ABSTRACT
Social change of any kind—including westernization—is piecemeal, haphazard and chaotic, even where attempts are made to organize and plan it. Consequently the student of westernization has to be careful that his work does not reflect too closely this chaos. Possibly our best plan would have been to follow the traditional parcelling-up of society: economics, kinship, politics, religion and culture. This being a short and sketchy study there is not space to deal in detail with all of these, but perhaps a few cursory words on what they were like in Imperial China will be a starting point.
