Other groups had not completely fallen away from the ideology, but had found major sections of it to be unsuitable to the regulation of their own lives. Virtue could not be found in a family system which was slowly losing its polygynous character and also slowly giving place to a sort of social atomism; the intervention of the machine state was required to serve as a substitute for ideological regulation until such a time as the new ideology should have developed sufficiently to restore relevance to traditions.
Indeed, throughout all China, there were few people who were not touched to a greater or less degree by the consequences of the collision of the two intellectual worlds, the nationalistic West and the old Chinese world-society. However much Chinese might desire to continue in their traditional modes of behavior, it was impossible for them to live happy and progressive lives by virtue of having memorized the classics and paid respect to the precepts of tradition, as had their forefathers. In all cases where the old ideas failed, state and law suddenly acquired a new importance—almost overwhelming to some Chinese—as the establishers of the new order of life. Even etiquette was established by decree, in the days of the parliamentary Republic at Peking; the age-old assurance of Chinese dress and manners was suddenly swept away, and the government found itself forced to decree frock-coats.
Successive governments in the new China had fallen, not because they did too much, but because they did too little. The sphere of state activity had become enormous in contrast to what it had been under more than a score of dynasties, and the state had perforce to intervene in almost every walk of life, and every detail of behavior. Yet this intervention, although imperative, was met by the age-old Chinese contempt for government, by the determined adherence to traditional methods of control in the face of situations to which now they were no longer relevant. It was this paradox, the ever-broadening necessity of state activity in the face of traditional and unrealistic opposition to state activity, which caused a great part of the turmoil in the new China. Officials made concessions to the necessity for state action by drafting elaborate codes on almost every subject, and then, turning about, also made concessions to the traditional non-political habits of their countrymen by failing to enforce the codes which they had just promulgated. The leaders of the Republic, and their followers in the provinces, found themselves with laws which could not possibly be introduced in a nation unaccustomed to law and especially unaccustomed to law dealing with life in a Western way; thus baffled, but perhaps not disappointed, the pseudo-republican government officials were content with developing a shadow state, a shadow body of law, and then ignoring it except as a tool in the vast pandemonium of the tuchunates—where state and law were valued only in so far as they served to aggrandize or enrich military rulers and their hangers-on.