By 1949 China had suffered from an increasingly attenuated sovereignty for over a century. After 1911 it had experienced not only limited sovereignty but also, in effect, multiple sovereignty,87 with the central government being obliged to share authority with both the occupying powers (i.e., multiple colonialism)88 and various domestic rivals. Most countries would have found such a situation unacceptable, but for China, with its imposingly long history of independence, and with a tradition of a unitary state system dating back over two millennia, this state of affairs was intolerable, gnawing
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