Page:Stanley Kuhl Hornbeck - The Situation in China (1927).djvu/8

 there is no more underlying all this activity than the interests and ambitions of the military leaders. There is a clash of ideas. There is a contest between comparatively conservative and comparatively radical groups. It is not, as it is so often put, a struggle between North China and South China. There is no political or economic line of cleavage in China. There is no party which is confined to the South; and there is no party which controls all of the North. One party, however, has nation-wide affiliations and has in every province some influence. This is the Kuo Min Tang, or Nationalist Party. The other parties are composed on a basis either of personal or of territorial affiliations. The Kuo Min Party may be said to embody the spirit of the "revolution"; it carries on from the overthrow of the monarchy; it has a "platform"; it talks of "popular government"; it represents the undisciplined and enthusiastic desire of a portion of the population of every province to break with tradition and throw off restraining and retarding influences.

It is, naturally, from the ranks of this party and its leaders that the most insistent of the fulminations of the Chinese against foreigners, foreign influence, foreign powers, emanate. In it are enrolled the majority, but by no means all, of the "western educated" students. It flourishes most in the South,—for the southern Chinese are by temperament more revolutionary, more ardent than the northern Chinese, and South China has known more