This chapter talks about Continental China and the account of recent work in the rapidly developing area of social history. It begins at a high level of generality by asserting that the Chinese revolution of the twentieth century has differed from all other national revolutions in two respects: the greater size of the population and the greater comprehensiveness of the changes it has confronted. The comprehensiveness of change in modern China is a matter of dispute between two schools of interpretation, which posit linear and cyclical patterns. The question of what happened to the Chinese economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a major focus of discussion. Commercialization permeated the agrarian economy during the Ch'ing. The Han Chinese in different regions and at different class levels had a common sense of identity and historical continuity. The horizontal class structure of late imperial China was theoretically divided by the Classics into the four occupational classes: scholar-gentry, peasants, artisans, and merchants.