In the twentieth century, both cultural radicals, who advocated for the total eradication of traditional Chinese culture as an obstacle to modernization, and cultural conservatives, who defended Chinese values against the pressures of Westernization, based their understanding of Chinese traditions on Western Orientalist interpretations of Chinese culture. The belief that Chinese social and cultural traits were incompatible with Western liberal democracy originated from Western scholars who viewed democracy as an inherently “white privilege,” unsuitable for people they deemed of “lower intelligence” or “lesser” cultures. When this racialist perspective was introduced to China, it fueled both the defense of autocratic rule and radical calls for full cultural and even linguistic Westernization in early twentieth-century China. The authoritarian KMT state of the early twentieth century sought to revive the idealized vision of a collectivist, filial Confucian culture to claim liberal democracy was unsuitable for China and to legitimize its autocratic rule. It simultaneously presented itself as the guardian of China as a new Christian civilization to its US allies.