If you read enough Chinese history, a cycle is all too obvious. A turbulent time is replaced by prosperity which then decays into unbelievable levels of destruction. This cycle has applied from the First Emperor to the Mongols and Qing to Chiang Kai Shek and the warlord era to Mao.
This historical cycle is uncannily reliable. Today’s headlines about anything and everything Chinese could easily fit into any era in any timeline of Chinese history. That horrifyingly brutal history makes the last millennium of European politics and wars look simplistic and trivial.
Wars, internal and external, were common, and often disastrous. The West has no real equivalent. Even the Wars of the Reformation don’t quite measure up. Only the Thirty Years War even comes close before the 20th century.
Repression on a scale unheard-of elsewhere was also common. China has never had anything even slightly resembling a functional democracy. There were no “rights” as the West understands them.
The major cycles of Chinese history, oversimplified
Imperial China’s dynasties fell into the cycle of self-destruction with almost monotonous, and murderous, regularity. The rise and fall of the dynasties were invariably accompanied by internal pressures. Some dynasties were so corrupt at the end that they were completely dysfunctional and unable to rule. Others could rule, and brutally, but incompetence and cronyism always destroyed them.
The First Emperor united China and ended the Warring States era; then destroyed his own empire with extreme repression and xenophobia. The Tang rose, fell, rose, and fell and the country fractured into north and south dynasties. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty came and went, changing roles from conquerors to forgotten mediocrities after Kublai Khan. The Ming created and destroyed their ground-breaking maritime trade with the world and fell soon afterward. The last Ming Emperor hanged himself.
Even the Qing’s astonishingly hardworking Qianlong Emperor wrote to Queen Victoria, telling the “chieftainess” that China had “no need of foreign manufactures”. The results of this insular mindset were the Opium Wars. The situation was brought on by China’s inability to deal with inferior barbarians, as the rest of the world were seen.
Internally, China was by this point an insoluble mess. During the late Qing, the world’s biggest war in history to that time, the Taiping Rebellion, managed to kill more people than World War 1, according to some estimates. The nation was devastated.
The Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) hijacked Sun Yat Sen’s early revolution when the Qing Dynasty collapsed. The Nationalists could barely manage the local warlords, let alone aggressive Imperial Japan. Internal politics as usual destroyed China as a functional nation. The KMT was unspeakably corrupt. At one point the leader of the Green Gang Triad was running the Bank of China. The Nationalists fell in 1949.
Mao, coming to power, unleashed the Cultural Revolution, a national polarization with only Mao in charge. Millions died and many more lived miserably through a truly horrific era.
I’ve met survivors of some of modern China’s various moods, and their stories are almost unbelievable. The horrifying thing is that whatever the local news, the current events, and whatever the incidents, all of these things are just parts of the greater cycle.
The degenerative cycle
It took decades to recover from Mao. Modern China’s prosperity is the tale of the recovery phase of the overall cycle. After the recovery phase, however, begins the degenerative cycle.
This part of the cycle has never really varied at all:
- Internal government upheaval – Some faction takes charge of a fractured, and invariably extremely corrupt government. This process is usually almost invisible externally.
- An “emperor” is made – China’s most conspicuous leaders are de facto emperors, competent or otherwise. They have extraordinary power, far beyond their predecessors in their own governments. The imperial mode seems to be the default.
- Opposition is destroyed – However innocuous, all visible dissent ceases. Any reason is invented to remove opponents and critics.
- Economic problems become severe – Wealth and power have an unambiguous history in China’s destructive eras. Wealth corrupts; China suffers.
- External factors come into play – China has a unique history of bizarre relations with the rest of the world. Whether it’s the Mongols, Soviets, colonial powers or the Americans, this highly reactive and often extremely clumsy relationship drives all future moves.
The ghosts are mean
China’s historical ghosts are quite literally indescribably vicious and brutal. Millions of dead are nothing even slightly new to China. Vlad the Impaler might (or might not) have rated a sentence or two in Chinese history. He wouldn’t have been too remarkable, though.
The Mafia would look like a strangely cute and utterly harmless kids’ charity compared to the almost psychotic internal Whack-A-Moles of Chinese historical politics. The Nazis would have been considered mere hobbyists in terms of numbers of dead. Machiavelli wouldn’t have got a job sweeping streets in ancient China; he’d have been considered far too predictable.
The worst of the degenerative cycle of China’s rises and falls is the return of these hideous ghosts. To give an example – One of China’s passing celebrities was famous for only one thing – His entourage happened to be passing some prisoners of war, and on the spur of the moment he decided to eat them. Dozens of them. Just a little snippet from a few millennia of strange behaviors. These ghosts are both mean and insane.
The truly vile irony is that they always appear in China’s all-too-rare times of prosperity. They thrive in times of extreme authoritarianism. They lead to disaster for China, with unchanging regularity. China always suffers most, whatever the international situation.
The media is now full of stories of an impending war with China. It could happen. If a war with China does come, the war is with China’s ghosts.
