Abstract: Scholars have long believed that “the local government was more powerful than the central government” during the last decade of the Qing. After probing changes of local government power during the New Policy Reform in the late Qing Dynasty, the author argues that “the local government was as powerless as the central government.” With the New Policy Reform， especially the Preparation for Constitutionalism, during the decade preceding the Revolution of 1911, the Qing government took measures to strengthen its centralization of authority and limit the influence of local government but these efforts were ineffectual and were undermined by the intensification of the internal contradictions within the government. This is why the power structure took the form of “the central government being as powerless as the local government.” On one hand the Qing court neither established a strong central government nor really controlled the military and financial power. On the other hand, no local governments effectively controlled local military and financial powers. On the eve of the Wuchang Uprising local government was obviously weaker and the Qing court had failed to centralize its authority．