This chapter discusses the specific strategies through which the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese empire attempted to confront external challenges and the impediments to implementing them; analyzes the difficulties facing the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) as it attempted to govern China; identifies the factors that enhanced the attractiveness of Marxism as a governing system for China and the challenges of adapting it; discusses the major characteristics of the Yan’an model and their significance for post-1949 China; and evaluates the effect of the Japanese invasion on the outcome of the Chinese civil war.