ABSTRACT
So long as the fiction of Confucian moral superiority remained, the supremacy of bureaucratic control was unbroken. Once exposed, Confucianism was to become a political issue, an alternative among other contending ideologies which threatened to change the polity of the empire. A more extreme attempt at Confucian revitalization was a thoroughly radical reinterpretation of the doctrine–the 1898 Reform. Imperialism was known only in a social Darwinian sense as the natural outcome of the process of evolution from nationalism to expansion. The importance of anti-Manchuism and the absence of anti-imperialism in the Chinese nationalism of the 1900s can be seen from the removal of nationalism from the political programme of the Kuomintang when it was instituted in 1912. Before 1937 Chiang had added little to the doctrinal arsenal of the Kuomintang (KMT). The founding of the KMT government coincided with the establishment of the first soviets in central China. The goals of the communist revolution were consequently anti-feudalism and anti-imperialism.
