where the desire to be thought well of may quite
possibly lead a successful militarist into patriotic courses. There are,
at the moment, two Tuchuns who are more important than any of the
others. These are Chang-tso-lin and Wu-Pei-Fu, both of whom have been
already mentioned. Chang-tso-lin is supreme in Manchuria, and strong in
Japanese support; he represents all that is most reactionary in China.
Wu-Pei-Fu, on the other hand, is credited with liberal tendencies. He is
an able general; not long ago, nominally at the bidding of Peking, he
established his authority on the Yangtze and in Hunan, thereby dealing a
blow to the hopes of Canton. It is not easy to see how he could come to
terms with the Canton Government, especially since it has allied itself
with Chang-tso-lin, but in the rest of China he might establish his
authority and seek to make it permanent by being constitutional (see
Appendix). If so, China might have a breathing-space, and a
breathing-space is all that is needed.

The economic life of China, except in the Treaty Ports and in a few
regions where there are mines, is still wholly pre-industrial. Peking
has nearly a million inhabitants, and covers an enormous area, owing to
the fact that all the houses have only a ground floor and are built
round a courtyard. Yet it has no trams or buses or local trains. So far
as I could see, there are not more than two or three factory chimneys in
the whole town. Apart from begging, trading, thieving and Government
employment, people live by handicrafts. The products are exquisite and
the work less monotonous than machine-minding, but the hours are long
and the pay infinitesimal.

Seventy or eighty per cent. of the population of China are engaged in
agriculture. Rice and tea are the chief products of the south, while
wheat and other kinds of grain form the staple crops in the north.[34]
The rainfall is very great in the south, but in the north it is only
just sufficient to prevent the land from being a desert. When I arrived
in China, in the autumn of 1920, a large area in the north, owing to
drought, was afflicted with a terrible famine, nearly as bad, probably,
as the famine in Russia in 1921. As the Bolsheviks were not concerned,
foreigners had no hesitation in trying to bring relief. As for the
Chinese, they regarded it passively as a stroke of fate, and even those
who died of it shared this view.

Most of the land is in the hands of peasant proprietors, who divid