e). From September 1917, onward, "indecisive civil wars between the North and the South stirred the country" (Chow, 1967, p. 10). Together, these lasted for more than a decade, until 1926.
Transition was very much a feature of the KMT during this whole period, and it owed something to events beyond KMT control but critical for the future of China. In 1915, while Sun was in exile in Japan, the Japanese Empire presented the infamous Twenty-One Demands to Yuan's fragile central government in Peking. The Twenty-One Demands were Japan's attempt to exploit both the weakness of China's central government and the weakness of European powers in Asia caused by the then-called Great War in Europe, and also to transform China into a Japanese imperial territory. Japan stepped into the central-government void, created by de facto warlord governance in de jure republican China on one hand and Europe's preoccupation with war on the other, to demand control of several provinces and of a significant part of Chinese domestic
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