As a state, as an all-embracing control institution, the old Chinese hierarchy was a pseudomorph--it looked like a state but was not really one. Now it had to develop those characteristics of regularity, impersonality, and machine effectiveness demanded of a state in the modern world. It had to restore the virtue of men by telling them how it was possible to be virtuous in a world in which all things turned and changed with the days and not with the centuries. It had to gather together the members of the old Chinese world-community, reorient them with respect to the new, divided world around them, and fight off the inroads of outsiders. Above everything else, it had to grow strong, so that it might institute order, so that it might someday grow weak again. On the other hand, if a governmental system were set up which tried to maintain the precarious supremacy that Western states have enjoyed, and which was subject to uncontrolled fluctuations in the thought of the people upon whom it rested, the Chinese might lose their character as Chinese. They might be absorbed into the Western world and become a group of yellow-skinned traditionless men, living according to the heritage of white men's laws and doomed to a perpetual inferiority because these laws were not their own. They might be aliens upon the earth, with no group to call their own. Such a nightmarish vision may have come to Sun Yat-sen when he pleaded with all his heart for the unification and defense of a China still Chinese. The old system broke and collapsed in 1911-1912. This collapse was hastened by the fact that the imperial family was incapable of leadership. A succession of degenerates and children occupied the throne--the one intelligent emperor was imprisoned by a clique--and a fanatical old woman held enough power to keep anyone else from using it, but not enough to lead or to want to lead a revolution from above. When the old structure caved in, over four hundred million people were without effective government, and no one really knew how to create it. _The Replacement of the Confucian Ideology_ Only some of the movements which have occurred in China have had political significance. With the collapse of the old stable order, the Chinese fell into great confusion, devoting themselves to a variety of doctrines and crusades. Some of these movements may be regarded as subordinate to the day-to-day struggle for military or governmental power; others, though within the sphere of politics as far as their interests were concerned, never acquired sufficient importance to impress themselves upon the general political scene.