ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that when China entered the twentieth century she was still a dynastic state rather than a national state. Her top structure relied on the omnipotent power and the mystic quality of the throne. Remaining on the bottom were many hundreds of millions of small, individual self-cultivators, from whom the bulk of the taxes was collected. In between the top and the bottom was the civil service bureaucracy; the criteria for admission to its membership were limited to literary skill and a pledge to the traditional code of personal ethics. But in the long-term development of Chinese history they also formed a partnership of a kind. The mass movements led by the Kuomintang (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while overlapping in certain time periods, in fact carried out a relay that changed China's destiny. A hundred years ago Chang Chih-tung announced: 'Chinese studies to build up the foundation; Western learning to provide its usefulness'.
