The proponents of Marxism were welcomed into China as trusted friends. In 1926 it was obvious to the whole world that China was definitely within the orbit of Marxism; in 1935 it was just as apparent that the Marxists faced a military doom, and that their forcible suppression might mean the end of their political effectiveness. Never ruined beyond all hope of recovery and triumph, never successful beyond all danger of disaster, the Marxists and their doctrines are the greatest uncertainty facing China. Sinologues, judging from past experience and impressed with the deep continuities and repetitions of Chinese history, may well argue that Marxism is another religious distributive cult such as periods of turmoil always produce in China. They can point to the rise and fall of the Yellow Turbans in the third century A. D., when the two leaders--the Duke of Heaven and the Duke of Humanity--shook the great Han dynasty down into everlasting ruin. Or they can refer to the T'ai-p'ing rebellion, which held a territory infinitely greater than that ever occupied by the Marxists, which impressed a fantastic but politically operative Christianity upon its followers, and which promised to do in South China what Brigham Young and the Mormons had done with the United Order in Utah; but the T'ai-p'ing went down to an extinction so complete that no living advocate of the cult practiced by millions seventy years ago can be found today. Thus it would be no violation of the set patterns of Chinese history if the movement of Marxism were to rise to world-dazzling splendor and then pass into utter oblivion. Yet Chinese history is no longer the only kind of history which holds weight for precedent in China, and if the T'ai-p'ing rebellion is one example, the Russian Revolution is another. Bolshevism certainly has better chances of succeeding in China than it could have seemed to have--to anyone but a fanatic--in the Russia of 1915. The Marxian doctrines had already eaten well into Chinese territory before entering upon the Chinese scene proper. One of the less savory bequests which the tsarist regime left the Communists was the question of Outer Mongolia, a vast stretch of land under the admitted suzerainty but beyond the real control of the Chinese. The area was used by White Russians as a base for operations, and--whether or not it accorded with their principles--the Red forces had to cross the frontier to pacify Siberia. Once in, they could not get out. It was essentially the sort of absent-minded conquest which has contributed so much to the British Empire: a strategic occupation leading inevitably to political domination. The Russians compromised as well as they might, setting up an Outer Mongolian People's Republic and administering the area in the way which the world was to observe on a much grander scale in the case of the Japanese in Manchuria--through advisers.