The principle of cladistic patterns and the method of component analysis (MCA) are introduced concisely with a hypothetic example and then applied to the cladistic analysis of the data on Chinese plants of the genus Cissus L. from Li (1990, Tab. 2). Thirteen resulted possible dichotomous cladograms are illustrated with characters, and they are the most parsimonious ones, all with a length of 41 steps. Comparison between them and the one by