Descriptions of Confucian China apply, therefore, with particular cogency to the past five hundred years, if account is taken of the role of Confucianism as a state philosophy. But if those elements of Chinese culture which are subsumed under the name of Confucianism are considered apart from Confucian philosophy, the time may be extended indefinitely. Confucian doctrine is one aspect of Chinese culture which has in various centuries risen to the forefront. Underneath this doctrine there are tenets, near the level of unconscious habit, which apply to almost all ages of China. It is difficult to separate the two phenomena and to distinguish between Chinese culture and its most representative philosophy. An analogy, remote but suggestive, is the influence of Aristotle in the West. Periods of Aristotelian predominance can be distinguished from the general history of Western thought, in which Aristotle plays a consistent but lesser role. As Aristotle was interpreted by Aquinas, so was Confucianism by the Sung philosophers. Aristotelian politics are far removed from the specific problems of representative or modern authoritarian government; nevertheless they possess great value and exercise an indeterminable influence upon the entire West. The analogy holds for China if left in its loosest terms. Confucianism is far from oblivion. The China which met the Western impact--"old China" in the eyes of the twentieth century--was in fact more Confucian than was the West Aristotelian. She was permeated by an ideology in which Confucius' teachings were the key pattern, though not one which he had made up in its entirety. _Government in the Confucian Ideology_ In Confucian China, government was reduced to a minimum. There existed a set of institutions which in many respects afforded a remarkable although misleading parallel to the governments of the West. In fact, the earliest Western visitors to China found no difficulty in applying their own political language to China. The supreme Chinese leader they called the _emperor_, despite the inevitable Caesarian connotations of the term and the fact that it erased the peculiar significance of the Chinese title. Subordinate areas were called _provinces_. All the way through, the use of European concepts compelled whole series of unwarranted parallels. The term _mandarin_ forced its way into Western tongues, however, since there was no existing term to describe the members of the curious hierarchy of scholar-bureaucrats occupying a position of hegemony among the institutions of Chinese society. Unfortunately for Chinese as well as Westerners, both were so poorly informed in the beginnings of intercourse that the Chinese could not secure an adequate picture of Europe, while the Europeans assumed that the Chinese were more, rather than less, like themselves. The Chinese society, with a single supreme ritual leader, was termed an _empire_, and the predominant hierarchy of that society a _government_.