Imperial Political Culture in the Modern Age

This chapter focuses on the modern trajectory of those major aspects of traditional Chinese political culture that discussed in the previous chapters. It shows that the concept of political unity remained the least affected by the advent of modernity. However, the principle of monarchism collapsed immediately with the advent of the new age, and the intellectual elite likewise saw a gradual erosion in their political power. Descending the traditional social ladder, the chapter arrives at two groups whose positions changed dramatically in the wake of the twentieth-century upheavals: local elites and the commoners. The first were, along with the emperor, the chief victims of China's entrance into modernity; the latter—now referred to in the modern parlance, as “the masses”—were supposed to be its major beneficiaries, and certainly gained a lot, though less than what might have been expected.