alth. There was an examination system that provided a vehicle for recruiting talented citizens to serve the emperor, which was a valuable and unusual institution in a society characterized by personal connections. Democracy, individualism, and private property were kept carefully in check. Central state authority, however, rarely penetrated to the local level. Chinese leaders invented bureaucracy to keep the country unified and mastered the art of keeping government small. The Chinese search for a modern state began in the nineteenth century when two major sources of disorder overwhelmed the imperial institutions: domestic disintegration and foreign invasion. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Chinese population had doubled and redoubled. The problem of the population explosion created tremendous pressure on the limited farmland to provide sufficient food supply. For economic, religious, of ethnic reasons, peasant uprisings began to erupt. Moreover, beginning with the Opium War of 1832-1842, the imperial army suffered a series of defeats at the hands of the industrial powers of the West. The image of a shattering imperial dynasty directed rebellion and dissolution within China, exemplified by the Taiping Rebellion of 1851-1864 that nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. (Zheng, Party vs. State in Post-1949 China, 30) The reform measures in the first decade of this century were aimed at replacing dynastic rule with a new form of government. Among the most significant changes was the abolition of the civil service exam in 1905, which virtually cut off the connections among the emperor, the ruling ideology, and the official gentry. This time the imperial rulers hoped to save themselves by experimenting with some new institutional adaptations. A revolution was menacing; students who had returned from abroad came with ideas harmful to the imperial rule. Following the overthrow of the imperial regime in the Revolution of 1922, centra...