Concerning previous musings on China, I’ve been having some thoughts.
Communism does not endure long, maybe close to a century at most. Xi Jinping is a mad Emperor and committed Marxist who’s policies are causing a tremendous amount of woe for China; he has also purged his court of opposition, so I don’t think someone can “Deng Xiaoping” the situation.
To my mind what we are looking at is one of those “interim dynasties” that rules China in the bits between the “greatest hits” so to speak. It’s not even a century old and it is wobbling nastily; couple that with military defeat in war with the United States (which I’m certain is coming), and I then think all China will determine that the CCP has lost the Mandate of Heaven.
Cue an “Empire long united, must divide” period.
It isn’t all doom and gloom though. Han/Tang Dynasty 2.0 would be waiting on the other side. Then the Celestial Empire rises to become a true superpower and near rival to nascent Imperial America.
I agree with your general point but think China won't break up but instead the CCP will die giving rise to a new emperor. I could see Xi himself being the start of a dynasty if he plays it right, though really I think he's setting precedents and instead it will be a successor of his (or a successor of a successor) who makes that leap. The CCP was required to modernize China, but in doing so it's become just another imperial bureaucracy under Xi.
I think China will suffer some nastiness after the fall of communism, but after that nastiness it will be "Empire long divided, must unite." That China may well have rose tinted glasses for its pre-revolutionary past and might even install a full blown Emperor on the Dragon Throne (although, perhaps not as powerful as previous monarchs have been).
Either way, a Celestial Empire that has gotten its shit together would soon remind the world of why China is the second eldest living civilisation (that honour goes to Dharmic civilisation. I believe India's destiny is also Imperial, but that's some way off).
My own contention has long been that the Mongols derailed Chinese history, rather in the way that they also derailed Russian history, and Alexander derailed Persian history. These respective "targets" were hit at different stages in their cultural development, and that affects the precise outcomes, but generally, we see that the derailed civilisations is knocked into a sort of "holding pattern". This has negative consequences down the line, although Persia interestingly escaped a lot of those negative consequences due to the influx of "new blood" from Central Asia. (Essentially, the Parthians gave shape to a new iteration of Persia, thus sort of shrugging off the derailing effects of Hellenistic, ah...
pseudomorphosis, one might say. Although I'm slightly abusing the term!
)
We've recently discussed the effects on Russia, so I'll leave that aside here.
China, however, that's an interesting case! As we know, China is very resilient. Unlike Rome, which fell apart and periheshed -- giving birth to successor-civilisations -- China
fell back together. Rome, upon its fracturing, produced three centuries of chaos in the West. The post-civilisational division is also the pre-cultural breeding ground for what comes next. (In our case: Charlemane and the ascent of Chistendom as a civilisation unto itself.) The same was true in China, but after the collapse of Latter Han and the sbsequent three centuries of turmoil... we saw no successor, but China reborn. In Sui, a new Qin. In the Tang, a repeat of the achievements of Former Han (a.k.a the Principate). In the brief anarchy of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, a mid-imperial crisis. In the Song synasty, a second iteration of the Dominate phase.
In other words: the Imperial phase of Chinese history just straight up
repeated. In full. Like that's a normal thing that civilisations can do. Well... it might be. Egypt pulled off the same stunt, but its second cycle was brutally aborted by the Assyrians, and that was essentially the death blow for Egypt as a functioning civilisation. (It took them ages to fully perish, but they never recovered.) China, unlike Egypty, unlike
anyone, completed a second phase of Universal Empire. And then, as if God has decided that pulling for a third time would be a bit
too much... the Mongols happened to China.
They happened right as the Song were already terminal, and they basically knocked China over. But Great Yuan was no Universal Empire. It was more like the Ilkhanate or the Golden Horde. A structure imposed by foreigners, and not part of China's "natural" historical cycle. It ultimately fell, but after that, China didn't return to its former historical cycle. That is: it didn't return to five-hundred-year unifications (with short upheavals in the middle) and three-century divisions between them. It was too hard-hit to "just" go on like that. But neither did it fall intopost-civilisational chaos, only for the same reigon to thereafter produce a new "Charlemagne" and give birth to a new, but different civilisation. It wasn't hit hard enough for
that. Chinese culture hadn't bee destroyed, after all. "Merely" knocked off course.
So a China persisted, but it was a derailed China.
One that produced dynasties that are far less durable. They last under three centuries in practical terms, with messy fifty-year periods (on average!) of turmoil in between. Since the Mongol invasion, China is also notably more susceptible to foreign influences. This is not limited to the Machu dynasty actually being a thing, but also Crazy Batshit Pseudo-Christianity almost taking over for a bit there, and... yeah, communism. Which, in its modern doctrinal form, is
not a Chinese idea. The post-Mongol unifications also show persistent "early installment weirdness", which is rather telling.
Here's my thesis. The Qing formed the previous unifying regime in the post-Mongol period. The chaotic period 1912-1949 formed the kind of typical "brief chaos period", and the establishment of the People's Republic marked a new unifying regime. This regime has in practice already divested itself of actual communist ideology. That ideology was, in fact, "early installment weirdness"; a consequence of the vulnerability to foreign influences. China is presently moving towards a more "native" form of authoritarianism; namely Neo-Legalism.
I expect the current generation of leaders to be overthrown by a more radical younger generation, who will get rid of even the pretense of communism, and who may indeed proclaim China an Empire again. This will happen later this century, due to the aging populace making the current system unsustainable. (You can already see this tension in China, with the young guard being very dissatisfied at having to work for the benefit of the old guard. It may go so far that something like the "
Boomercaust when" meme will actually become
real in China...)
If this change in leadership merely represents a "change in direction", and no real discontinuity in unified government, then China will continue in its post-Mongol holding pattern, and the new regime may be expected to continue for another two centuries thereafter (or so), before falling into a half-century of chaos, and then... rinse and repeat.
If, however, the seizure of power (by increasingly radical Neo-Legalism under the younger generation dissatisfied with the nominally Communist ruling clique) is
drastic enough, then they may actually --
more or less by accident -- produce a new Qin-like horror regime, and re-start the true Imperial cycle. (
ETA: This would, interestingly, roughly link up
their Imperial cycle with
our Imperial cycle. I suspect that might actually produce a hyper-stable geopolitical situation.)
@Lord Sovereign essentially describes the latter scenario. I personally think the former is more likely. But both are possible. So we will see. We will live to see...
interesting times.
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I want to stress (just for clarity) that in macro-historical terms, Egyptian civilisation is
extinct, and has been for many ages; present-day Egypt is simply part of Islamic civilisation, and -- beyond geographical correspondence -- unrelated to the ancient Egyptian civilisation.
It's a bit like saying that the Roman Empire still exists because Italians exist. But in fact, Roman civilisation is extinct, and modern Italy is part of Western (Christian) civilisation.