This chaper presents essays on republican period, the economic trends from I9I2 to 49, Peking Government, the warlord era and the intellectual history of the reform generation supplement to the first and second series came out before the two volumes of the fourth part of the second series. An original study of the May Fourth phenomenon is Lin Yii-sheng's challenging work. Surveys in Chinese from a Marxist viewpoint, focused on the period around 1919, include Hua Kang and Ch'en Tuan-chih. The principal bibliographic work on the CCP before 1949 has been done by Japanese scholars, who have listed especially documents held in archives in Taiwan and articles published in major serials. The involvement of the Chinese bourgeoisie in the revolution of 1911 marked its emergence on the political scene. The chambers of commerce and the business associations, despite the essential roles they played between 1911 and 1927, remain poorly known.

The death of Yuan Shih-k'ai in June 1916 ushered in the era of the warlords and yet throughout the ensuing decade of militarism, the Peking government remained the symbol of China's national sovereignty and hoped-for unity. Constitutionalism served the interests of ex-bureaucrats and professionals because it offered them legitimate political roles without opening the political arena to the groups below them. The popular support it could command would provide the key to wealth and power for China. The institutional facade of the Peking government was constitutional: legislative, executive and judicial functions parcelled out by law, policy decisions made by institutional procedures. The reality was factional: personal followings, cutting across the boundaries of official institutions, each faction centred on a particular leader. Constitutionalism could not restrain the brutal forces. The tide of change washed the wealthy and fortunate ashore in the foreign concessions of treaty ports. The constitutional system exhausted its own vitality through its members' absorption in factional struggles.

The time between 1916 and 1928 is commonly called the 'warlord period'. While warlords used such personal ties to cultivate the loyalty of their officers, their subordinates often had similar relationships with their own juniors. Some commanders tried to minimize these secondary loyalties, and focus all allegiance directly on themselves, but it was difficult to eliminate them. The percentage of public revenue actually devoted to public purposes evidently declined in most provinces through the warlord era. The chaos of warlordism, and the concomitant weakness of the Peking government, rendered China peculiarly vulnerable to foreign pressures and encroachments. This chapter looks at some events to note how militarism supervened and finally supplanted the vestiges of constitutionalism. On the one hand, the warlord years represented the low point of political unity and national strength in the twentieth century. On the other hand, they also represented the peak of intellectual and literary achievement.