A man like Hu Han-min could owe his importance almost altogether to his past associations with the Party and with Dr. Sun, to his authority as an exponent of the _San Min Chu I_, and to his appeal to the sense of prestige, dignity and stability on the part of other people who did not possess such power, which was exercised in the name of the Kuomintang and its ideology. T. V. Soong, in money matters, or Chang Hsüeh-liang, in military matters, were important because they had under their immediate influence so much cash or so many troops, the availability and mobility of which from day to day determined their actual share of power. Lastly, these same men possessed political authority by narrowly lawful means, i.e., by the governmental offices which they held. Thirdly, the government was deeply out of harmony with an overwhelming majority of college students, much of the professional and intellectual classes, and a broad section of the articulate farmer and labor groups. In the pre-war years of strain, unofficial persons could follow world fashions in ideas associated with Leftism. Although the full Western pattern of Right, Center, and Left was not imposed upon Chinese politics, many of the most active publicists wrote in these terms. There was, accordingly, a traditional China and a Leftist China; the latter faithfully imported European concepts and did much to change the language of Chinese political struggle. The government--itself Left from the point of view of the pre-existent order, yet committed to modes of thought and policy formally little more radical than the American New Deal--was constantly recalled to the most cold-blooded of _realpolitische_ considerations. Fourthly, the student movement--in some phases a part of the general Leftist drive--proved a constant source of difficulty and trouble. Chinese students (both collegiate and secondary) are self-conscious, frequently arrogant inheritors of the Chinese tradition of rule by _literati_. Their influence over the masses is impressive; their patriotism, however unreflective, is ardent; and their interest in international affairs is violent.[5] [Footnote 5: In particular, see Freyn, Hubert, _Prelude to War: The Chinese Student Rebellion of 1935-1936_, Shanghai, 1939. Reference to contemporary Left-liberal and Left publications in Europe and America will disclose numerous sympathetic eyewitness accounts of the troubles and the fortitude of the students. Some of these accounts now possess a wry, inadvertent humor in their characterization of Chiang as a willing accomplice of Japan.]