Like the russian and the French Revolutions, the Chinese Revolution was launched by the breakdown of an autocratic and semibureaucratic Old Regime. And it culminated in a New Regime more centralized, mass-incorporating, and in many ways more fully rationalized and bureaucratic than the prerevolutionary Old Regime. In all three Revolutions, moreover, peasants provided the major insurrectionary force to transform old class relations. In France and Russia, social-revolutionary changes depended upon the occurrence of peasant revolts. Nevertheless, revolutionary state organizations were built up with the aid of primarily urban popular support and imposed through administrative hierarchies upon the rural areas. The postrevolutionary states in France and Russia both were (despite many differences) professional—bureaucratic regimes. In the Chinese Revolution, however, peasants ended up providing both the revolutionary insurrectionary force and the organized popular basis for the consolidation of revolutionary state power. And the result was a revolutionary New Regime uniquely devoted to fostering widespread participation and surprisingly resistant to routinized hierarchical domination by bureaucratic officials and professional experts.