从西周到清代,中国历史上曾经有过封建制、贵族制和王权官僚制三种不同的制度,相应地也产生了封建士大夫、世家大族和官僚士大夫三种精英形态,地方与国家之间因而呈现出不同的关系。 到清末,地方主义开始崛起,辛亥革命就是一场地方对中央的革命,民初经历了代议民主制和行政权威制之后,到 1916年之后,显现出五代十国式的藩镇割据,读书人再次成为自由流动资源,分化为沉淀到地方的“土豪”旧绅士阶级和接受了新文化洗礼的“游士”新知识阶级。 联省自治的失败意味着地方“土豪”已经失去了历史舞台,而国民党联合了新的“游士”阶级最终统一了中国。
From the West Zhou Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, China had experienced three different political systems, i.e., feudalism, aristocracy and bureaucracy, which accordingly produced three kinds of elites, i.e., feudal scholar-officials, aristocratic families and scholar-bureaucrats, and formed different relations between the local and the state. In the late Qing Dynasty, localism started to arise, e.g., and the Revolution of 1911 is a revolution of the local against the central government. The early Republic of China witnessed representative democracy and system of administrative authority. After 1916, China, similar to the situation in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, was divided by the force of military governors. Consequently, scholars became unbounded and free and increasing differentiated into the “local gentry” of old fashion and the “roaming scholars”- the new intellectuals who had been baptized by new culture. The failure of the autonomy of jointed provinces implied that the “local gentry” had lost their stage in history. Finally, Kuomintang unified China by uniting the new “roaming scholars”.