, you just have to look at where its money comes from. The central finances of the Nanjing government relied mainly on three types of taxes: customs duties, salt taxes, and a consolidated tax levied uniformly on factory-made goods like cigarettes and cotton yarn, which today would be called value-added tax. Combined, these three sources accounted for over ninety-five percent of the central government's actual revenue. Meanwhile, the land tax paid by farmers had already been allocated to the provinces as local fiscal revenue back in 1928. In other words, the central government's money came entirely from treaty ports and factories, having nothing to do with the countryside. Where did the money go? Well, from 1928 to 1937, military expenditures accounted for an average of forty-one point two percent of central government spending, while debt repayment averaged thirty-two point one percent. Forty-one point two plus thirty-two point one equals seventy-three point three percent. Out of every one hundred yuan, seventy-three yuan was used for supporting the military and paying off debts, leaving less than twenty-seven yuan for national construction and administration. What did they do when the money wasn't enough? They borrowed from banks in Shanghai, continuing to do so until 1935, when the government simply forced government shares into the Bank of China and replaced the chairman with T.V. Soong. Therefore, before the War of Resistance, the profile of this regime was very clear: the party did not reach the county level, taxes were not seen in the villages, and the army and various factions were all tied together solely by Chiang Kai-shek. Then the war came. Fighting a war required people and grain! During the eight years of the War of Resistance, the Nationalist government conscripted a total of fourteen million and fifty thousand soldiers. Furthermore, starting in 1941, the land tax was reclaimed by the central government, directly collecting grain. For these two tasks, they had to enter the villages and handle them household by household. However, the Kuomintang had no real roots in the villages, so what could they do? They had no choice but to hand the tasks over to the local baojia chiefs. Ten households made a jia, and one hundred households made a bao; these were the leading figures the Kuomintang used in the villages to assign household registrations and corvée duties on behalf of the authorities. At that time, deciding which family had to provide men or grain depended entirely on the mouths of this group of people.

By 1945, the war was won, and the Kuomintang returned to the formerly occupied areas. The common people had actually been looking forward to it. As a result, the Kuomintang did just one thing and lost all popular support entirely. The disgraceful acts of the taking-over officials—such as seizing gold bars and grabbing women—we won't even go into those. What was even more ruthless? The exchange rate. The money in the hands of the people in the occupied areas was the Central Reserve Bank notes issued by the Wang Jingwei regime, while the money brought back from Chongqing was called legal tender, meaning it was the banknotes issued by the Chongqing Nationalist government itself. The government stipulated that two hundred yuan of Central Reserve Bank notes could be exchanged for one yuan of legal tender. At that time, some people estimated based on prices on both sides that a reasonable exchange rate should have been between thirty to one or fifty to one. Let's calculate based on fifty to one: two hundred yuan of your Central Reserve Bank notes was originally worth four yuan of legal tender, but now you were only given one yuan in exchange, meaning three-quarters of the market value was directly evaporated. Where did those three-quarters go? They all ended up in the pockets of the people who entered the city holding legal tender. How did a Ta Kung Pao editorial on September 27, 1945, describe it? It said that this takeover almost completely lost the hearts of the people in the Nanjing-Shanghai region. With popular support lost, the money was also gone. Once the civil war started, military expenditures directly accounted for about sixty percent of fiscal spending, taxes could no longer be collected, and they had no choice but to print banknotes. Let's look at the circulation volume of legal tender: in June 1937, it was one point four billion, and by August 1948, it was around six hundred and sixty trillion. In eleven years, it increased by forty-seven ten-thousandfold, and the legal tender directly became waste paper.

On August 19, 1948, Chiang Kai-shek introduced a new currency called the Gold Yuan. The exchange rate was set at one Gold Yuan for three million fapi (legal tender), and the government guaranteed that no more than two billion would be printed—a topic we have discussed before. At the same time, it was mandated that all gold, silver, and U.S. dollars held by the public had to be turned over to the Central Bank by September 30, 1948, in exchange for Gold Yuan. The exchange rate was 200 Gold Yuan per tael of gold and 4 Gold Yuan per U.S. dollar. Prices were frozen by administrative decree at the levels of August 19, and anyone who raised prices would be arrested. Did the public believe it? Well, at least they handed over their assets. According to the Central Bank's own figures, they collected 1.66 million taels of gold and over 47 million U.S. dollars; combined with silver and Hong Kong dollars, the total was approximately 190 million U.S. dollars. Then, the price controls lasted only about 70 days. On October 1, the government announced that the price controls were fucking over. On October 11, the two-billion limit was abandoned, and the redemption price for gold was changed from 200 to 1,000 Gold Yuan per tael. Let's do the math: if you handed over one tael of gold in September, you received 200 Gold Yuan. But just two months later, if you wanted to buy back that one tael of gold, it would cost 1,000 Gold Yuan. The 200 you held would only be enough to buy 0.2 taels; 80 percent of your value was wiped out. That's not even counting inflation. Now look at how much was printed: the circulation of Gold Yuan was less than 300 million at the end of August 1948, reached 2 trillion by April 25, 1949—1,000 times what the Nationalist government had guaranteed—and hit around 125 trillion by the end of July. It increased 420,000 times in eleven months. It took eleven years for the fapi to inflate 470,000 times, but the Gold Yuan did it in just eleven months. Who did this blow hit the hardest? It mainly hit the civil servants, teachers, low-level employees, and small business owners in the cities. These were the people who had some savings and were the last ones willing to believe in the Kuomintang (KMT). So, before the KMT lost on the battlefield, they had already bankrupted this group of people by emptying their wallets. In January 1948, Chiang Kai-shek gave a speech within the party, the gist of which was that in all of history, both at home and abroad, no revolutionary party had ever been as decadent and corrupt as the KMT was today, and such a party should have been eliminated long ago. This fucking statement wasn't mine; it was his own. You can all look it up.

Alright, let's trace this thread from beginning to end. The Tongmenghui was essentially a group of people just trying to get by together, so it could only rely on elections to gather people, and it would discard its platform just to get votes. This was, in fact, an opportunistic party, so don't be surprised that a bunch of opportunists joined later. After the election machine was stopped by a bullet, Sun Yat-sen's conclusion was that the party members were fucking disobedient, so he started making them press their fingerprints. Even after pressing fingerprints, there was still no organization, so he invited the Soviet Union to copy the Soviet Communist Party's constitution. Just as the first half was set up, in 1927, they cleared out the grassroots themselves. A party without a grassroots base cannot control the guns. At this point, the military became the boss, and a military regime cannot enter the villages; it can only rely on coastal taxes, bank debts, and the leader's reputation to hold on. The war destroyed the coast, leaving only the conscription of soldiers, the collection of grain, and the printing of money. In the end, the KMT's currency also harvested the last of its own people. Some might say, wasn't that because the Japanese invaded? The war was certainly decisive, but the figures for party members, county party branches, and finances were all pre-war. The war only widened the gap; the gap wasn't created by the war.

Finally, let me talk about a twist. After the very same Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan in 1949, it patched up that second half. What did it start doing between 1950 and 1952? It was called the KMT's Great Reform Movement. What was its essence? Well, learning from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to carry out land reform. What happened afterward was also covered in last year's Double Tenth program. Martial law was lifted in 1987, and in 1996 the people of Taiwan were able to elect their president on a one-person, one-vote basis. Why did it reach this step? Well, it is still because of those two words: political tutelage. Ever since Sun Yat-sen's time, those words were followed by another two words: constitutionalism. The KMT set its own deadline at six years, but in the end, it dragged on from 1928 until 1947 to implement the constitution—dragging it out for nearly twenty years. After arriving in Taiwan, it enforced martial law for another 38 years. They really knew how to stall. In the end, it was only under pressure from the United States that those policies from the communist-suppression mobilization period were thoroughly dismantled. But no matter what, power was ultimately returned to the people. What about the other apprentice? The CCP learned the whole playbook: party branches entered the villages and entered the military companies, so the CCP won precisely on this second half. But if you flip through the CCP's party constitution, you cannot find the four words "returning power to the people" at all. It didn't want political tutelage in the first place, because political tutelage implies returning power in the future; the CCP never had any intention of returning it. From 1949 to today, it has been 77 years, and there isn't even a deadline. So as for what I said last year, today I can consider it fully articulated. The KMT and the CCP are different-generation brothers taught by the same master. The one that learned half the playbook lost the mainland. Later in Taiwan, it fully mastered dictatorship. That is why today, with Cheng Li-wun becoming party chairperson, I am not surprised at all. The KMT itself has always been a party that loves to speculate, and Cheng Li-wun also possesses this opportunistic quality. In the future, the KMT will definitely be marginalized. Still, I wish the people of Taiwan a happy National Day. Alright, that's all for today's broadcast. If you enjoyed the show, thank you for liking and subscribing. If you would like to support me, you can join the membership channel, which features four in-depth episodes every month; welcome to join the Good People Club. See you in the next episode.