Chinese, however, did not remain blind to the trend of events.  After the fall of Tsingtao and the subsequent complications with Japan, which so greatly served to increase the complexities of a nebulous situation, certain lines of thought insensibly developed.  That the influential classes in China should have desired that Germany should by some means rehabilitate herself in Europe and so be placed in a position to chastise a nation that for twenty years had brought nothing but sorrow to them was perhaps only natural; and it is primarily to this one cause that so-called sympathy with Germany during the first part of the war has been due.  But it must also be noticed that the immense German propaganda in China during the first two years of the war, coupled with the successes won in Russia and elsewhere, powerfully impressed the population—­not so much because they were attracted by the feats of a Power that had enthroned militarism, but because they wrongly supposed that sooner or later the effects of this military display would be not only to secure the relaxation of the Japanese grip on the country but would compel the Powers to re-cast their pre-war policies in China and abandon their attempts at placing the country under financial supervision.  Thus, by the irony of Fate, Germany in Eastern Asia for the best part of 1914, 1915 and 1916, stood for the aspirations of the oppressed—­a moral which we may very reasonably hope will not escape the attention of the Foreign Offices of the world.  Nor must it be forgotten that the modern Chinese army, being like the Japanese, largely Germany-trained and Germany-armed, had a natural predilection for Teutonism; and since the army, as we have shown, plays a powerful role in the politics of the Republic, public opinion was greatly swayed by what it proclaimed through its accredited organs.

Be this as it may, it was humanly impossible for such a vast country with such vast resources in men and raw materials to remain permanently quiescent during an universal conflagration when there was so much to be salvaged.  Slowly the idea became general in China that something had to be done; that is that a state of technical neutrality would lead nowhere save possibly to Avernus.

As early as November, 1915, Yuan Shih-kai and his immediate henchmen had indeed realized the internal advantages to be derived from a formal war-partnership with the signatories of the Pact of London, the impulse to the movement being given by certain important shipments of arms and ammunition from China which were then made.  A half-surreptitious attempt to discuss terms in Peking caused no little excitement, the matter being, however, only debated in very general terms.  The principal item proposed by the Peking government was characteristically the stipulation that an immediate loan of two million pounds should be made to China, in return for her technical belligerency.  But when the proposal was taken to Tokio, Japan rightly saw that its main purpose was simply to secure an indirect foreign endorsement of Yuan Shih-kai’s candidature as Emperor; and for that reason she threw cold-water on the whole project.  To subscribe to a formula, which besides enthroning Yuan Shih-kai would have been a grievous blow to her Continental ambitions, was an unthinkable thing; and therefore the manoeuvre was foredoomed to failure.