ABSTRACT
In the wake of Japan's victory, two official missions were dispatched by the Chinese Emperor to Europe, America and Japan to study the practice of constitutional governments. Tai Chi-t'ao, for example, was in favour of a confederacy based on his observation that most Chinese would put their provincial concerns over national concerns and that Peking had always concentrated too much power in its hands at the expense of the provinces. The Kuomintang started its revolutionary career as the China Revival Society in 1894. The Chinese Revolutionary Party still lacked a clear political as well as organizational line; it was anything but a Bolshevik party. Strictly speaking, consular jurisdiction, in China or elsewhere, had no legal foundation if all states were equal before the international law. Foreign legal practice had the greatest impact on China in the mixed courts of Shanghai, which dealt with all cases involving a foreign plaintiff.
