In his address at this meeting, Chiang Kai-shek made the following remarks: “There are those who now criticize and mock us, saying that our Party’s work is lax and undisciplined, even that we have become corrupt and decrepit. We must acknowledge all such criticisms and accept them. Looking back over the past three years and eight months—especially the last six months—we can plainly see that our fighting spirit has been waning day by day. From the Party to the government, from our central leadership down through party affairs, politics, the military, and the economy, there has been no fresh vigor or new vitality. In my view, this constitutes an enormous crisis, one that should deeply alarm us.”  These words of Chiang Kai-shek bring into sharp relief an undeniable fact: the Chinese Communist Party and our compatriots at home and abroad have consistently been right in their criticisms of the Nationalist authorities. Yet it must be acknowledged that anyone who has spoken the truth about these matters has invariably been branded a criminal. The ancient maxim, “It is easier to dam a river than to restrain the people,” remains unrecognized by the current Nationalist regime. To this day, the people’s rights to freedom of thought, speech, and publication have been almost entirely stripped away, with further restrictions being imposed.

However, the Nationalist leadership’s calculations and practices have been fundamentally flawed. Popular resentment has been mounting daily under the combined pressure of the big bourgeoisie’s political repression and its rapacious economic exploitation. The schism triggered by the massacre of the New Fourth Army has only deepened the public’s discontent with the Nationalist authorities, forcing Chiang to finally admit the true nature of his regime’s crisis. He calls on Nationalists to engage in self-reflection, but he shows no intention of addressing the root cause of this crisis. What, then, is that root cause? Simply put: the absence of democracy. As long as the Nationalist regime continues to run counter to the interests of the masses, the crisis will persist. There is no path to reconciliation between the Nationalists and the people except through democracy. Yet Chiang’s speech contains not a single word about democratic governance; his talk of “becoming one with the people” is nothing more than empty rhetoric—or perhaps a pretext for intensifying secret-police operations aimed at consolidating control over the populace.

The plenary session’s declaration goes even further, explicitly postponing the implementation of constitutional rule until “the end of hostilities.” Thus, the call for constitutional government that the nation’s people and all political parties have been voicing for two years—the very measure intended to strengthen national unity in the war of resistance—has once again been set aside. Moreover, as an oppressed people rising up to resist a powerful enemy, we cannot achieve final victory without widespread popular armed resistance. Yet the Nationalist authorities, under the guise of “military orders and discipline,” are seeking to dismantle genuine popular militias, turning these so-called orders and regulations into instruments for eliminating political opponents, as exemplified by the attack on and disbandment of the New Fourth Army. Such actions are nothing short of treason against the war effort. The plenary declaration fails to correct this course; instead, it reinforces this unprincipled use of “military orders and discipline” to undermine and destroy resistance forces, a clear case of mistaken judgment.

On the subject of “economic construction,” the declaration both denies the need to improve the people’s living standards, labeling any such efforts as “incitement to class struggle,” and at the same time perpetuates a system of economic controls that benefits only a small clique of big capitalists while leaving the rest to suffer from rampant corruption and inefficiency. By rejecting free economic development and thereby striking at the national industrial and commercial bourgeoisie as well as the broad ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, the regime is pursuing a disastrous economic policy. It is abundantly clear that the economic crisis now unfolding cannot be overcome unless this policy is changed. But such a change is possible only under a democratic political system.

In sum, we remain hopeful that the Nationalist Party will move in a positive direction, for the good of the national war effort. However, if the leaders of the Nationalist regime continue to focus solely on superficial fixes rather than undertaking a fundamental reassessment of their own mistakes and of the true causes of the Party’s decline and decay, no real progress will be made. For the Nationalists to effect genuine improvement, they must accept the eleven-point postwar plan proposed by the Communist Party and implement it earnestly. Patchwork measures that treat only the symptoms without addressing the underlying problems will achieve nothing.