To better understand The Good Earth, a brief review of the history of China at that time that the story takes place would be helpful. After the overthrow of the Ching Dynasty of the Manchus in 1911 by Sun Yat-sen and other dedicated intellectuals who envisioned a united and democratic nation, developments did not go quite as well as the leaders had hoped.
Since China is one of the largest nations on earth, it is natural that its people are not necessarily homogeneous. Even though they are basically of the same race and write the same language, there are at least a hundred spoken dialects, which means that a person from one province may not easily understand what a person from another province is saying; in many cases, verbal communication is totally impossible. However, an educated person could read Chinese, be it written by a person from the extreme South or a person from the extreme North, even though these two people would not understand each other's speech. As Wang Lung notes in Chapter 12, "But Anhwei is not Kiangsu. In Anhwei, where Wang Lung was born, the language is slow and deep and it wells from the throat. But in the Kiangsu city where they now lived the people spoke in syllables which splintered from their lips and from the ends of their tongues."
While perhaps over-simplifying the troubles in China after the overthrow of the Imperial power, most of the local military governors of the provinces were unwilling to be lorded over by what they considered a revolutionary government. Instead, they set up their own separate territories. This state of affairs went on for years.
Almost every province had its "strong man," popularly known as "war lords." Some were merely terrorists or bandits, but others controlled vast areas and held millions in thrall. Wu Pei-fu, for example, ruled five provinces in North and Central China and his "subjects" must have been well over one hundred million. In Manchuria, Chang Tso-ling held onto a territory almost as large as France and Spain combined. Even after his death at the hands of Japanese extremists, his son, the "Young Marshal," ruled until the Japanese finally took over in 1932 and established the satellite state of Manchukuo. The war lords collected taxes and had their own armies and civil service: their word was law. Even Chiang Kaishek, while he pursued his goal of a united China, could have been labeled a war lord. After the death of Sun Yet-sen in 1925, and a period of struggle within the ruling Kuomintang party, Chiang finally set up his headquarters in Nanking and his campaign against the local chieftains was largely successful until it became a conflict against the Communists of Mao Tse-tung and the Japanese.
