Managerial work by local elites was accompanied by an outpouring of theoretical writing. The focus in local government had been an important part of the 'Restoration' in the 1860s, when China was faced with widespread chaos and devastation in the wake of the mid-century rebellions. As a movement pledged to social transformation as well as national unification, the Nationalists of the 1920s came to power committed to carrying out Sun Yat-sen's vision of a democratic China. The evolution of the Nationalist government's policy toward local administration embodied a general trend away from Sun's conception of local self-government and toward a more rigorous system of bureaucratic control. Liang Shu-ming's rural reconstruction experiment in Shantung achieved at least a temporary protection by political authorities, and relied on a radically nativist Confucian reformism. Rural reconstruction thus involved a broad range of types: Westerninfluenced and nativist, educational and military, populist and bureaucratic. Predictably, the Nanking authorities became involved in rural reconstruction too.