Among the most pitiful of the movements for the construction of a general agreement in China were the proalien movements. They were pitiful because they represented a prostitution of thought by men conscious of the nature of their action. The Anfu Party flourished in the first decade after the death of Yüan in 1916; together with its militarism and its meaningless "realism" it was pro-Japanese. The present "government" in North China[9] is another such movement. Manchoukuo bases little of her official ideology on such a dangerous outlook and prefers to propagate a Confucianist traditionalism in so far as she propagates anything. Pro-Japanese action may express a discontent with the competence of the Chinese for self-government, but more forcefully it relates to theories of Pan-Asianism or Pan-Mongolism. The opportunist movements--militarism, _tuchünism_, military federalism, bureaucratic separatism, capitalism, and political puppetry--served to confuse the basic alternatives. Because they reflected a narrow and accidental scheme of power rather than long-range transformation, they possessed a specious realism which obfuscated real issues. They distracted attention without rewarding it and polarized opinion around conflicts which were beyond settlement. There is no possibility of agreement between men who think one another deluded in regard to fundamentals. Disorder in China was the more violent because of these different explanations. They delayed the creation of a framework in which men could find a common reasonableness, an ideology sufficient to rationalize all interests and to sublimate all frustrations. _Christianity as a Political Force_ Ever since the establishment of American and British Protestant missions in the nineteenth century, Christianity has been a conditioning force for a democratic ideology in Asia.[10] The Protestants were among the first to make a breach in the stronghold of Confucianism; they secured international action to assist them. Their role was that of counter-ideologues whose position was guaranteed by treaty (British Treaty of Tientsin, 1858; American Treaty of Tientsin, 1858). They possessed the power, under the legal sanction of the Chinese government, to preach against the moral foundations upon which that government rested. A missionary wrote in 1887: