t the same time as the Hittite, Roman, British, or Turkish empires rose and fell, China stood firm as a rock on the eastern side of Eurasia. Even today, we`re seeing the rise of a militant, powerful China that stands to threaten the world order. This brings up the pertinent question: what is the essence of Chinese civilization? How do we understand this civilization that holds one-fifth of the human race? Central China then promulgated mass migrations out from there, across all of East Asia, stretching from Japan to Indonesia, creating the genetic pool that`s modern East Asians. From then on, we saw the Chinese form Stone Age villages that gradually got larger and larger until they formed small kingdoms. The Chinese claim that their civilization stretches back to 3000 BC under a certain dragon-descended Yellow Emperor who taught them civilization is unlikely, but you do see small kingdoms involved in the Shang state. The Shang were an ethnic Han theocracy based out of the North Chinese Plain around 1600 BC, where the elite was built around communication with the gods. The Yellow River is one of the nastiest in the world, regularly changing its course by hundreds of miles since the region`s so flat. The Chinese had to build dams to keep the Yellow River from killing thousands of people when it floods and to use its water for farming. In this regard, the ancient Chinese were pretty similar to other cultures around the same time, like the Babylonians and Egyptians, who formed civilizations to gather workers together to keep their rivers under control and then formed governments that did the managing as theocracies that mediated between the gods who controlled the weather and the people.

However, the next stage of Chinese history hit when the Zhou Turkic nomads riding chariots took over China around 1000 BC and installed a feudal state where they gave the various tribal war bands different plots of land, which then split up China into different principalities and kingdoms. The Zhou Turks were numerically insignificant and quickly assimilated into Chinese culture, which brings up an interesting point that China is one of the few civilizations that didn`t form from a combination of cultures but instead from a continuous development of a single society over time. Western civilization is a combination of Christian, German, and Roman influence into a single culture, or India of Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and Harappan influence, but China is really just an extension of Han society, with nomads coming and conquering every once in a while. If you look at genetic maps, you see Europe`s a north-south gradient with local clusters forming around countries like England, Poland, or France, while India is also a north-south gradient but each caste being its own ethnic group. Meanwhile, if you look at genetics, the Han Chinese are just a single massive genetic group, by far the largest in the world. This has allowed China to be the area that`s been consistently unified by far the most in history but also, at the same time, predisposed the Chinese towards isolationism and ignoring the rest of the world. An important turning point that happened here is the Zhou, in order to take power from the Shang monarchy, developed an ideological system called the Mandate of Heaven, in which Heaven bestows power upon the emperor to govern the state. However, long story short, if the ruler is not moral, said power can be rescinded, and the rebel can seize power. The idea of the Mandate of Heaven has persisted for the last three thousand years of Chinese history, even being invoked during the Tiananmen Square protests.

This is interesting, as the origin of John Locke`s idea of the social contract that justified the American and French revolutions. However, this idea that power could become corrupt and then be restored by moral rebels has been a check on tyranny across Chinese history. The Chinese have had a pretty accurate and realistic view of history: a new empire seizes power, governs well for a couple of generations, becomes debauched and decadent, then you start to see peasant rebellions and famines, then a new rebel seizes power and restarts the dynasty after a period of disunity and warlords. This sort of thing has happened countless times across Chinese history, and you`re going to see this happening again and again throughout this articel.

After the Zhou monarchy had lost centralized control over China, we see a period from roughly 750 BC to 200 BC called the Spring and Autumn of Warring States period, where we see Chinese culture, as it exists today, form. Over this period, China saw the development of cities and trade, which around 500 BC, like it did across Eurasia, led to the Axial Age, a period when philosophers tried to figure out how to live a noble and good life. In China, this came in the form of three ideologies that would forever influence Chinese civilization afterward: Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism.

Confucianism basically believes that we all have social duties to the people in our social networks that we must follow. These include loyalty of children to their parents, employee to employer, and ruler to ruled. Meanwhile, those higher up in the social network are expected to exchange said loyalty for benevolent guidance. Confucianism is, in effect, a social theory masquerading as a religion. Confucianism had a series of effects on China, the first being immense social cohesion. Confucian countries have the lowest crime rates of anywhere in the world. The Chinese have died en masse in wars with unimaginable courage too many times to count. Confucian emphasis on the duties of ruler and ruled meant that China was one of the most enlightened despotisms in world history. Chinese regimes were often more humane rulers than anywhere else in Asia, and the Chinese abolished slavery before the birth of Christ. At the same time, the Confucian emphasis on education is why these societies are known for excelling in so many academic subjects today. However, the negative side of Confucianism was fundamental conservatism. Confucius deserves to be considered for the most conservative philosopher of all time. The point of Confucianism was to try to turn back the clock to the world that existed 500 years before Confucius and return to the social code of the early Zhou Dynasty. The Chinese have always looked to the past and have had trouble dealing with the future for this reason, as we`ll see later in this article. Confucian conservatism has held the Chinese back in military, economic, and technological ability from not being able to keep up with the times.

Taoism, in many ways, is the counterpoint to Confucianism. Taoism is a collection of folk beliefs wrapped together, masquerading as a religion. It believes in a couple of things: first, there`s a general idea that there`s a way that you should follow, which generally involves going with the flow and not trying to force things; secondly, there are various magical rituals that a person can discover in order to attain immortality. And although this is a brutal simplification, we coulde say, that Confucianism was for public life, while Taoism for private life.

During this whole era, China was going through a bloody series of wars that eventually cut down the number of Chinese states from over 20 to just one: the state of Qin around 220 BC. As almost always happens, the state that comes out on top of these horrifying conflicts is the one that`s best organized and most ruthless. The Qin were like the Prussians of the ancient world, creating a massive government bureaucracy under a totalitarian emperor with a powerful military. The Qin formed an ideology called Legalism, which, in short, believed that human nature was evil and that a strict legal code ruled by a harsh government was the only thing that kept society together. The individual existed to be a chess piece in the ruler`s grand strategy game. This is an ideology that literally believed that rulers should keep the population ignorant and that a king shouldn`t love his wives too much, lest they control him.

The problem with Legalism was that it was so cynical, it couldn`t provoke any loyalty. A great example was that the mans who led the rebellion that defeated the Qin state rebelled because they were late to an army meet-up post, and since the penalty for lateness was death, they decided to rebel since they had nothing to lose anyway. The Qin state collapsed after a single generation since it was just too cruel and totalitarian to survive. Legalism became an evil word for the rest of Chinese history. However, the irony is that Legalism became a structure for future Chinese governance and the political ideology for over 2,000 years, even though it was papered over with Confucian names and ethics.

As a final point to discuss China`s religions, we need to cover a few generalizations about the Chinese character. The Chinese are down-to-earth and reasonable. When I say down-to-earth, I mean that the Chinese have always viewed the world practically, without getting stuck in abstractions, philosophic debates, or broad theories. All these Chinese theories are, in reality, testable theories. Confucianism and Legalism are political and sociological theories, and Taoism is, in theory, a series of rituals. The idea of an all-encompassing god comes from the Semitic peoples, and abstract philosophy from the Indo-Aryans, but the Chinese lacked either to create a broad metaphysical view of the world. As a replacement for traditional religion, the Chinese have instead become quite superstitious. This is because they don`t have a god to rely upon for the anxieties of the world when life`s really hard; they instead rely upon magic and other superstitions to make life seem more certain. We see this in the various foreign religions that were able to gain a foothold in China throughout its history.

One example is Buddhism, which essentially promoted itself in China by offering various magical tricks to peasants and Chinese people to create psychic defense and good luck. Communism, on the other hand, gained traction in China by presenting itself as a magical trick to catch up with the West. When I say the Chinese are reasonable, I mean there have been very few wars of religion or campaigns of religious persecution in Chinese history. A single person could have theoretically belonged to all three ideologies above without a second thought. Likewise, in China, we see the layering of thousands of years of belief on top of each other. The most significant religion in China is ancestor worship and worship of heaven, both of which have thrived since prehistoric times. Communism and Christianity have just been later additions to this rich heritage.

Due to China`s agricultural style, which requires mass cooperation, belief structures have always prioritized the collective over the individual. This has come in various ways, one of which is the Chinese obsession with face, or how one`s personal status appears to others. While Westerners prioritize competition, China aims for harmony and cooperation. Confucianism and Taoism put heavy emphasis on rituals that Westerners might see as empty, but for a traditional Chinese person, using the proper greeting to greet your social superiors is a matter of moral principle rather than just politeness.

Something Westerners rarely see but is nevertheless vital is that the West is the only major society that has scaled up by using individualism, breaking down the family and clan. In other major Asian civilizations, the clan and family were the basic building blocks of society. In China, this was particularly profound, with families working as a unit to get people into government jobs as an insurance policy. Families would have multiple members trying to secure government positions at once, and if one was successful, they would support their entire clan.

China was polygamous until the 20th century. The seminal moment in which China unified as a nation was under the Qin, who not only conquered the other rival kingdoms around 220 BC but also conquered the whole of southern China, which was inhabited by native tribes. As mentioned before, the Qin set up a framework of Chinese governance but couldn`t maintain power for very long because they were cruel and couldn`t retain loyalty. After the Qin dynasty, the Han rose to power and effectively set up the Chinese imperial model that would last until the 20th century. The Han can be thought of as equivalents to the Roman Empire, as they expanded the Chinese empire geographically to the borders it would have at its largest extents until the present, with colonies in Central Asia and Vietnam.

China is a unique state in that it`s the first country to form in history that`s still around. What I mean by that is the national identity that goes back the furthest of anywhere in the world is the Chinese, and they have an unbroken descent from the China of Qin Shi Huang to the present. The state has been so powerful that it has repressed other elements in society. This is opposed to an area like India, where society was so powerful as to effectively strangle the state across its history, or a place like England, where society and government were well-balanced, leading to the development of representative democracy.

Confucianism allowed China to have powerful governments that weren`t brutally oppressive and extractive, allowing China to become quite wealthy for most of its history. The unity of China across 2,000 years and its continuing functioning as a society is a testament to China`s ruling class, the Mandarins or bureaucrats. The Mandarins evolved during the Han dynasty and took a couple hundred years to develop into the form they would eventually settle into. The Mandarins were government bureaucrats who would take a imperial test, its like a mega SAT (The SAT is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States), that determined their role in the government. Surprisingly, the integrity of this test was largely maintained throughout history. The positive effect of the Mandarins was to provide China with intelligent leadership. The negative was that, like bureaucrats everywhere, they were often conservative and unimaginative people. As we`ll see, the government effectively stifled the development of other elements in society, such as the military, merchants, or priests. By withholding resources from the military for fear it would become a competitor, the bureaucracy kept China weak and allowed its conquest by nomadic peoples many times.

If China had a lot of responsible mid-level governments, a problem it continually faced was the “bad emperor” problem, in which there were no checks upon the emperor`s power itself. China was by far the most absolutist state in Eurasia in the pre-modern world, and that meant that a single bad emperor could undo all the progress of generations before him.

A key aspect of the Chinese empire and its story is the northern frontier and the barbarians. Starting with the Qin dynasty, the Chinese faced continual attacks from nomadic barbarians of the Mongol grasslands. The problem with fighting these peoples was that they were difficult to control on their own turf. The Han dynasty managed to do this after a lengthy multi-decade war that bordered upon genocide, but for later dynasties, the only way to pacify the grasslands was through alliances with other nomadic peoples. The nomads` mobility, however, made them terrifying opponents, as Chinese armies typically lacked cavalry and were composed of archers and spearmen, so the nomads could easily outmaneuver them. The Chinese built and maintained the Great Wall as a way of limiting the mobility of these nomadic peoples on the dead flat North Chinese Plain.

It was common for the nomads to conquer China, even when outnumbered a hundred to one. Multiple times over, the Han dynasty operated on a similar timescale to the Romans, and like Europe, the heartland of northern China was conquered by Mongol and Turkic barbarians, while the colonial southern state, which can be seen as an analog to Byzantium, remained independent. The difference between China and Europe was that the nomads were outnumbered a hundred to one by the Chinese and assimilated quickly, while there were far more Germans in the Holy Roman Empire, meaning they established themselves as a permanent ruling class.

The Tang dynasty, descendants of barbarians themselves, were able to use barbarian allies to control Central Asia to the greatest degree of any Chinese dynasty ever. The barbarian conquerors, being foreigners, were open to foreign culture, and this was China`s era of cosmopolitanism. The capital, Xi`an, had Christian, Muslim, Persian, and Sogdian populations, just to name a few. This was also when Buddhism was introduced to China, which is essentially the last innovation seen in Chinese culture before European colonization. Buddhism served a similar role to Taoism in providing a release from the conformity of Confucianism, with monasteries offering an escape from the stifling Confucian family structure and honoring social classes that were disfavored under Confucianism, such as merchants and women.

As an overwhelmingly conservative society, Chinese culture largely solidified around the birth of Christ. Something to make clear is that due to different circumstances and the long game of “telephone” it took to reach China, the Buddhism practiced in China, Mahayana Buddhism, is essentially the opposite of the Buddhism taught by the Buddha. The Buddha designed a nihilistic, atheistic psychological journey, while Buddhism as it developed in China is an extremely optimistic group religion. For example, the Buddha said not to turn his teachings into a religion with deities, metaphysical views of the world like gods, or magical rituals, and not to adopt the outward trappings of a religion with elements like priests and structure. However, Mahayana Chinese Buddhism did every single one of those things. Mahayana Buddhism mixed with Zoroastrianism in Persia before it was introduced to China, and once in China, it mixed with Chinese customs to become something that bore little resemblance to its original form.

Throughout history, Chinese culture has demonstrated an incredible capacity for adaptation and absorption of new ideas while maintaining its unique identity. The introduction of Buddhism and its transformation into a form suited to Chinese society is just one example of this adaptability.

Despite being an overwhelmingly conservative society with a deeply rooted cultural heritage, China has shown remarkable resilience and adaptability throughout its long history. As the country faces new challenges and opportunities in the modern world, it will likely continue to evolve while maintaining its rich cultural traditions, as it has done for thousands of years.

This imperial cosmopolitan era in China came to a rapid end with the An Lushan Rebellion. This was the bloodiest war in history up to that time, in which a Turkic chieftain led a rebellion against a centralized government, killing more people than World War One (currently estimeeted as 13–36 million deaths in total). The rebels were eventually defeated, but this resulted in a massive sea change in almost every aspect of China. With the defeat of An Lushan, China had trouble relying on the barbarian noble elites that had previously dominated much of the military. This Buddhist barbarian elite did a good job of balancing out the Confucian civilian leadership to create a dynamic Chinese elite. The Tang Dynasty kept going for another century plus after the An Lushan Rebellion, but then a peasant uprising killed the traditional nobility, turning China into a purely bureaucratic Confucian-run nation.

Around 900 A.D., we saw China go through a sea change that would set its path for the next thousand years: the Neo-Confucian Renaissance. The Buddhists, who had been dominant since the fall of the Han Dynasty, promoted a cosmopolitan capitalist order with the Buddhist monasteries strangely being massive investment brokers. However, the Confucian bureaucrats gained power, and Confucian values gained greater currency. This article is pretty critical about Confucianism, and this isn`t actually an attack upon Confucianism as an ideology or anything Confucius said. More so, once a single social class gains control of society, it tailors that society towards its self-interest, and we`ve seen this bear fruit in each of the major civilizations, with the exception of the West, which was the West`s great advantage.

In China, what happened was that the bureaucrats gained power, and for all their strengths, the bureaucrats drove China in a direction that eventually led to its decay as a civilization. At the same time, the bureaucrats used Confucian radicalism as the ideological justification for this trajectory. Another important shift occurred around 1000 A.D. This was the settlement of southern China. In early China, the center of population was in the grain-growing north of the country. However, due to advances in rice agriculture, as well as adaptation among the Han Chinese to the south`s malarial climate, the population of southern China skyrocketed during the Middle Ages.

For some context, this, latitude-wise, is like the center of America`s population moving from Virginia to Florida. Rice-growing, malarial climates produce weaker soldiers given that irrigated populations suffer from various diseases like ringworm that make them physically weaker. This is why the capital and center of power in China has always been in the north. The shift to the south took China from being a predominantly northern, grassland-facing militaristic society to a water-based commerce one.

One of the most important events in Chinese history was the construction of the Grand Canal, from southern to northern China, over hundreds of miles, which fed northern China with southern rice, thus keeping the two regions connected. Realistically, we could have very easily seen a world where South China had become independent. As thoughtout the history it is shown that China goes through cosmopolitan and isolationist phases, largely dependent upon how bloody their last major invasion by foreigners has been.

In short, if the last foreign invasion killed a couple million people, it`ll encourage China to try to compete with the rest of the world, and if it`s killed tens of millions, it`ll push China into PTSD shock that`ll force it into an isolationist period. I want to make clear that China was the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation on Earth for most of its history. However, the Neo-Confucian Renaissance and the bureaucratization of Chinese society eventually led to its stagnation and decline. The bureaucrats, in their quest for control and stability, suppressed technological advancements and limited trade, which ultimately hindered China`s ability to compete with the rapidly advancing West.

It is important to acknowledge that China`s history is incredibly complex, and there is no single factor that can explain its rise and fall. However, understanding the interplay between cosmopolitanism and isolationism, as well as the influence of the bureaucrats and Confucianism, can help us gain a better understanding of the forces that have shaped China`s past and continue to shape its future.

As China emerges as a global superpower in the 21st century, it remains to be seen whether it will learn from its past and adopt a more balanced approach to governance and international engagement. In a rapidly changing world, the lessons of history can provide valuable insights as we navigate the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
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Appendix: Further Reading

For readers interested in delving deeper into the themes discussed in this blog post, the following books provide comprehensive explorations of modern ideologies, discontent, and the search for meaning in the 21st century and was being used as a Source for this Blog:

1. "The Search for Modern China" by Jonathan D. Spence: This book provides a comprehensive overview of Chinese history from the late Ming dynasty to the present day, offering insights into the political, social, and cultural transformations that have shaped modern China.
2. "China: A History" by John Keay: Keay's book offers a broad yet detailed account of China's history, covering various dynasties, philosophical movements, economic developments, and interactions with other civilizations.
3. "The Cambridge Illustrated History of China" edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey: This illustrated volume provides a visual journey through Chinese history, accompanied by insightful commentary from leading scholars in the field.
4. "The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people" (PBS Documentary Series) by Michael Wood: This documentary series offers a compelling narrative of China's history, exploring key events, personalities, and themes in an accessible and engaging manner.
5. "The Mandate of Heaven and The Great Ming Code" translated by Jiang Yonglin: This book provides translations and analyses of two foundational texts in Chinese political and legal thought, offering insights into concepts such as the Mandate of Heaven and legal governance in imperial China.

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