Mandarin Chinese is widely believed to observe the Phrase Structure Condition (first proposed in Huang 1982; hereafter 'PSC'), a PF filter on phrase-structural representations that forbids the occurrence of two (or more) syntactic constituents in the postverbal field. This idea has proved highly important and influential, as witnessed by the fact that there exists no shortage of studies that presuppose the validity of the PSC--often without discussion, and even in more recent literature on Chinese syntax (Sybesma 1999; Tieu 2008; Liao 2014; Paul 2015; Chung 2017; Chan and Cheung 2020 among others; see also Shu 2018 for an explicit minimalist reformulation). This dissertation takes up the challenge of dispensing with the language-particular PSC.To this end, I re-examine all the three empirical domains that are initially taken to support the PSC, namely (i) verb doubling; (ii) external possession; and (iii) 'breakable compounds', which has not been previously attempted. Regarding verb doubling, I propose that the phenomenon is not a repair strategy that amnesties potential PSC violations. Rather, verb doubling arises as a side effect of an optional syntactic operation that fronts VP to a clausal position in the preverbal field, in line with robust crosslinguistic correlations reported in Hein (2018). Data that apparently indicate that verb doubling is sometimes obligatory merely reflect independent interpretive constraints on object scrambling (Soh 1998). As for external possession and 'breakable compounds', I pursue the novel idea that they are underlyingly one and the same phenomenon. The restrictions that these constructions observe are shown to readily follow from the limited number of nominal licensors within the postverbal field, with no recourse to the PSC. While the present proposal might be seen as new extension of Li's (1985, 1990) classic idea of abstract Case to the current two domains, its exact details differ from Li's in that left-right directionality plays no role in the mechanisms behind nominal licensing, and that Mandarin is not assumed to be a head-final language, both suspect ingredients crucial for Li's Case-based explanation to work. The conclusion is then that there is nothing special about the Mandarin postverbal field; the relevant word order phenomena can be captured under the same algorithms that linearise verbal dependents in other head-initial languages like English. Besides advancing the present understanding of the phrase-structural organisation of Mandarin Chinese, the current investigation also constitutes the first attempt to map out the lower portion of the Mandarin functional clausal spine in detail, in addition to other new discoveries. More generally, this project lends additional support to the idea that head-chain resolution is sensitive to both structural and linear factors (Saab 2008, 2017); to the phasehood of vP (pace Preminger 2019; Keine 2020); to the anti-local nature of syntactic movement (Abels' 2003 version); and to the familiar claim that nominals are in need of formal licensing in caseless languages (Chomsky 1981; Li 1985, 1990; Sheehan and Van der Wal 2018), including--as we have discovered--even certain functional projections. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]