The society upon which the National Government of China, its Left associates, and its Japanophile rivals rest is not a settled, stagnant society. An extraordinary ferment has gripped China for more than a century--arising from cadastral, agrarian, technological, economic, fiscal, ideological, political, and governmental change. The Chinese people have endured; they have also acted. Within a single century, three blazing revolutions have swept China: the T'aip'ing Rebellion, put down with Western aid after fifteen years of war; the Boxer uprising, deflected into xenophobia by the Manchus; and the Great Revolution, which succeeded in part. Between these, there have been changes, bloody but of secondary magnitude: the Moslem rebellions; the minor uprisings of Sun Yat-sen; the Republican Revolution; the 1919 movement; the _tuchün_ wars; the Communist communes, which failed utterly in Shanghai and Canton; the Communist _jacqueries_, which continued; and the present rip tide of resistance. None of these was effectively mastered by organized government; each was exploited by one government, and opposed by another. Unlike a Western state, wherein government becomes the prime mobilizer during crises, Chinese society shifts its incalculable forces, and governments leap forward to take advantage of them. This extensive, unorganized residue of opinion and power, outside the reach of government, keeps any modern Chinese government in a peculiar condition. Like a perpetual process of revolution, social changes demand that a government exploit them, deflect them, or employ them--but not launch or stop them. The Kuomintang has failed in its attempts to launch favorable mass movements, and also failed to stop antagonistic ones. The secret of the Chinese Communist power has lain in the skill of the Red leaders, who utilized available movements. Hence the continued development of Chinese government rests upon the wills, fancies, interests, mob action, enthusiasm or dispiritedness of a people who in their own communities do not read newspapers, listen to radios, or pay much attention to the national state. Despite attempts to bring society under the control of government, in order to make it possible to bring government under the control of society (constitutionalism), the decisive forces of modern Chinese life are outside the reach of propaganda or control.