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China and Imperial Decay and Decline

One of the greatest accidents of modern world history is perhaps the fact that when the West began to seriously impinge on China, in the middle of the nineteenth century, China was already entering one of its periodic phases of dynastic decline. Thus, while the experience of Western imperialism that the Chinese speak of as the Century of Humiliation was in some respects a wholly unprecedented episode in Chinese history, in other respects it follows long-established patterns.

The rhythm of imperial decay and decline, peasant rebellion, and fragmentation, followed by a counter-rhythm of attempted and then actual restoration and revitalization, is a very old one in China (Fairbank, pp. 100-103). It can be clearly traced back at least nearly two thousand years, to the decline of the Han Dynasty and the eventual flourishing of the Tang Dynasty, and suggestively similar patterns can be found nearly fifteen hundred years earlier still, in the decline of the Shang and the rise of the Chou.

Moreover, this rhythm is so established in traditional Chinese historiography that it is in some sense self-fulfilling. A dynasty's eventual loss of the Mandate of Heaven, and a period of turmoil followed by the assumption of that mandate by a new dynasty, is something that the scholar-gentry class that dominated Chinese affairs understood and expected, and which therefore shaped their own response to times of disorder. When once a dynasty reached a certain point of incapacity, easier to recognize than to define, the scholar-gentry class in effect withdrew their allegiance from the dynasty and began to cast about in search of a new dynasty that could gain the Mandate of Heaven and thus deserve their renewed allegiance (Fairbank, p. 103).

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries adhere closely to this traditional pattern in numerous respects. Peasant rebellion erupted at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the form of the White Lotus m...

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China and Imperial Decay and Decline. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:48, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682578.html