The present analysis presupposes that in the flow of history there is recognizable societal structure (cultural type) and recognizable societal change (development). It also recognizes the theoretical and practical significance of major societal types, societies—operational units whose peculiarity is determined by the interaction of a number of essential technical, organizational, and social elements. Some of these essential elements are not necessarily specific: they may be compatible with several types of society. But they may become specific through their magnitude or the institutional setting in which they function. For instance, though slaves were present in many societies, in only a few did the institution of slavery become an essential feature. And serfs (peasants attached to the soil or to the village) were present in several societies: they appeared in oriental civilizations long before they were conspicuous in Greek antiquity or in the European and Japanese Middle Ages. But they were essential mainly in feudal societies and in the “helotage” society of Sparta. Similar diversities in compatability characterize corvee labor, irrigation economy, and commercial and industrial capitalism.

When we speak of social change in China we most often have in mind one or the other of two pictures. The first is the change that we see today, when radically new ideas, techniques and forces from foreign countries have shaken the traditional social order, altering the old patterns rapidly and sometimes violently. The second picture is that of the dynastic cycle, a concept that we have inherited from the traditional Chinese historian, sometimes adding a few embellishments of our own. The political fortunes of a ruling house are often reflected (and perhaps affected) by a characteristic cycle in the whole political and economic order of the nation: from successful adjustment and control to maladjustment and chaos. The end of each cycle, if we focus our attention only on these factors, leaves Chinese society much as it was at the end of the cycle before. But this perspective tends to omit qualitative changes that occur in Chinese society on a different plane.

One of the topics of Chinese history that deserves greater attention is the nature and direction of the expansion of the Chinese people beyond the geographical confines of China. It is a subject which, for want of more information, is still so cloaked in generalities as to present the misleading impression that the Chinese have always been a landbound people oriented towards the land frontier of the north and northwest. A Western scholar, for example, has written: “China has never been a sea-power because nothing has ever induced her people to be otherwise than landmen, and landmen dependent on agriculture with the same habit and ways of thinking drilled into them through forty centuries.” In a recent work we find this statement: “Essentially a land people, the Chinese cannot be considered as having possessed seapower…. The attention of the Chinese through the centuries has been turned inward towards Central Asia rather than outward, and their knowledge of the seas which washed their coast was extremely small.”

Traditionally, Chinese dynasties were characterized by the maintenance of a highly centralized bureaucracy whose prime objective was the preservation of central control over all important aspects of national life. The degree of effectiveness of the bureaucracy determined the degree of central power, the diminution and loss of which invariably led to the weakening and downfall of a dynasty. Since the economy of China was based on intensive farming, regulation of water, either for the positive purpose of irrigation or the Negative purpose of flood prevention, remained throughout Chinese history a matter of utmost importance and a principal concern of the state. The success or failure of a dynasty in handling this vital problem reflected the effectiveness of its bureaucracy, which in turn determined the fate of the dynasty itself.

The accession to power of the Kuomintang in 1927–1928 marked the end of the era in which revolutionary strains had been dominant in the party's program and the beginning of one of the most interesting and instructive of the many efforts in history to make a revolution the heir of ancient tradition. The Kuomintang effort was noteworthy for four reasons: (1) the rapidity with which its course was reversed; (2) the magnitude of the gulf between the Confucian political and social system which the Kuomintang sought to restore and the national and social revolution which the party had lately led to victory; (3) the full and uninhibited adherence of Chiang Kai-shek and other leaders not only to the values of the traditional society but to the specific institutions in which these had been embodied; and (4) a well-documented, persistent and selfconscious effort on the part of these leaders to win the competition with the Communists by detailed application in the mid-twentieth century of precisely the means which the Imperial Chinese Government had applied against the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth.

As was true of many other fields of learning in Japan, Chinese studies entered a new stage of development with the Meiji era. The valuable tradition of kangaku (“Chinese learning” of the Tokugawa period) was affected and, to a degree, replaced, by Western scientific methods of inquiry.

Leading characters in this novel are “Zhamtso,” head of the Mongolian Scientific Committee; “Andreἴ Makarovich Turanov,” a Russian geographer, “Roy Webster,” leader of an American expedition in the Gobi Desert; and “Nakamura,” a Japanese officer spying in Outer Mongolia. These thinly-disguised names may be penetrated as: Tsyben Zhamtsaranovich Zhamtsarano (1880–1940?), founder of the Mongolian Scientific Committee and its “perpetual secretary”; Eduard Makarovich Murzaev, a prominent Soviet geographer and author of a Stalin Prize-winning physical geography of the Mongolian People's Republic (Outer Mongolia); Roy Chapman Andrews, leader of the Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, director of the Museum for many years, now living in California; “Nakamura” is not identifiable under this or any other name.