The Beiyang government moved 400 of the original draft into the northern provinces, where it re-edited the content twice, thus creating three different versions of the book.
According to historian Hsi-yuan Chen, further work was discouraged by the obsolescence of the Imperial Chinese conceptions of political legitimacy and historiography, which the making of an "official history" inherently assumed.
It attempts to follow the form of previous official histories, and is organized into four sections: Because of the lack of funding, the authors were forced to publish quickly, and consequently this project was never finished, remaining in the draft stage.
[4] In fact, the draft completely avoided the use of the Republic of China calendar, which was unacceptable for an official history meant to endorse the rise of a new regime.
In 1961, the People's Republic of China also attempted to complete writing the history of the Qing dynasty, but the historians were prevented from doing so by the Cultural Revolution which started in 1966.
[12] The draft was rejected in November 2023, apparently because of official discontent with the narrative it presented and the influence of the so-called New Qing History school.