As evolutionary theories were introduced into China, and the principle of evolution was established in the last years of the Qing dynasty, it became a pressing problem to fix the position of China in an evolutionary sequence. Many kinds of evolutionary orders emerged around the year 1900, among which the order from savage society to patriarchal society to militant society proposed by Yan Fu’s Shehui tongquan, translated from Edward Jenks’s A Short History of Politics, was the most influential. To explain Yan Fu’s purpose in translating this work, the political and intellectual situation of China and the works he had read but had not translated should also be taken into consideration, besides his expositions through the preface, comments and translation of this work. In Shehui tongquan, Yan Fu labelled China as “patriarchal as well as militant,” and on many occasions expressed the wish for China to rise above patriarchal society and enter militant society. His label of Confucius as “Sage of patriarchal society” shook the position of Confucianism in China. Meanwhile, Yan Fu criticized the tendencies of conservatism, xenophobia and anti- Manchuism in contemporary China. His criticism of conservatism and xenophobia was widely accepted and occasioned no debate, while his criticism of anti- Manchuism became involved in the debate between the revolutionary party and the constitutional party. Zhang Taiyan refuted Yan from the aspect of understanding “nationalism” correctly. There were also some faults in Zhang’s refutation. However, his opinions that there are differences between social science and natural science, and that the particularity of China should be taken into consideration in studying Chinese society, were very insightful. Yan Fu’s introduction of a social evolutionary sequence, and his location of Chinese society therein, were influential among intellectuals until the 1920s and 1930s, around which time it was replaced by a five stage theory. But the pattern of analysing Chinese society from general truth or general rules did not change. Actually, Herbert Spencer had once refuted Auguste Comte’s practice of taking different forms of society as different stages in the evolutionary series, but he himself also accepted the existence of a principle of evolution, and used “universal,” “general,” and “special” to differentiate them, in a way that is not completely clear. Yan Fu’s works were often aimed at specific occasions rather than something unchanging. It should be noted that, in his late years, especially after the breakout of the First World War, Yan experienced a re-valuation of eastern and western cultures, as well as of “militant society,” and reaffirmed the value of traditional Chinese culture.