Democratic centralism (Kuomintang)
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Democratic centralism (Chinese: 民主集權制; pinyin: mínzhǔ jíquánzhì; Wade–Giles: min2chu3 chi2chʻüan2chih4; lit. 'democratic collect-authority system')[a] is a main principle of Leninist vanguard parties, but it was also closely related to the party organization and rule of the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) in the Republic of China. However, unlike the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the KMT did not include "democratic centralism" in its party constitution.[1]
Democratic centralism of the KMT was also closely related to Sun Yat-sen's Separation of Five Powers theory. Sun thought that the parliamentary power in the Western representative democracy was so great that it was a kind of [populist] 'parliamentary dictatorship' that they controlled administrative agencies, so he argued that the inspection and legislative powers should be independent of the popularly elected parliament, so that the inspection and legislative powers should be exercised by experts, not by the people.[2][3][4] Sun's Three Principles of the People ideology saw that political power should be delegated to experts; the people can express their thoughts and have 'experts' implement them for them.[5]
History
Democratic centralism of the KMT is modeled after democratic centralism of the early Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); Lenin suggested that the organization of the party should form a secretively disciplined organization based on a small number of professional revolutionaries; during the Warlord Era, the KMT reorganized the KMT's party organization similar to the CPSU under Mikhail Borodin.[6]
The organizational structures of the Kuomintang would remain in place until the democratization on Taiwan in the 1990s and would serve as a structural basis of several Taiwanese political parties such as the Democratic Progressive Party.[7][8][9]
