Rescuing China - Grammar as the keystone of a new Chinese culture in the first decades of 1900

The earliest Chinese works which may be labeled as linguistic appeared as early as 3rd century B.C.E.; in the following centuries, a very solid tradition of linguistic studies was carried out (its main branches being philology, phonology, rhetoric and the study of the characters). Linguistic disciplines played a role of the utmost importance in pre-modern China as the examination for being enrolled in imperial bureaucracy, the local aristocracy, were based on the knowledge of ancient texts and on the mastery of writing skills, for which aforementioned studies were crucial. It is not hazardous to maintain that linguistic studies until the beginning of the twentieth century lacked a firm theoretical framework, comparable, for instance, to Greek-Latin traditional and then European linguistics or to Indian linguistics.