At this juncture the arena was to broaden. In October, 1917, Sun Yat-sen was elected Generalissimo of the South by the remnants of the parliament which had gathered in Canton. Their action was provoked largely by China's declaration of war on Germany--a step which Sun bitterly opposed as serving no Chinese interest. From now on there were to be _two_ Republican traditions in China, each one of them with theoretical claims to the legitimate succession from the 1912-1913 Republic. The government established by Sun Yat-sen in the South did not secure any international recognition, nor did it contain remnants of the imperial bureaucracy, or win the respect of the soldiery. But it did fall heir to the ideological revolution. The people were still skeptically indulgent toward Sun the idealist and his ramshackle governments, although they conceived of government in China largely as the problem of fattening the Peking phantom and raising it to husky manhood. The Northern Republic survived until 1928, increasingly a puzzle and an illusion.[7] The details of its slow death are intricate. The military did not ignore the Republic altogether. They requested its sanction for their manipulation of the balance of power. The Republic legitimized the gradations of military strength which grew out of conspiracy, tax exploitation, opium farming, and ineffectual war. The Republic and its presidency were the chief pawns in the pointless game of Chinese militarism. The Republic lent a color of unity to the country and preserved those proprieties dominant in the Chinese mind. Even banditry becomes respectable if it observes "political" formalities, and at times the line between banditry and generalship became a matter of day-to-day intentions or of the size of the armed forces at hand. The government in Peking struggled to provide a suitable organizational form for the status quo, though never quite catching up with the new _faits accomplis_ of each week. In three connections the Republic of China at Peking is worthy of consideration: in its constitutional development, which in a dreamlike and ineffectual way mirrored the political ideals of the nonrevolutionary elite;[8] in its international role, which was of genuine importance and value to China; and in its administrative accomplishments, which--for a government--were negligible to the point of absurdity, but admirable indeed for bureaucracy working in chaos.