penetrating more and more
into China, land itself became "capital", an object of speculation for
people with capital; its value no longer depended entirely on the rents
it could yield but, under certain circumstances, on quite other
things--the construction of railways or public buildings, and so on.
These changes impoverished and demoralized the gentry, who in the course
of the past century had grown fewer in number. The gentry were not in a
position to take part fully in the capitalist manipulations, because
they had never possessed much capital; their wealth had lain entirely
in their land, and the income from their rents was consumed quite
unproductively in luxurious living.

Moreover, the class solidarity of the gentry was dissolving. In the
past, politics had been carried on by cliques of gentry families, with
the emperor at their head as an unchangeable institution. This edifice
had now lost its summit; the struggles between cliques still went on,
but entirely without the control which the emperor's power had after all
exercised, as a sort of regulative element in the play of forces among
the gentry. The arena for this competition had been the court. After the
destruction of the arena, the field of play lost its boundaries: the
struggles between cliques no longer had a definite objective; the only
objective left was the maintenance or securing of any and every hold on
power. Under the new conditions cliques or individuals among the gentry
could only ally themselves with the possessors of military power, the
generals or governors. In this last stage the struggle between rival
groups turned into a rivalry between individuals. Family ties began to
weaken and other ties, such as between school mates, or origin from the
same village or town, became more important than they had been before.
For the securing of the aim in view any means were considered
justifiable. Never was there such bribery and corruption among the
officials as in the years after 1912. This period, until 1927, may
therefore be described as a period of dissolution and destruction of the
social system of the gentry.

Over against this dying class of the gentry stood, broadly speaking, a
tripartite opposition. To begin with, there was the new middle class,
divided and without clear political ideas; anti-dynastic of course, but
undecided especially as to the attitude it should adopt towards the
peasants who, to this day, form over 80 per cent of the Ch