The democratic nationalist government was to supersede the Empire. In between there was no central government, since the various military leaders paid scant respect to the unfortunate clique of diplomats and officials who carried on the few functions left to the powerless Peking government.(280) The new government was not, therefore, so much a new political order to be set up in place of the old as a political order to be built up out of military chaos. The social system, although shaken and affected by Western ideas, continued much as usual, and was to be woven into the new socio-political patterns that Sun Yat-sen projected. The Nationalist government was to be the nation’s answer to the foreign aggression. The White Peril, which had flooded Asia, could only be held back by the dykes of a militant nationalist movement, expressing itself in a formal state such as the Westerners themselves had developed, and which fitted them to undertake the conquest of the world. This government was to be the agent of the whole Chinese people who, casting off the oppression of the militarists and the imperialists, was to rise again with its ancient power, formidable and ready to fight if necessary, more ready to bring about world-coöperation and peace if possible. It was to be a government made up of a trained officialdom such as ancient China had possessed for centuries, which had led to the integration of control and culture (in the narrowest sense of the word), and of a people ruling by checking that officialdom: an all-powerful state-machine ruled by an all-powerful people.(281) A state was to appear in the world of states and enclose the Chinese people, by political power, more effectively than could the Great Wall.