s
did any particular fighting, and that against great odds in numbers.
The name is Wu Pei Fu. He at least has not fought for the Chili
faction against the Anwhei faction. He has proclaimed from the first
that he was fighting to rid the country of military control of civil
government, and against traitors who would sell their country to
foreigners. He has come out strongly for a new popular assembly, to
form a new constitution and to unite the country. And although Chang
Tso Lin has remarked that Wu Pei Fu as a military subordinate could
not be expected to intervene in politics, he has not as yet found it
convenient to oppose the demand for a popular assembly. Meanwhile the
liberals are organizing their forces, hardly expecting to win a
victory, but resolved, win or lose, to take advantage of the
opportunity to carry further the education of the Chinese people in
the meaning of democracy.

August, 1920.

V

Divided China

1.

In January 1920 the Peking government issued an edict proclaiming the
unification of China. On May 5th Sun Yat Sen was formally inaugurated
in Canton as president of all China. Thus China has within six months
been twice unified, once from the northern standpoint and once from
the southern. Each act of "unification" is in fact a symbol of the
division of China, a division expressing differences of language,
temperament, history, and political policy as well as of geography,
persons and factions. This division has been one of the outstanding
facts of Chinese history since the overthrow of the Manchus ten years
ago and it has manifested itself in intermittent civil war. Yet there
are two other statements which are equally true, although they flatly
contradict each other and the one just made. One statement is that so
far as the people of China are concerned there is no real division on
geographical lines, but only the common division occurring everywhere
between conservatives and progressives. The other is that instead of
two divisions in China, there are at least five, two parties in both
the north and south, and another in the central or Yangtse region,[3]
each one of the five splitting up again more or less on factional and
provincial lines. And so far as the future is concerned, probably this
last statement is the most significant of the three. That all three
statements are true is what makes Chinese politics so difficult to
understand even in their larger features.

[3] Sinc