Condensed History of China

until fairly recently, most historians thought that it was a myth. But the archeological record has proven them wrong. Xia had descended from a wide-spread Yellow River valley Neolithic culture known as the Longshan culture, famous for their black-lacquered pottery

Shang (c. 1750 – c. 1040 BC)

There are three things to know about the Shang:

one, they were the most advanced bronze-working civilization in the world;
two, Shang remains provide the earliest and most complete record of Chinese writing; and
three, they were quite possibly the most blood-thirsty pre-modern civilization. They liked human sacrifice — a lot.
Fourth, the Shang had a very odd system of succession: instead of a patrilineal system where power was passed from father to son, the kingship passed from elder brother to younger brother.

Western Zhou (c. 1100 – 771 BC)

they used a father-to-son succession system. Also, they weren’t too keen on human sacrifice. However, they weren’t as good at working bronze as the Shang.

The Zhou actually didn’t rule all of what was then China. China was then made up of a number of quasi-independent principalities. However, the Zhou were the most powerful principality and played the role of hegemon in the area. They were located in the middle of the principalities, giving rise to what the Chinese call their country — the Middle Kingdom. The Zhou were able to maintain peace and stability through the hegemon system for a few hundred years; then in 771 BC, the capital was sacked by barbarians from the west.

Eastern Zhou (771 – 256 BC)

a) Spring & Autumn Period (722 – 481 BC)

After the capital was sacked by barbarians from the west, the Zhou moved east.

The Spring and Autumn Annals provides a history of period saw a proliferation of new ideas and philosophies. The three most important, from a historical standpoint, were Daoism, Confucianism, and Legalism.

Daoism the oldest great book of Daoism, the Dao de Jing, The Way and Virtue, was allegedly written by a man named Lao-zi.. Daoism profoundly influenced the later development of Cha’an (also known as Zen) Buddhism.

Confucius believed that moral men make good rulers and that virtue is one of the most important properties that an official can have. He also believed that virtue can be attained by following the proper way of behaving, and thus placed a great deal of stress on proper. The Emperor was the Son of Heaven (while Heaven in a Western context is a place, Heaven in the Chinese context is a divine/natural force) and had the Mandate of Heaven to rule.

Legalism derived from the teachings of another one of Confucius’ disciples, a man named Xun-zi. Xun-zi believed that, for the most part, man would look out for himself first and was therefore basically evil. Consequently, the Legalists designed a series of draconian laws that would make a nation easier to control. The fundamental aim of both Confucianism and Legalism was the re-unification of a then divided China, but they took difference approaches. Confucianism depended on virtue and natural order; Legalism used a iron fist.

b) Warring States Period

The politics of the Warring States period were much the same as those of the Spring & Autumn period; the major difference was that while in the earlier period, armies were small and battles lasted only a day, much like in pre-Napoleonic wars, the later period featured what modern strategists would call “totalwar.” Massive armies (half a million per army was not an uncommon figure), long battles, sieges, were all common features of the Warring States battlefield.

D. Early Empire

Qin (221 – 206 BC)

In 221 BC, the first Emperor of China (so-called because all the previous dynastic heads only called themselves kings), Qin Shihuangdi, conquered the rest of China after a few hundred years of disunity. There are two major reasons why he won; the first is that he was a devout Legalist (so much so that he burnt all the books in the country) and did things like execute generals for showing up late for maneuvers.. The other reason is because the state of Qin had a lot of iron, and consequently, at the dawn of the iron age, had many more iron weapons than the other armies did. He linked together many of the old packed-earth defensive walls of the old principalities into the Great Wall of China.

Han (206 BC – 220 AD)

a) Earlier Han (206 BC – AD 8)

Han is an important dynasty mostly because they developed (actually, it was invented by Qin Shihuangdi, but perfected by the Han) the administrative model which every successive chineese dynasty would copy and refine. China was the biggest country in the world. This is a management issue of tremendous proportions. How are you going to do things like collect taxes, keep the peace, and basically run a government without bureaucracy? The Chinese bureaucratic system is based on the study of the Confucian Classics, which provide an ideological reference point for proper behavior and loyalty to the Emperor. By developing this system, the Han emperors were able to run China with a reasonable degree of efficiency.

b) Wang Man Interregnum

Between AD 8 and 25, a man named Wang Mang ruled China. He had been part of the Han royal household; he himself, however, was a commoner and had no royal blood in his veins. He had been appointed emperor after a power struggle in the Han house. History is mixed on him. While he did seem to have some good, reform-oriented ideas (e.g. power back to the people), he really wasn’t up to the task of ruling.

Wang Mang hoped to gather support from the peasantry be introducing reforms. He declared that a family of less than eight that had more than fifteen acres was obligated to distribute the excess amount of land to those who had none. His next act as Emperor was to devise a new loan system for peasants. Instead of paying the thirty percent interest that private loaners demanded, Wang Mang offered loans to those in needs with only ten percent interest. In an attempt to stabilize the price of grain, Wang Mang made plans for a state granary. He did this, hoping to discourage the wealthy landowner to hoard grain and profit from price fluctuations.

Wang Mang was convinced that his subjects would obey his decrees, but again gentry-bureaucrats gave less importance to Confucianism than to their wealth. They and other landowners did not cooperate with Wang’s reforms, and without large media like newspapers, the local people would remain unaware of any reforms if the landowners withheld the information.

In the year AD 11, the Yellow River broke its banks, creating floods from Shan Dong in the north, to where the river empties into the sea. The people did not have grain stored as Wang Mang said they should have. In addition, the people were left without food shortly after the crisis began. In the year AD 14, they resorted to cannibalism. Thinking that his reforms failed, Wang Mang withdrew them. However, it was too late, because his opposition already took up arms against him.After his death in AD 25, the Han royal family took back the reins of power, and set up the Later Han dynasty.

c) Later Han Dinasty

The later Han were able to keep it together for about 200 years; however, towards the end of their rule, they become more and more dissolute. More importantly, they were unable to deal with two factors: a population shift from the Yellow River in the north to the Yangzi in the south; and they simply could not control barbarian tribal raiders from the north, which were one reason why people were moving to the south. Eventually, in AD 220, the center had lost so much control to the provinces that it collapsed plunging China into 350 years of chaos and disunity.

E. Years of Dinunity: Three Kingdoms and Dinasties from North & South (220-590)

Constants wars ramped through China, with little importance. Perhaps its greatest accomplishment was to reinforce in Chinese thought the importance of having “one Emperor over China, like one sun in the sky.”

Socially, though, there were two important developments. The first was that the ethnic Han Chinese kept on moving south, while ‘barbarians’ moved into the north and assimilated themselves into Chinese society. The second development was Buddhism, which had had its start in India sometime in the 6th century BC. It was introduced into China around the middle of the first century AD but really didn’t catch on until the fall of the Han dynasty.

F. The second empire

Sui (589 – 618)

The most important thing to know about this dynasty is that it was very short (by dynastic standards) and that it did a pretty good job of re-unifying China. Because it had a northern power base, it was part barbarian, as was the Tang. Despite the fact that the royal houses of Sui and succeeding Tang were not entirely Han Chinese, both of these dynasties are considered to be Chinese, as opposed to the Mongols and Manchus later on.

Tang (618 – 907)

The Tang are considered to be one of the great dynasties of Chinese history; many historians rank them right behind the Han. They extended the boundaries of China through Siberia in the North, Korea in the east, and were in what is now Vietnam in the South. They even extended a corridor of control along the Silk Road well into modern-day Afghanistan.

There are two interesting historical things about the Tang. The first is the Empress Wu, the only woman ever to actually bear the title ‘Emperor’ (or, in her case, Empress).The second was the An Lushan Rebellion, which marked the beginning of the end for the

Song (960-1280)

The Song (pronounced Soong) dynasty ranks up there with the Tang and the Han as one of the great dynasties. A time of remarkable advances in technology, culture, and economics, the Song, despite its political failures, basically set the stage for the rest of the imperial era. The most important development during the Song was that agricultural technology, aided by the importation of a fast-growing Vietnamese strain of rice and the invention of the printing press, developed to the point where the food-supply sy
stem was so efficient that, for the most part, there was no need to develop it further. There was enough food for everyone, more or less, the system worked, and it became self-sustaining. Because it worked, there was no incentive to improve it; the system thus remained basically unchanged from the Song up until the twentieth century. In fact, many rice farmers in the Chinese interior and in less-developed regions of south-east Asia are, for the most part, still using Song-era farming techniques.

The efficiency of the system not only made it economically self-sustaining, but also re-enforced the existing social structure. Consequently, society and economics were largely static from the Song until the collapse of the dynastic system in the twentieth century.

This is important because one of the factors behind the Industrial Revolution in Europe was that they didn’t have enough people to work the fields. There was an incentive to create better technology in Europe; there was no need in China. China actually had a surplus of human labor.

While the Song was a time of great advances, politically and militarily, the Song was a failure. The northern half of China was conquered by barbarians, forcing the dynasty to abandon a northern capital in the early 1100’s. Then a hundred and fifty years later, the Mongols, fresh from conquering everything between Manchuria and Austria, invaded and occupied China.

Yuan (Mongol) (1279 – 1368)

While time of Mongol rule is called a dynasty, it was in fact a government of occupation. While the Mongols did use existing governmental structures for the duration, the language they used was Mongol, and many of the officials they used were non-Chinese. Mongols.

The Yuan dynasty also featured the famous Khubilai Khan, who, among other things, extended the Grand Canal. While in many ways, the Yuan was a disaster, the reluctance of the Mongols to hire educated Chinese for governmental posts resulted in a remarkable cultural flowering; for example, Beijing Opera was invented during the Yuan. On the other hand, attempts to analyze the failure of the Song in keeping barbarians out China led to the rise and dominance of Neo-Confucianism, a notoriously conservative (if not outright reactionary) brand of Confucianism that had originally developed during the Song.

Ming (1368 – 1644)

Then came the Ming. The Ming rulers distinguished themselves by being fatter, lazier, crazier, and nastier than the average Imperial family. After the first Ming Emperor discovered that his prime minister was plotting against him, not only was the prime minister beheaded, but his entire family and anyone even remotely connected with him. Eventually, about 40,000 people were executed in connection with this case alone. They were also virulent Neo-Confucianists.

In the early 1400s, a sailor named Zheng He (with a fleet of some 300-plus ships)sailed as far west as Mogadishu and Jiddah, and he may have gotten to Madagascar. But once the sailors came back, the trips were never followed up on. Conservative scholars at court failed to see the importance of them. For the first time in history, China was turning inwards, clinging to an incorrect interpretation of an outmoded philosophy.

G. The Birth of Modern China

Qing (Manchu) (1644 – 1911)

In 1644, the Manchus took over China and founded the Qing dynasty. The Qing weren’t the worst rulers; under them the arts flowered and culture bloomed. Moreover, they attempted to copy Chinese institutions and philosophy to a much greater extent than then the Mongols of the Yuan. However, in their attempt to to emulate the Chinese, they were even more conservative and inflexible than the Ming. Their approach to foreign policy, which was to make everyone treat the Emperor like the Son of Heaven and not acknowledge other countries as being equal to China.

Other problems that plagued the late (1840 onwards) Qing included rampant corruption, a steady decentralization of power, and the unfortunate fact that they were losing control on too many fronts at the same time. Rebellions sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. In hindsight, it is clear that the entire system was slowly collapsing.

The attitude of the Western powers towards China (England, Russia, Germany, France, and the United States) was ambivalent. On the one hand, they did their best to undermine restrictive trading and governmental regulation. On the other hand, they did do their best to prop up the ailing Qing, the most notable example being the crushing of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 by foreign troops (primarily U.S. Marines). What the Western powers were interested in was the carving up of China for their own purposes, and that, paradoxically, required keeping China together.

But two things happened to prevent that. First, in 1911, the Qing dynasty collapsed and China plunged headlong into chaos. Second, in 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand told his driver to go down a street in Sarajevo he shouldn’t have, and Europe plunged headlong into chaos.

Republican China (1911-1949)

During World War I, the Chinese Government, such as it was, sided with the Allies. In return, they were promised that the German concessions in Shangdong province would be handed back over to the Chinese Government at the end of the war. They weren’t, and to add insult to injury, the Treaty of Versailles handed them over to Japan. On May 4, 1919, about 3,000 students from various Beijing universities got together in Tiananmen Square and held a mass protest. In the early 1920s, Dr. Sun Yatsen, as the leader of the (up-to-then unsuccessful) Nationalist Party (KMT), accepted Soviet aid. With the Communist help, Sun Yatsen was able to forge a alliance with the fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and started the task of re-unifying a China beset with warlords.

Unfortunately, Sun died of cancer in 1925. The leadership of the KMT was then taken over by Chiang Kaishek.

After Chiang took over the KMT, he launched his famous “Northern Expedition” — all the way from Guangzhou to Shanghai. This unified Southern China and, more importantly, let the Nationalists control the Lower Yangzi. Once they got to Shanghai, Chiang, who had never liked the Communists anyway, launched a massacre of CCP members. Among those who managed to escape the carnage was a young communist named Mao Zedong.

The Communists were forced to abandon their urban bases and fled to the countryside. There, the Nationalist forces (aided and abetted by German ‘advisors’) tried to hunt t
hem down, and in the words (more or less) of Chiang, “eliminate the cancer of Communism.” In 1934, the Nationalists were closing in on the Communist positions, when, under the cover of night, the Communists broke out and started running. They didn’t stop for a year. This was the Long March. When the Communists started, they had 100,000 people. A year later, when they finally stopped, they had traveled 6,000 miles, and were down to between four to eight thousand people.

While all this was going on, the Japanese were busy occupying Manchuria. This proved helpful for the Communists — the troops sent by Jiang to the North to contain and eventually eliminate the CCP much preferred to spend their time fighting the Japanese.

In 1937, the Japanese invaded China proper from their bases in Manchuria, using the notorious “Marco Polo” incident as an excuse. Once whole-scale war had been launched, it didn’t take the Japanese long to occupy the major coastal cities and commit atrocities. By the time that the war had ended in 1945, 20 million Chinese had died at the hands of the Japanese. The Nationalist Government fled.

In 1939, World War II started. This initally had little effect on the situation in China, as the Japanese were not involved with war in Europe. However, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the main thrust of the Japanese war effort turned away from fighting the Chinese and towards fighting the Americans.

After the Americans entered the war, the Communists started to consolidate their control over North China in preparation for the resumption of the civil war that would occur after the Japanese had been defeated. The Nationalists, in contrast to the Communists, were disorganized and corrupt, problems that would only intensify after the war. Moreover, their attempts to fight the Japanese were ineffective at best.

At the end of World War II, the war between the Nationalists and the Communists started up again. The Communists were hampered by the fact that the Japanese were under orders to surrender only to the Nationalists, not the Communists. This, however, did not end up making much of a difference. By early 1949, the Nationalists were hamstrung by intractable corruption and huge debts; they paid off their debts by printing more money, which only lead to hyperinflation. By that October, the Nationalists had fled to Taiwan and Mao Zedong had proclaimed the creation of the People’s Republic of China.

The People’s Republic of China (1949- )

In 1958, Mao, who was growing increasingly distant from Moscow, launched the Great Leap Forward. The idea was to mobilize the peasant masses to increase crop production by collectivizing the farms and use the excess labor to produce steel. What ended up happening was the greatest man-made famine in human history. From 1958 to 1960, poor planning and bad management managed to starve 30 million people to death. Officially, the government blamed it on “bad weather.”

By 1962, the break with the Soviets was complete,

In 1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The origins of the Cultural Revolution are vague, but probably stem, in part, from a growing separation between Mao’s clique and the rest of the CCP. Mao called upon students to rebel against authority, and they did, forming units of Red Guards. China promptly collapsed into anarchy. While the Cultural Revolution ‘officially’ ended in 1969, and the worst abuses stopped then, the politically charged atmosphere was maintained until Mao’s death in 1976.

Deng Xiaoping, who was purged twice during the Cultural Revolution eventually emerged as the paramount leader in 1978, and promptly launched his economic reform program. Deng’s actions, initially limited to agricultural reforms, gradually started to spread to the rest of the country. One of his favorite sayings is “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white; what matters is how well it catches mice.” This is in direct contrast to the ideology of the Maoist years, where a favored slogan was “Better Red than Expert,” which meant, in practice, that totally unqualified ideologues were put in charge of projects that really needed technical expertise.

In 1993, Deng Xiaoping, in one of his last major public appearances, toured the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and emphatically voiced his approval. After that, the Chinese economy exploded.

Condensed History of China – Paul Frankenstein – Summary

C. Pre-imperial china