The chief threat to China's integrity does not come overland, as it has so often in the past, but by sea, reaching the southern coastal area first.

Western traders, missionaries, and soldiers of fortune had begun to arrive in large numbers even before the Qing, in the sixteenth century.

The empire's inability to evaluate correctly the nature of the new challenge or to respond flexibly to it will result in the demise of the Qing and the collapse of the entire millennia-old framework of dynastic rule.