inese
population. The middle class consisted mainly of traders and bankers,
whose aim was the introduction of Western capitalism in association with
foreign powers. There were also young students who were often the sons
of old gentry families and had been sent abroad for study with grants
given them by their friends and relatives in the government; or sons of
businessmen sent away by their fathers. These students not always
accepted the ideas of their fathers; they were influenced by the
ideologies of the West, Marxist or non-Marxist, and often created clubs
or groups in the University cities of Europe or the United States. Such
groups of people who had studied together or passed the exams together,
had already begun to play a role in politics in the nineteenth century.
Now, the influence of such organizations of usually informal character
increased. Against the returned students who often had difficulties in
adjustment, stood the students at Chinese Universities, especially the
National University in Peking (Peita). They represented people of the
same origin, but of the lower strata of the gentry or of business; they
were more nationalistic and politically active and often less influenced
by Western ideologies.

In the second place, there was a relatively very small genuine
proletariat, the product of the first activities of big capitalists in
China, found mainly in Shanghai. Thirdly and finally, there was a
gigantic peasantry, uninterested in politics and uneducated, but ready
to give unthinking allegiance to anyone who promised to make an end of
the intolerable conditions in the matter of rents and taxes, conditions
that were growing steadily worse with the decay of the gentry. These
peasants were thinking of popular risings on the pattern of all the
risings in the history of China--attacks on the towns and the killing of
the hated landowners, officials, and money-lenders, that is to say of
the gentry.

Such was the picture of the middle class and those who were ready to
support it, a group with widely divergent interests, held together only
by its opposition to the gentry system and the monarchy. It could not
but be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve political
success with such a group. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the "Father of the
Republic", accordingly laid down three stages of progress in his many
works, of which the best-known are _San-min chu-i_, ("The Three
Principles of the People"), and _Chie