text: During the 1920s, a common position among Chinese intellectuals from a broad range of cultural and ideological positions was that the people were not ready for democracy. Conservative intellectuals viewed the masses as too dangerous to participate in the political process. They believed that China's modernization should rely on educated elites and that it would be a lengthy period before the masses were ready to participate in democracy. Many progressive intellectuals also lacked confidence in the masses. For example, many iconoclasts of the May Fourth Movement blamed the masses for their passivity in the face of the country's difficult circumstances.
  Sun's 1924 program called for nation-building in three stages: military government, , and constitutional government. Sun's view was that military government should be exercised during China's revolutionary period, then as a province stabilized political tutelage could begin and the people educated on self-governance, and finally once all counties in a province were ready to exercise self-governance, constitutional government could begin.
  The formation of the Nationalist one-party state in 1927 implemented sought to implement the "political tutelage" stage of Sun Yat-sen's three-stage program, with elections only after the people were properly educated. Over time, portions of the KMT and various public intellectuals urged Chiang Kai-shek to move to the third phase (constitutional government), but Chiang's view was that China remained in a revolutionary period and continued to need the KMT's political tutelage.