Lederer’s sociological and political article asks whether China’s contemporary upheavals repeat an old cycle of dynastic collapse or inaugurate a new historical epoch. He connects political transformation to industrialization and the emergence of organized workers, modern intellectuals, and a programmatic party, while acknowledging the limits of observation from Europe:
Auch für Sachkenner ist es ungemein schwer, sich aus der Ferne her vorzustellen, was heute in China vorgeht, was da im Entstehen ist.
English translation: Even for those with expert knowledge it is exceedingly difficult to imagine from afar what is going on in China today, what is there coming into being.
This caution frames an inquiry into the social conditions of political agency. A historical survey traces foreign encroachment through territorial concessions, Japanese demands, the Versailles settlement, and the Washington Conference. China’s subordination provides the international setting, but Lederer seeks an explanation beyond diplomacy or supposedly permanent national characteristics. He connects external conduct to internal social relations:
Ein Volk, das von sozialen Kämpfen zerrissen ist, sucht den Klassenkampf häufig durch Uebertragung nach dem Ausland, durch Expansion zu überwinden oder ausländische Interventionen zu provozieren.
English translation: A people torn by social struggles frequently seeks to overcome the class struggle by transferring it abroad, through expansion, or to provoke foreign interventions.
This proposition informs his account of traditional China’s relative foreign-policy restraint. Rather than attributing it simply to superior moral principles, he emphasizes a social order capable of containing internal tensions. His reconstruction centers on the disappearance of feudal power, government by classically educated literati, village autonomy, and the extended family. Examination-based recruitment renewed the governing stratum without creating a hereditary warrior aristocracy; official rotation impeded territorial power bases, while shared writing and classical learning connected elites across linguistic differences.
Diese Literaten waren die tatsächlichen Träger der Macht in China und sie haben ihr Ansehen bis heute noch bewahrt.
English translation: These literati were the actual bearers of power in China, and they have preserved their prestige down to the present day.
The literati’s authority anchors Lederer’s distinction between cultural cohesion and centralized state power. Against Weber’s emphasis on cities, he foregrounds the village; against an exclusively magical interpretation of official authority, he stresses classical learning as a shared practical code. The family supplied livelihood, protection, and obligation, leaving the individual relatively little autonomous political scope. Comparisons with Europe and Japan distinguish this order from states organized around military power, hereditary elites, and administrative penetration. These broad contrasts support his distinction between dynastic rebellion and social revolution.
Industrialization constitutes the decisive rupture. Earlier conquerors could be assimilated without fundamentally transforming family and village life; capitalism undermines their economic functions. Migration exposes people to insecurity outside inherited networks, while commercial accumulation conflicts with obligations to kin. Yet the destruction of established solidarities also produces new forms of collective life. Drawing on Marx, Lederer treats the factory and labor process as foundations for workers’ organization. Habits of group membership can facilitate unions rather than simply dissolve into individualism.
Educational reform, the abolition of classical examinations, and vernacular writing produce a parallel transformation among intellectuals. Students and graduates returning from abroad acquire political importance through both their ideas and their uncertain employment prospects. Socialist sympathies express economic insecurity as well as opposition to capitalism’s disruption of inherited culture. Workers, intellectuals, and nationalist proprietors consequently find provisional common ground in the Kuo Ming Tang’s resistance to foreign privileges and military predation.
Lederer interprets Sun Yat-sen’s principles through these constituencies. Anti-imperialism entails fiscal and tariff autonomy and protection for Chinese enterprise. Democracy might develop through existing group organizations rather than exclusively through individualized citizenship. The social principle supports unions, boycotts, labor regulation, and arbitration, without making revolutionary rhetoric equivalent to a program of socialization.
The class divisions erupting within the movement in 1927 make this convergence unstable. Nevertheless, Lederer regards the party’s organization and politically trained army as qualitatively different from generals’ mercenary forces. His concluding problem is the passage from organized social groups to public authority: can solidarities created amid industrial disruption furnish the basis of modern statehood? The article links international agency and state formation to transformations in everyday social organization, while leaving their outcome contingent on class conflict and militarism.
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