Yuan Shikai: A Briefly Reigning Emperor

Yuan Shikai seems to me to be an atavistic product of an ancient society come too late into a new world. His acts of duplicity and cruelty, which in the eyes of the new Chinese appear as so many inexspeable crimes, are not so to him. He can understand neither how untimely they are, nor how truly immoral. Absolute sovereigns reason in the same way. So when you say, atavistic, I was going to use the word primitive. But in a sense, it's used negatively. You are going back to some crude thing that your ancestors used to do.