Such was the picture of the middle class and those who were ready to support it, a group with widely divergent interests, held together only by its opposition to the gentry system and the monarchy.  It could not but be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve political success with such a group.  Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the “Father of the Republic”, accordingly laid down three stages of progress in his many works, of which the best-known are San-min chu-i, ("The Three Principles of the People"), and Chien-kuo fang-lueeh ("Plans for the Building up of the Realm").  The three phases of development through which republican China was to pass were:  the phase of struggle against the old system, the phase of educative rule, and the phase of truly democratic government.  The phase of educative rule was to be a sort of authoritarian system with a democratic content, under which the people should be familiarized with democracy and enabled to grow politically ripe for true democracy.

Difficult as was the internal situation from the social point of view, it was no less difficult in economic respects.  China had recognized that she must at least adopt Western technical and industrial progress in order to continue to exist as an independent state.  But the building up of industry demanded large sums of money.  The existing Chinese banks were quite incapable of providing the capital needed; but the acceptance of capital from abroad led at once, every time, to further political capitulations.  The gentry, who had no cash worth mention, were violently opposed to the capitalization of their properties, and were in favour of continuing as far as possible to work the soil in the old style.  Quite apart from all this, all over the country there were generals who had come from the ranks of the gentry, and who collected the whole of the financial resources of their region for the support of their private armies.  Investors had little confidence in the republican government so long as they could not tell whether the government would decide in favour of its right or of its left wing.

No less complicated was the intellectual situation at this time.  Confucianism, and the whole of the old culture and morality bound up with it, was unacceptable to the middle-class element.  In the first place, Confucianism rejected the principle, required at least in theory by the middle class, of the equality of all people; secondly, the Confucian great-family system was irreconcilable with middle-class individualism, quite apart from the fact that the Confucian form of state could only be a monarchy.  Every attempt to bolster up Confucianism in practice or theory was bound to fail and did fail.  Even the gentry could scarcely offer any real defence of the Confucian system any longer.  With Confucianism went the moral standards especially of the upper classes of society.  Taoism was out of the question as a substitute, because of its anarchistic and egocentric character.  Consequently, in these years, part of the gentry turned to Buddhism and part to Christianity.  Some of the middle class who had come under European influence also turned to Christianity, regarding it as a part of the European civilization they had to adopt.  Others adhered to modern philosophic systems such as pragmatism and positivism.  Marxist doctrines spread rapidly.