Part 1. A Brief History
(first draft)
The history of Chinese civilization is one of the oldest and longest in the collective experience of humanity, and has proven to be one of the few oldest civilizations still standing and thriving today since its inception in antiquity. Paleoanthropologists have found evidences of
Homo erectus in China, such as the notorious Peking Man discovered during 1923 in the vicinity of Zhoukoudian, which dated back to roughly 500,000 years ago. Although that is the case for boasting such an ancient hominid lineage in China, there is no hard evidences suggesting their direct ancestry of the modern Chinese other than some hardheaded, senile, and largely antiquated scholars who still hold the claim out of a sheer nativist patriotism and nationalism, which regrettably are still evident in today's school textbooks in China. Nevertheless, artifacts of neolithic settlements dated back to tens of thousands of years ago are already ubiquitous which shall be deemed as the direct precursors of the Chinese civilization. In the historic annals of ancient China, it already gave an account of a long bygone era which enlightened us with an origin of the Chinese as a hunters and gatherers community:
people wore furs and drank blood, lived in the wilderness and caves 茹毛饮血，野处穴居. The transition from savages to civilization came from the legendary time of the so-called
Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors 三皇五帝. Although largely an mythology, the names of some of the sovereigns and sages shed much light to us about the so-called "Great Leap forward" theory of the neolithic period coined by Jared Diamond, such as
suiren 燧人
, youchao 有巢, and
Shennong 神农, literally meant
Fire Man,
Nest, and
Sacred Farmer. This Rosetta indicator gave us a great clue that people transformed from the hunting and gathering way of life to a farm settlement with the invention of fire, erection of architectures, and the manipulation of agriculture. Thus began the epic history of China.
It originated along the river banks of
Huanghe, the Yellow River some 6000 years ago. During the third millennium B.C., the clan of the legendary Yellow Emperor,
Huang Di, one of the Five Emperors and widely revered as the Great Grand Ancestor of the Chinese people,, had for the first time forged a confederation of united tribes in the heart of China and established a proto-Chinese civilization. A few centuries thereafter, this proto-Chinese civilization integrated and assimilated with other cultures surrounding her and slowly expanded her perimeter until eventually, the establishment of the first dynastic kingdom, the
Xia, in today’s Henan province. It is said that during this time, this proto-Chinese civilization, known as the
Hua-Xia nation had already possessed advanced mechanisms which were capable to run a sophisticated system of society; such as essential social hierarchy, civil bureaucracy, basic writing system, military weaponry, crude forms of capital exchange, as well as professional knowledge in agriculture, astrology, meteorology, textile, architecture, etc.
Since then, even though the dynastic houses changed from hand-to-hand in innumerable occasions , much in accordance with the rest of human experience in different parts of the world, the Chinese Will and Spirit has never been broken, even during the direst tribulation inflicted by Fate, a phenomenon of vicissitude which all civilizations are bound to experience from time to time. Such as the Mongol invasion led by Genghis Khan’s clan which saw the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty under his grandson, Kublai during the 13th Century A.D. and the Manchu Empire of the Qing Dynasty under the reign of the House of Aisin-Gioro which lasted until 1911, the Chinese national Spirit has been intact and only finds itself to be ever resilient and resourceful.
Before we venture into the current issues and dilemmas of modern China, one must first to ask why is it that the people of China were such a peculiar race, who possesses almost a form of panacea that ensures her enduring longevity. In the long course of human destiny, the fate of a race were as precarious as candle in the wind, only the most resilient few survived out of the sift of ruthless Natural Selection. The only race today whose seniority, longevity, cultural continuity and fortitude are commensurable to the Chinese is the Jewish Race. The only difference is that for over two millenniums the Jews had been driven out of their homeland and living in a state of Diaspora until the recent formation of the Israeli state in Palestine. They have survived endless hardship, out of the wreckages of the Czar’s Pogrom and the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust, they have exhibited a dauntless national spirit which is sure to become one of the fittest. Their antediluvian institution is much intact and their racial character is well alike Mose’s tribes in their exodus from Pharaoh’s persecution.
The Chinese is one of such distinctive breed. Four thousands years ago, when the much of the world was still under the veil of pre-historical Hobbesian modus vivendi, the Chinese has erected a common edifice known as the Xia Dynasty which is collectively recognized as the dawn of the Chinese civilization. When Moses lead his people out of Egypt and tried to settle in a peaceful land of Canaan, the Chinese was already living under the second and a more dynamic dynasty called the Shang. During this time, Bronze ware refinement had already been finessed into a very sophisticated level, all of which had been manifested by numerous museum collections all over the world. Both social and political infrastructure had been significantly advanced. When the Greeks were busy and ferociously fighting the Trojans, the Chinese were also engaged in an epic-scale, legendary war which is bound to echo in eternity—the latterly romanticized war between the clan of Zhou and the ruling house of Shang—“Fengshen Yanyi”, commonly known in the West as The Creation of the Gods.
After the Clan of Zhou conquered the Shang Dynasty, which was largely perceived as the Mandate of Heaven, the clan of Zhou established the longest reigning dynasty in China, some 800 years in its total duration (circa 1045 BC to 256 BC). This dynasty was most crucial in the way that it has laid in some of the fundamental blueprints of the characters and belief system of the Chinese, some of which are still largely intact today, such as Confucianism and Taoism, both of which were born during the latter half of the Zhou Dynasty, roughly the contemporary to Siddhartha of Buddhism, and Plato and Aristotle of the Greek philosophic academy. This period was so important that the academic community today had commonly viewed it as the first pivotal epoch of human history, because much of our way of thinking and world view are being initiated during that time, and most of the thoughts originated since then have either become canons or pure classics. It is so fascinating and enticing that the Italians some 2000 years later introduced a new movement called the Renaissance which was largely to conjure up the Spirits of the West from the dead and reinvigorated them into a new body, that body in turn had gave birth to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Neo-classicist movement, the birth of modern democratic republics, the Industrial Revolution, and last but not least, today’s Olympic Games.
Equally important was the Zhou Dynasty to the Chinese, which gave them a prophet of their own, to wit, Confucius. For more than 2000 years, Confucianism was at the heart of the Chinese people, even though in numerous occasions some daredevil tyrants had tried to rid of the Chinese people of their prophet and imposed upon them himself, most notorious one being Mao during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Confucianism had survived in the hearts and minds of the Chinese in the form of a collective consciousness. Confucianism as an ideological structure had suited perfectly with a civilization such as the Chinese, which was, and still very much is an agrarian society in essence, with the majority of population engaged in a single occupation, namely, peasantry. Its worldly emphasis had given rise to one of the world's earliest and most sophisticated civil bureaucracy, one of the key components that had made possible for such a vast country to function and survive through millenniums. Its central cannon is the perfect ideal of a Junzi 君子, or an esquire with noble virtues, whose primary moral obligation is revolving around the family, his elders and parents, also known as filial piety. outwardly, he is obliged to observe the five noble virtues to the best of his endeavor, namely, Ren 仁, humanist Compassion, Yi 义, Morality, Li 礼, Civility, Zhi 智, Wisdom, and Xin 信, Integrity. To identify himself in harmony with nature, he knows his role subordinates to those that's above him, they are in the order of Heaven and earth, only afterwards comes men's. This all-encompassing ideological outlook has assumed a religious function which in turn transformed the Chinese during the next two millennium into the Confucian man when the West first come into contact with China during their first encounter.
If it is the Zhou Dynasty that had laid down the corner stones for the Chinese people's moral characters, it is the subsequent two dynasties that had really authenticated their physical, national, and geopolitical identity. It was in 221 BC. that the Qin, a mere remote northwestern vassal state of the former Zhou kingdom in its origin, had finally vanquished the Zhou Dynasty and conquered all of the other vassal states, and unified China for the first time, in its entirety from the Northern China's Great Wall to the Southern coasts of South China Sea under a single centralized and authoritarian empire. The king of Qin proclaimed himself as the Emperor of China, and in turn not only bequeathed the world with an awesome underworld of terracotta army from his mausoleum, but more significantly, had forged a prototype of a ruthless and omnipotent despot, which was to haunt the Chinese ever since. It was only a few decades ago that Mao was to emulate Qin's diabolical persona into a far worse nightmare during the Cultural Revolution, when he hailed the emperor of Qin as the greatest Führer ever existed in China, and waged a devastating campaign against Confucianism, something the Qin Emperor had done as well during his reign of terror. Nevertheless, it is a good case of argument that it was not until the Qin Dynasty that we first saw the archetype of the ruthless, omnipotent, and absolutist Chinese despot in all his vivid and graphic manifestation. All of the subsequent despots, tyrants, and dictators big and small owe certain debts to their ancestral Qin's legacy.
It is a well-established physicist theory that the amount of action leads to the equal amount of reaction. It holds true for historic dialectics as well. For that amount of terror Qin had waged, he certainly won't see his hard-forged empire hold up for long, which is equally true for Mao's regime. Both crumbled apart as soon as they drew in their last breathe, and what's followed is a reformation and a somewhat peaceful reconstruction and reinvigoration. Following the Qin's collapse was an epic showdown between two of the most powerful potentates vying for China's ultimate overlordship, the Chu and the Han in the notorious war known as Chu-Han Conflict. What emerged was without saying perceived as the Mandate of Heaven, and gave rise to one of the most powerful dynasties of China - the Han empire, 202 BC - 220 AD. It was so crucial that the Han dynasty is to the Chinese, whose ethnicity is classified as over 90% Han today. Its glory and cultural prowess were equally substantial, that it not only produced some of the greatest military generals and victories against the northern nomadic tribes and expanded the northwestern frontiers, which opened up trade routes with Asia Minors, it also boasts endless magnificent artifacts and literatures, most well known is the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historians. It was also during the Han Dynasty that Buddhism was introduced into China from India, which took a life of its own and significantly supplemented the Chinese culture and tradition in the next two millennium. Han Dynasty was often associated with Tang Dynasty as the golden age of China in the Chinese consciousness, and people mentioned the two with pride and glory, as opposed to the Qing, the last dynasty in Chinese history, often with infamy and humiliation as it was being internally ruled by a minor ethnicity, the manchus, and externally bullied by Western imperialism. So much so that today's younger generation of China have initiated a grassroot movement of Han fashion, which they viewed as the authentic Chinese folk costume like the kimono to the Japanese, in order to do away with the ubiquitous Manchu folk costume, which was mistaken as an enduring stereotype of the Chinese traditional fashion.
As I mentioned earlier, if vicissitude is the abiding law of history, it can’t be truer than the history of China. After the Han Empire had peaked its zenith, it started to descend into a relative decline since the second century AD., much like the second half of the Zhou dynasty, which spawned the epoch of Spring and Autumn, and Warring States. Similarly, following the waning era of Han dynasty, there came the most notorious era of the Three Kingdoms (circa 220-280 AD.). So famous that much of the oriental popular culture, such as cinema, TV dramas, and computer games were still very heavily influenced by it. This era has produced a substantial numbers of heroes, who still infatuate the minds and imaginations of the general populace today. Such as the omniscient, wise and virtuous chancellor Zhuge Liang, loyal and judicious general Guan Yu of Late Han, shrewd and lionhearted king of Wei, Cao Cao, to name just a few, so much legends and stories of glorious and epic proportions had turned from the era, that it is beyond doubt that this period marked yet another most fascinating time in the history of China. One can derive much insights and knowledge of the wisdom and moral characters of the classic Chinese by studying them.
After the period of the Three Kingdoms, which was to be unified briefly by the feeble and short-lived dynasty of Jin, China was to disintegrated into a Dark Age, the so-called Southern and Northern Dynasties, from the next few centuries before enlightenment sparked up again in the 7th century when Tang Dynasty was founded. The Dark Age encompasses many regional factions with a few dozens different dynasties and kingdoms spreading north and south in China. This was also the first time when Northern China falls into the reigns of the nomadic steppe tribes, in which the Chinese coined a rather nationalistic or biased phrase “Five Barbarians’ rampage of China” (五胡乱华). The realities of which was much more complicated. Even though no doubt the “barbarians” did wreak havocs in certain frontier regions by looting and pillaging and carried out some atrocious massacres, an enduring problem faced China for millenniums and a key factor to erect the Great Wall, they also introduced many refreshing and rejuvenating elements into the Chinese culture, manifested in all realms of social facets, such as fashion, religions, technology, and the enrichment of language. Many of them ended up fell in love with Chinese civilization that they forbidden their own people speaking their native language, and issued an executive decree to enforce a mass sinonization program. i.e. Most notorious was the case of Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei (467-499 AD.). The phenomenon of so-called barbarians’ intervention, occupation, and mass assimilations in the history of China was to play out again and again that it no doubt has transformed certain aspects of Chinese national and cultural characters. E.g. most Northern Chinese’ dialects are mutually intelligible and the people in enduring stereotypes are deemed to be brutish, hunky, impulsive, and subsisted on wheat and barley. A very steppe people-like character and the relative homogeny of the Northern dialects and culture only can be made possible by conquests.
In contrast, The South was the stronghold of authentic Chinese for a very longtime until the Mongol Yuan Dynasty and finally, the Manchu Qing Dynasty. Other than that, it was for the most part, diversified, self-sufficient, and ruled by Chinese of different dynasties retreated from the North. The terrain was mountainous and rugged, in contrast to the flatness of northern plains, so people are more isolated, and in turn, most topolects of the South are mutually unintelligible, albeit always assisted with an unified written system. People of the South are physically more graceful in comparison to the Northerners, elegant in taste, refined in culture, and subsisted on rice. Militarily, they could never beat the Northerners, but they have always retained a crypto-pride in their culture, arts, and civil standards. This peculiar phenomenon cannot be truer in the later Southern Song Dynasty of the 12th century, in which they have developed such an exquisite civilization that can only be rivaled with the Rococo French. A famous poem written by the Tang Dynasty poet, Du Mu 杜牧 has encapsulated this nostalgic infatuation:
The Four hundred and Eighty temples of the Southern Dynasties 南朝四百八十寺
So many buildings and towers were immersed in the mist and drizzle多少楼台烟雨中
There is an age old proverb in China which sums up the enduring nature of Chinese history: “long disintegration lead to consolidation, long consolidation lead to disintegration.” 分久必合，合久必分。This has proved to be an abiding law of the progression of Chinese history. After much turmoil and chaos during the Dark Age of Southern and Northern Dynasties, clarity slowly started to emerge almost as if a déjà vu of the Qin Empire all over again. Only this time, it is called the Sui dynasty. Also like Qin, it only lasted two generations, and slipped straight into the most well known dynasty of China, the Tang dynasty, also known as the Golden Age of China. Much like its mighty predecessor, the Han Empire, Tang dynasty (618-907 AD.) was truly the most glamorous and magnificent epoch in the whole human experience of the middle ages, and arguably the most powerful state outshining all its contemporaries. If the Roman’s quip “all roads lead to Rome” was an adequate way of discerning the supremacy of the Roman Empire, then during the Tang dynasty, “all roads lead to Chang’an (capital of Tang)” must hold equally true. Both physical as well as cultural artifacts of the time still unequivocally attest to its flamboyant presence. It has produced some of the most well known literary and poetic masters of China. Such as Li Bai, Du Pu, Han Yu, to name but a few. Many of their works are still ubiquitous in the popular culture today. The ceramic wares of Tang known as Sancai that glittered in the museums all over the world today were proved to be the state-of-the-art at the times.
Socially, economically, and politically, it also boasts some of the most stunning feats that is quite hard to imagine even for many of the Chinese today. When most of the medieval European cities such as London and Paris were still the scale of villages, towns, or citadels, Tang cities has already reached millions of denizens, and its sheer dynamism, grandeur, diversity, and economic prowess were evidently proofs that they’re some of the world’s first cosmopolitans. In its capital Chang’an, which was the final destination of the Silk Road, a medieval international highway, it encompasses all of the religions of the time, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Manicheans, Daoists, all co-existed peacefully. There’re Jews, Arabs, Persians, Tartars, Tibetans, Japanese, Koreans, Uighurs, Southeastern Asians, living in the city, trying to make the most of their pilgrimage and sojourning in China. When the Byzantine Empire was already suffering from its midlife crisis, when Charlemagne was busy building its nascent Carolingian empire, when the Anglo-Saxons were undergoing its mass migration and assimilation to the British Isle, and the Vikings were busy hacking off each others’ heads and wreak havocs in Northern Europe, the Tang Empire was truly the shining beacon of the East. Its legacy was far-reaching, and its influence on other Asian countries was substantial. Today, the Cantonese Chinese who first founded Chinatowns all over the world called their communities in Chinese, the “Tang People’s Streets”, even though they’re almost all ethnically Han, Tang dynasty was really the period in which the final sinonization of southern China was completed.
Without indulging too much in China’s passing glory, as the Chinese aphorism pithily put it: “there is no soirée in the world that lasts forever”, Tang dynasty was disintegrating during the final century of the first millennium AD. What followed is almost an encore of what preceded it, a second mini-dark age, the so-called Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. This period was relatively trivial in the whole annals of China; nevertheless, it is a historical stage which holds two significances. First, it marked the transitional phase at the end of the first millennium which inherited everything of the antiquity China, and paved the way for the next major dynasty of China, the Song dynasty (960-1279). Secondly, it reinforced the significance that the “barbarians”’ role in the meddling, shaping, and reshaping of the affairs in China. Three out of the Five Dynasties were founded by a group of northwestern nomads (late-Tang 后唐, late-Jin 后晋, and late-Han 后汉) called the Shatuo Turks, who were the ancestors of the modern Uyghurs in Xinjiang, when China was fragmented subjected to regional foreign dominance. It was also in this period that the other “barbarians” started to make their first historical debut and ultimately transformed the course of Chinese feudal history in the next millennium, which only ended in 1911 with the dethronement of the Qing emperor of the Manchu people, who shared ancestry with their predecessors, the Jurchen of the Jin dynasty (1125-1235), which occupied most of northern China and constantly harassed their Chinese neighbors, the Song dynasty until its final retreat to the south of the Yangtze River. Preceded to the rise of Jurchen, who were then subjects to the Liao dynasty (907-1125) founded by the Khitans, there were also the Tanguts who founded the West Xia dynasty (1038-1227) in today's western China. And most significantly and probably unwittingly, the seeds were sown for the awe-inspiring Mongols of this time, who originated from some obscurities as slaves of the Liao dynasty.
All of the epic dramas of the “barbarians” were able to play out was because the collapse of central command of the Tang dynasty and the disintegration of China during this mini-dark age. When the Chinese resume control and unified China Proper again in Song dynasty, the face of northern China was beyond their recognition and the Chinese was to face a formidable and menacing neighbor on their northern frontier ever since, who would again and again, much like the barbarian case the Roman empire was suffering, wage invasions toward the south, and ultimately saw the whole country conquered under Kublai Khan of the brief Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) and again, under the Manchus of Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
Following this mini-dark age was the establishment of the Song dynasty
(960-1279). Even though comparatively speaking it was weaker than the Tang or the Han dynasties in terms of its military prowess and territorial sovereignty, (it lost all of the northwest lands that its predecessors formerly possessed;) and it was surrounded by redoubtable "barbarians" all over it: the Liao to their North, the
Tangut West Xia to their northwest, and the Tibetans to their southwest, to name just a few, nevertheless it was still arguably the most advanced civilization of its contemporaries in the world. The Song dynasty has developed some of the most advanced financial, governmental, artistic and technological feats at the time. The magnificent panorama of the painting,
Along the River During the Qingming Festival, still manifests its once glory. Cultural accomplishments were also in its blossom, with one of its emperor, Huizong, being himself a sophisticated artist, calligrapher, and a virtuoso, the state sponsored cultural enrichment was at its plateau. The artifacts produced from the Song dynasty that filled in the museums all over the world, such as paintings, jade, amber, ceramics wares were state-of-the-arts outshining all its contemporaries. The legendary classic novel, Water Margin, written in the later Ming dynasty, stood as a vivid depiction of its social and cultural plurality. So rich was its delineation and description that when it was exported to Japan it brought in a great impact much as the American culture does today. The tattoos that donned so many of the characters of the novel was popularized in the Japanese underworld and became the world-renowned Yakusa tattoos that we are so familiar with today.
During the whole establishment of the Song dynasty, the Tartary on the northern frontier had grown into a significant force. It has always been a problem on and off for thousands of years. And the different Chinese dynasties always opted between the appeasement policies of political marriages, conferring nominal titles, tributes and gifts, or occasional military campaigns. However, since the second millennium of our common era onwards, they have grown to be more and more obstreperous that an insatiable greed and lust for the invasion of China Proper had become more imminent until one point in which the two emperors of Song dynasty along with some few thousands servants were all abducted by the powerful
Jurchens of Jin dynasty, and the capital city looted and sacked, thus resolutely ended the Song dynasty's northern sovereignty. The remaining royal court retreated to the south of Yangtze River and erected another capital in today's Hangzhou, and historically initiated the feeble Southern Song dynasty with the whole northern China in the hands of the
Juchens of Jin dynasty. In a few hundred years, everything had fallen under the sway of the invincible Mongols of Ghengis Khan and later his grandson, Kublai Khan, who founded the Yuan dynasty in China (1271-1368). This was the time when the all-time renowned adventurer Marko Polo visited China and worked in the Mongol's court for some decades long, and for the first time, introduced the mysterious land of the Far East to the Europeans, and actually sown the seeds for the later age of maritime exploration and the rise of Europa.
Just like every case of the tempests of barbarian berserks, from the Carthaginians, the vikings, Attila, to the Mongols, their reigns were always brief and their legacy flimsy. After the death of Kublia Khan the Mongols ruling China soon found their subjects in rebelling and not very long the Chinese had regained their sovereignty and founded the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) by a demagogue from some obscured origin named
Zhu Yuanzhang. The Ming dynasty was the last Chinese ruled imperial glory of the so-called feudal era, (Albeit the fact that feudalism was never de facto the case since the Qin dynasty some 2000 years ago in comparison to its Western counterpart such as that of the Medieval Europe.) and nevertheless, it had achieved some of the most fascinating accomplishments in the whole history of China. Such as three out of the four Chinese literary classics were produced during the Ming era: the
Journey to the West,
Water Margin, and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Also worth point out was the fact that the Ming dynasty produced for the first time in human history, some of the world-class international fleets lead by an eunuch named Zheng He embarking some half dozen voyages traversed Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, all the way to the east coast of Africa, more than half century before Christopher Columbus' voyage of a few meager sail ships to America. Albeit a very different intention between the two, the former being a pure courtesy of meet&greet from the magnanimous Chinese emperor, and the latter being driven by utter lust and greed for gold and conquest. Last but not least, the Ming dynasty was also the time in which the Jesuits, such as the prominent Italian Matteo Ricci, made extensive studies and visits in China, and introduced the ideas of Confucianism to the West for the first time. The era of Ming was actually the initial phase of international contact and exchange leading up to the age of maritime imperialism of the West, a game which China was never interested in to begin with, and was never to catch up again, unlike the Japan, who was also keen at imitation and so-called "RAND" nation, but this is an aside.
Even though the Ming had contributed much in terms of its cultural, social, and technical achievements, the imperial court was corrupt, the royalties lewd and feeble, leading up to the hegemony of the eunuch class, also a very distinctive attribute of Chinese history which occurred in quite a few occasions throughout its millennial age, and people becoming degenerate and indolent. Contrary to the Ming's decline, some petty tribes from Manchuria who're really the kins of the Jurchens, started to consolidate and rise up under the leadership of a Manchu chieftain named Nurhaci Aisin-Gioro, who lead his cavalries to slowly annex and conquer China from the north. Even though he was mortally wounded in a battle with a Chinese general named Yuan Chonghuan by Yuan’s imported Portuguese cannons, his grandson, like Ghengis Khan's grandson, Kublai Khan, emperor Shunzhi had finally conquered the whole China and founded the last dynasty in China, the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). The Qing dynasty had really left quite a few deep imbedded legacies for the present day Chinese. Apart from the deep rooted stereotypes of oversea Chinese who founded Chinatowns all over the world, and wore a rather bizarre or even distasteful queue on their half-shaven head, which was really a Manchu custom forced onto their Chinese subjects, they had laid down the blueprint for the present China’s territorial integrity, except for Mongolia, which declared independence after the fall of Manchu court by Comintern’s intrigues. Some present day Republic of China’s map still nominally claimed the whole sovereignty of Qing’s court. This was also why the Chinese claimed Tibet was an integral part of China, because it used to be a territorial domain of the Yuan and Qing dynasties respectively. The whole reason why Mongolia was freed and Tibet wasn’t is utterly arbitrary, as are many things in the world by the whims of politicking. Also worth noting are the Manchus being foreigners or “barbarians” to the Chinese in the beginning, they had really took some pains into assimilating themselves being Chinese and sinonizing their whole race, like their predecessors mentioned before. They also produced some of the most able rulers for a good few hundred years, such as the mighty Kangxi, wise Yongzheng, and witty Qianlong. Up until the Opium War (1839-1842) when emperor Daoguang was in reign, even though the Qing court was utterly defeated and humiliated, he was still a competent ruler by all Chinese standards.
If one is to attribute the whole reason as to why the Qing dynasty had finally collapsed to them being corrupt and weak are rather a bit one-sided and unsound. The reality of which are much complicated and was due to a variety of factors, one of which was because it coincided with the rise of Western powers. The Qing was definitely not weak in terms of all of the existed dynasties in China for thousands of years, if not arguably one of the strongest, along with, say Han and Tang dynasties. It was just the other powers had grown even stronger compounded by the engines of Industrial Revolution when China was still in the phase of Asiatic agricultural society, feeding the most populous country on earth. They simply cannot compete with the West using bows and arrows while the West is pointing the Gatlings at them. It was a no-win situation and they had in-turn signed a series of so-called “unequal” treaties, thus sown the seeds of a so-perceived era of sangquanruguo 丧权辱国, or forfeiting rights and undergoing humiliations, which was still an undercurrent of present day Chinese collective consciousness, thanks very much to the CCP incessant incantation in their socialist education as if it was some mantras to be forever memorized in order to pay gratitude to the “salvation” of the CCP. The reality was quite the contrary, the CCP never really “liberated” the Chinese people, nor did they come to the “salvation” of the people when they really needed it, such as the time of Japanese invasion.
The Qing dynasty was finally toppled in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, spiritually lead by the founding father of republican China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and physically brought into being by many Manchu-hater Chinese and more daredevil adventurers, who became the warlords soon after, the most prominent and certainly most colorful one, being the former prime minster of Qing, Mr. Yuan Shikai, and later the first president of republican China, and even experimented with an ill-conceived and abortive attempt of being the emperor of the three-months old Empire of China. Nevertheless, The Republic of China was officially founded on January the first of 1912 of common era, and thus historically ended the millennial old tradition of so-called feudal rule, and established parliamentary democracy albeit with jolts and blunders. The first official republican flag was the now almost forgotten Five Color Flag—red, yellow, blue,white, and black—which symbolizes the five major races of China, the Han, Manchu, Mongols, Muslims, and Tibetans, also the five major integral domains of China, China Proper, Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet respectively.
Even though the ideals are noble and the concept sound, the republican era was ill born right from the start. Because as an age old tradition, pithily summarized by the famous Chinese idiom, One mountain cannot contain two tigers, Mr. Yuan Shikai and Dr. Sun Yat-sen simply cannot tolerate each other. Starting from the beginning, Yuan was using the Five Color Flag and Sun was using the KMT turned ROC flag that is still current in Taiwan, and in the 1920's, with all power lost and no one at his aid, finally turned to the Soviet Cominterns for assistance and founded a military cadet academy, the Whampoa in southern province of Guangdong, and bequeathed all his legacy to Chiang Kai-shek, who launched the Northern Expedition against Yuan's proteges, the various warlords, from 1926-1928, and finally transfered the official power to the infant administration of Nanking in 1928 by means of one-party dictatorship. Just to invoke another famous Chinese quip to capture the drama played out in China of this time: Just when Praying mantis was about to capture the cicada, there is the finch right after it, or just when the scolopacidae (a typer of wader) and the clam is having a pitched battle, the old fisherman had greatly benefited, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen had unwittingly sown the seed for the birth of CCP, an conditional agreement between the Soviets and the KMT to let the CCP be embedded within them. So when the KMT and the warlords, and later the Japanese were having a great and often a Pyrrhic fight, the CCP had slowly strengthened themselves under the leadership of Mao Zedong, and finally launched an all-out war after WWII and kicked the KMT out of Continental China for good, the aftermath of which is still the current political structure of today's China.
It isn't to say that Chiang never bothered with the CCP, but on the contrary, he tried in many occasions, and adopting many ugly and brutal ways, such as enlisting the aid of gangsters, to nip the CCP out of its bud. Initially he seemed to be succeeding and forced the CCP to a grand but pitiful retreat, the now glamorized and mythologized version of the so-called Long March (1934-1936), the CCP was proved to be ever-resilient. But the reality was just that Chiang had too many enemies, and Mao had too many allies, and the general ignorant populace was by and large, dirt-poor, dispossessed, and resentful of the KMT administration, which was deplorably corrupt, incompetent, and often conspired with criminals, thus people had easily fallen into the CCP's fabricated myth of Proletariat Utopian propaganda, both of my paternal grandparents being well-educated and came from respectable background, but were still ardent adherents of the Communist Cause. And after reading Edgar Snow's euphoric writings extolling the so-called Liberation Zone of the CCP such as in Red Star Over China, my grandmother resolutely embarked on the revolutionary journey in the 1940's, comrade with my grandfather who was a member earlier than her, and both worked for the Shanghai CCP underground organization, which was a detachment of the CCP's New Fourth Army. The CCP finally founded the People's Republic of China on October the first of 1949, which still stands today for the time being.
So in a way that my grandparents helped erected this Chinese Communist empire, dedicated their lives for it, sacrificed a great deal because of it in the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao pretty much sacked every individual comrade, and the same communist state which is now the sole object that I vow to dismantle due to my disenchantment which was confessed in the Prologue.
Above is a crash course of the millennial old history of China up to the present day. The future of which is really for us to create. In order to obtain a general picture of the current political situation, I am going to leave it to part 2 of this Chapter for further examination.
