Abstract: 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”.