“Power Order” and the Reform of Regime in the Late Qing Dynasty: An Analysis Based on a New Framework

From the fundamental concern of political science,reform of regime is essentially the process and result of changes in power relations and structures.The analytical framework with “power order” as the core concept aims to draw on Michael Mann’s social power typology and combine the concept of process tracing methods to construct a structural unit analyzing “the relations between subject of power and the subjective power”,and two process dimensions analyzing “disintegration and shaping of power structure form”,and then to revisit the political reform in the late Qing Dynasty.The analysis finds there appeared such situations as political power suspension,military power transition,ideological power reconstruction,and economic power sluggishness in the late Qing Dynasty,which means the strong structure of “political power — ideological power” and “political power — military power” that the monarchy relied on was disintegrated,resulting in political disorder.Shaped by the mentality of the epoch and the West ideology,the Chinese intellectuals of that time were eager to chart the future of China’s modern political system,but the ideal government they wanted to establish dissipated in complex changes of the “power order”.Although the revolutionaries and the constitutionalists cooperated and launched the “1911 Revolution”,the republic established after the revolution was merely nominal after all,which did not conform to the principles of establising the “ideal” republic,and finally ended in the domestic military intervention.