Government in Republican China

One of the earliest serious Western analyses of Republican China's tortured birth pangs. Linebarger, writing as China fought for its survival against Japan, grapples with a fundamental question: how does a civilization five thousand years old rebuild itself from scratch? He traces the collapse of the Qing, the chaotic warlord years, and the Kuomintang's desperate attempt to forge a functional republic from imperial ruins. The book illuminates Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People as both ideology and practical governance strategy, while examining why Confucian thought proved both a stabilizing inheritance and a millstone around the neck of modernizers. Linebarger offers a front-row seat to the bloodiest, most consequential nation-building failure of the twentieth century. Essential for anyone seeking to understand how the People's Republic rose from the ashes of this collapsed republic.