He went down to Canton in 1918, and fought under the command of Sun Yat-sen, with the inferior troops and hopeless expeditions which the Leader, politically adept but strategically inexpert, kept throwing against the confusion of the _tuchün_ wars, with the result that the war-lords, counting him as another element in their balance of power, did not even set up a united front against him. Chiang, a Central Chinese, was unsympathetic to the intense provincialism of the Cantonese, and was hopelessly tactless in criticizing old-type soldiers upon whom Sun then relied. Disillusioned but still loyal, he went back to Shanghai and wrote letters of advice to his friends in the South, including Dr. Sun. Throughout this time he was simply one more among the dozens of bright young military men who were, in the existing crudity of warfare, unneeded in China. (Chu Tê, Chiang's present colleague and rival who heads the Soviet Chinese military system, was at this time besotted in Yünnan--a petty war-lord of landlord family, trapped hopeless on his little island of power amidst ruin.) The period in the Shanghai years was filled in with business activity. Chiang was acquainted with some of the most influential merchants of the city, among them the crippled Chang Ching-chiang, a Paris merchant whose personal wealth was an informal treasury of Sun's movement. Chiang entered brokerage, and is supposed to have made a great deal of money. He became acquainted with the modernized, Westernized young Chinese of the metropolis, and left many friends behind him among the Chinese business men and industrialists. Speculative or unfriendly writers asseverate that Chiang joined the Green Gang, an association which combined the features of a protection racket and a benevolent society. (Such a society, common in China during periods of disturbance, is the archetype of the American-Chinese Tong [_tang_] in its more violent phases.) If so, membership gave Chiang the key to an underworld as well organized as François Villon's Paris, wherein beggars, thieves, pickpockets, kidnappers, labor contractors, burial societies, and legitimate associations merged under the extra-legal government of a Masonic-like hierarchy. (The author is acquainted with a Chinese League of Nations official who joined the Gang as a necessary implement of social research, and was afforded genuine courtesy in preparing a report, general but accurate as to prevailing conditions, through the assistance of his fellow-members.)