Mao's party came to be perceived, not only by the peasant masses, but also by many members of the intellectual Tlite, as the most consistent inheritor of the nationalist faith.
Both Mao and Chiang Kai-shek saw themselves as the only and true national revolutionaries, but in the end it was marxist-leninist ideology, as adapted by Mao to China's struggle against imperialism, to win the day. Mao's success was not merely a political and military conquest of the Chinese state, but also an ideological victory in so far as the Chinese revolution was overwhelmingly seen, twenty-four years after Sun Yat-sen's death, as the only one capable of bringing Chinese nationalism to fruition (Bianco, 1967, 165-6).
Finally, in comparing Mao's and Chiang Kai-shek's differing conceptions of nationalism as applied to the problem of Chinese independence, it can also be useful to compare their respective criticisms of each other.
Mao sees his attitude toward foreign entities in direct contrast to that of the Kuomintang during the war of liberation against Japan.
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