Communist training helped the Nationalists to power, but under circumstances which made necessary either the institution of terror or the partial inhibition of the Nationalist programs. The Nationalists had promised almost anything to almost everyone in order to secure power; this was a part of the propaganda methods which Communists taught. After seizing power in 1926-1927 the Nationalists could resort only to military dictatorship and party terrorism in order to achieve the fulfillment of their extravagant promises. But the Nationalists were Chinese, and as such cherished the old notions of moderation and humanity in government. They were not the master of any legalism or dialectic which would justify the slaughter of millions for the good of a system. Millions have died in China, but the Chinese never acknowledged the massacre. They could not face the program of class war which their promises inevitably implied. The Communists kept pressing forward, now giving pledges in their own name and in the name of the Nationalists, redeemable only by class warfare or involving the discredit of the Nationalists. The situation came to a head when the Communists began taking independent action. Indiscreet Communists informed Nationalist leaders that the Kuomintang was to be discarded so that the revolution could continue--along Communist lines. The breaks, first with the Kuomintang Right and then with the Kuomintang Left, occurred in 1927. The Russians went back to Russia. The Chinese Communists faced their future alone. The Canton-Moscow Entente--as the Nationalist-Communist coalition has been called--changed the Nationalist movement profoundly in 1923-1927. It found the movement a small elite of opposition and left it a swollen party with a government and an army under its control, a vast schedule of promises to fulfill, a second revolution to vindicate.[17] NOTES [1] Sun Yat-sen, _How China Was Made a Republic_ (unpublished manuscript written in Shanghai in 1919, now in possession of the present author), p. 4. [2] On the Manchu reforms see H. M. Vinacke, _Modern Constitutional Development in China_, Princeton, 1920, and Meribeth E. Cameron, _The Reform Movement in China_, 1898-1912, Stanford, 1931. On the revolutionary group see T'ang Leang-li, _The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution_, New York, 1930. [3] See below, pp. 41 ff. [4] See below, pp. 145 ff. [5] See below, pp. 149 ff. [6] See below, p. 60. A description of other plans for democracy in China is given in M. J. Bau, _Modern Democracy in China_, Shanghai, 1923. [7] See below, pp. 102 ff. [8] See below, pp. 139 ff. [9] See below, pp. 185 ff. [10] See, among others, Tyler Dennett, _The Democratic Movement in Asia_, New York, 1918; R. Y. Lo, _China's Revolution from the Inside_, New York, 1930. The author wishes to thank J. J. Holmes, School of Religion, Duke University, for suggestions concerning this section.