China's Wartime State

THE CYCLICAL interpretation of the historical Chinese state is too imprecise to withstand intensive scrutiny by modem social science methods. Nevertheless, the metaphor of the dynastic cycle does provide a point of departure in understanding the enormous changes that have taken place in twentieth-century China. The decline and fall of the Ch&s;ing (Qing) system, coupled with the intrusion of the Western state pattern, has produced several assumptions among participants and observers.