A study about the development of historical syntax and the application of the various approaches to the historical syntax of Chinese, including a typologically based discussion of the Chinese word order problem. In this discussion are to be found: (i) comments on a number of theories of word order in Chinese, (ii) a survey of problems in word order change of Chinese, (iii) the question whether Modern Mandarin is predominantly SVO or SOV, (iv) a discussion of causes of word order change in Chinese, and (v) a new hypothesis explaining word order change in Chinese, consisting of two elements, viz the rise of resultative complement and compound verbs and the loss of topic markers.