y the gentry of
the north. Some of the new immigrants, on the other hand, were military
people. They came with empty hands, and they had no land. They hoped
that the government would give them positions in the military
administration and so provide them with means; they tried to gain
possession of the government and to exclude the old settlers as far as
possible. The tension was increased by the effect of the influx of
Chinese in bringing more land into cultivation, thus producing a boom
period such as is produced by the opening up of colonial land. Everyone
was in a hurry to grab as much land as possible. There was yet a further
difference between the two groups of Chinese: the old settlers had long
lost touch with the remainder of their families in the north. They had
become South Chinese, and all their interests lay in the south. The new
immigrants had left part of their families in the north under alien
rule. Their interests still lay to some extent in the north. They were
working for the reconquest of the north by military means; at times
individuals or groups returned to the north, while others persuaded the
rest of their relatives to come south. It would be wrong to suppose that
there was no inter-communication between the two parts into which China
had fallen. As soon as the Chinese gentry were able to regain any
footing in the territories under alien rule, the official relations,
often those of belligerency, proceeded alongside unofficial intercourse
between individual families and family groupings, and these latter were,
as a rule, in no way belligerent.

The lower stratum in the south consisted mainly of the remains of the
original non-Chinese population, particularly in border and southern
territories which had been newly annexed from time to time. In the
centre of the southern state the way of life of the non-Chinese was very
quickly assimilated to that of the Chinese, so that the aborigines were
soon indistinguishable from Chinese. The remaining part of the lower
class consisted of impoverished Chinese peasants. This whole lower
section of the population rarely took any active and visible part in
politics, except at times in the form of great popular risings.

Until the third century, the south had been of no great economic
importance, in spite of the good climate and the extraordinary fertility
of the Yangtze valley. The country had been too thinly settled, and the
indigenous population had not become ad