ovement (Fairbanks, pp. 178-81), and recurred on a vastly larger scale at mid-century with the Taiping Rebellion (Fairbanks, pp. 181-88). The Boxer Rebellion had some characteristic features of yet another peasant rebellion, and so indeed did the Communist Revolution. But peasant rebellion has not alone been sufficient for a dynastic transition. From the mid-nineteenth century till about 1895, the Manchu Dynasty still commanded sufficient support among Chinese scholars that their prevalent tendency was restorationist.
In 1895-98, however, the dynasty reached a state of extremis. Defeat by Japan was followed by an expansion of "spheres of influence," by Japan and European powers--an incipient partitioning of China (Fairbank, p. 203). Thereafter, in the period from about 1895 to 1920, the scholar class became fragmented, some factions holding on all the more strongly to an idealized conception of the old order, while other factions radicalized, seeking a new order. Implicitly, the latter group abandoned the dynasty as having lost the Mandate of Heaven, and looked for its restoration from elsewhere. An abortive new "dynasty" arose with the Republican movement, but it lost its incipient hold in the face of provincial fragmentation (the war
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