The impact of Western imperialism has struck China in the past century, during the critical or revolutionary phase of this immemorial cycle. Chinese politics took the color of a back-country struggle. The centers of modern power were beyond Chinese administrative reach. The emergent Chinese state, deprived of its foci of power in the metropolises, was promised control thereof only when it had become an effective and complete state--a condition largely unobtainable without control of Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow, and the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. In theory, the Chinese Republic was established January 1, 1912. In practice, the name _Republic_ has masked a _mêlée_ of governments and power-organizations, ranging from bandit gangs with pretentious political color to authentic regional governments administering large areas. This culminated in the National Government which, beginning as a conspiracy, becoming the leading regional government, is now in the position of _de facto_ government for virtually all Free China, the Chinese dominions, and much of the occupied area. None of these governments has ever held an election based on wide suffrage; none has systematically subordinated policy to law; none has possessed a treasury, fleet or air force worthy of a second-class power, until the present war. Out of these unpromising materials the counter-attacking Chinese state has arisen; only by legal formula is it the same Republic as its predecessors; only by courtesy is this the Year XXX (1941) of the Republic.[2] [Footnote 2: Detailed descriptions of the political history of the period are to be found, _inter alia_, in Holcombe, Arthur N., _The Chinese Revolution_, Cambridge, 1930; MacNair, Harley F., _China in Revolution_, Chicago, 1931; and, most popularly, Escarra, Jean, _China Then and Now_, Peiping, 1940. Descriptions of the government are Wu Chih-fang, _Chinese Government and Politics_, Shanghai, 1934; Lum Kalfred Dip, _Chinese Government_, Shanghai, 1934; and Linebarger, Paul M. A., _Government in Republican China_, New York and London, 1938.] The governmental developments of the Republican era fall conveniently into four periods: the period of establishment, 1911-1916; the period of _tuchünism_, 1917-1926; the rule of the National Government, 1927-1936; the period of invasion, 1937 to the present. The turning points between these periods are, respectively, the fall of the Manchu Empire of China (1911), the death of the dictator-President Yüan Shih-k'ai (1916), the Great Revolution under Kuomintang-Communist leadership (culminating, 1927), and the Sian affair (December 1936) followed by full-scale invasion (July 1937).