the first world war the foreign powers revised their
attitude towards China. The idea of territorial partitioning of the
country was replaced by an attempt at financial exploitation; military
friction between the Western powers and Japan was in this way to be
minimized. Financial control was to be exercised by an international
banking consortium (1920). It was necessary for political reasons that
this committee should be joined by Japan. After her Twenty-one Demands,
however, Japan was hated throughout China. During the world war she had
given loans to the various governments and rebels, and in this way had
secured one privilege after another. Consequently China declined the
banking consortium. She tried to secure capital from her own resources;
but in the existing political situation and the acute economic
depression internal loans had no success.

In an agreement between the United States and Japan in 1917, the United
States, in consequence of the war, had to give their assent to special
rights for Japan in China. After the war the international conference at
Washington (November 1921-February 1922) tried to set narrower limits to
Japan's influence over China, and also to re-determine the relative
strength in the Pacific of the four great powers (America, Britain,
France, Japan). After the failure of the banking plan this was the last
means of preventing military conflicts between the powers in the Far
East. This brought some relief to China, as Japan had to yield for the
time to the pressure of the western powers.

The years that followed until 1927 were those of the complete collapse
of the political power of the Peking government--years of entire
dissolution. In the south Sun Yat-sen had been elected generalissimo in
1921. In 1924 he was re-elected with a mandate for a campaign against
the north. In 1924 there also met in Canton the first general congress
of the Kuomintang ("People's Party"). The Kuomintang (in 1929 it had
653,000 members, or roughly 0.15 per cent of the population) is the
continuation of the Komingtang ("Revolutionary Party") founded by Sun
Yat-sen, which as a middle-class party had worked for the removal of the
dynasty. The new Kuomintang was more socialistic, as is shown by its
admission of Communists and the stress laid upon land reform.

At the end of 1924 Sun Yat-sen with some of his followers went to
Peking, to discuss the possibility of a reunion between north and south
on the basis of th