Chinese history overview and major developments

Chinese History

Discuss the features of a dynasty in decline and explain why the Sung Dynasty avoided the standard problems that plagued other dynasties before and after

The standard profile of a Chinese dynasty in decline, as exemplified first in the Five Dynasties that ruled China following the breakup of the Tang Empire in 907 as well as the dynasties that existed after the Sung surrendered to Mongol rule, was a state of internal and then of external dissolution. A dynasty in decline was often subject to an onslaught of outside foreign attacks, which caused its immediate termination. But this foreign attack was only effective after economic, internal dissolution had occurred between the powerful landowning classes and their enraged yet politically disenfranchised and ignored tenant peasants. At the court and city, a dynasty in decline was often marked by aristocratic rather than merit-based administration.

But the Sung Dynasty that ended the chaotic period of the Five Dynasties of the Liang, Tang, Han, Chin, and Chou and not marked by these characteristics. To take one specific example of a previous dynastic decline, Han dealings with barbarian neighbors were conducted within an unfair tribute system. Under this system China granted diplomatic recognition and trading privileges only to those states and peoples acknowledging its superiority, symbolized by the payment of tribute. Despite its technical superiority, the end of the Han occurred after powerful landlords insisted on shifting too much land from the tax rolls. This created an increased burden on poorer farmers. The newly powerful farmers also meant there was more intense political wrangling at the imperial court. The resulting economic hardships and governmental disintegration led to massive peasant rebellion and the dissolution of the empire, as the tribute paying peoples revolted, taking advantage of the weakened state of the Han dynastic empire.

The Sung Dynasty had a more cultural and moderating social influence upon the Chinese people and upon the land. The Sung Confucian social service system of examination acted as a socially leveling influence and ended aristocratic domination won only by birth, as landholders of education and respected influence came to political power at the court. Thus the Sung influence can even be described as democratizing to China, although conservative notions of filial authority drew China closer together as a land, isolated it from Western and neighboring influence, and deflated some of the nascent power of women and social and economic power of tenant peasants. However, even this latter temporary denaturing of the peasants as a political force mean that a level of internal peace was possible, longer than had ever transpired in China before or world, afterwards.

The dominance the Sung Empire came to an end with the conquest of the Mongols in 1279, after a campaign of several decades. Again, even after Mongol influence abated, foreign influence upon China was always one of the speediest sources of dynastic decline. Later, the source of conflict between China and the West became trade rather than tribute payments. The Ching Dynasty, for example, attempted to conduct diplomatic and commercial relations with the European powers within the traditional framework of the tribute system and to confine foreign trade to the single port of Canton in the south. But the British, the most active European traders, were also among the most active in smuggling opium into the country, demanded wider access to China.

Once again, internally, China was both weakened in terms of its class warfare between peasants and farmers, urbanites and rural dwellers, and dominated by a weak and ineffectual emperor who was overly reliant upon the system's patronage system. China became exposed to the Opium Wars, as a result, and fell into decline once again, repeating the familiar dynastic patterns of the past.

Works Consulted

Chang, Eric. "China." China History Website. Last updated 2004.

http://www.bergen.org/AAST/Projects/ChinaHistory/SUNG.htm

Examining details from the story of "Genghis Khan" and Daily Life in China by Gernet Jacques (Stanford Univ. Press, 1962) Contrast life on the steppe to life in China. Which might be better and why?

On the surface, the comparison between life on the Chinese steppe and under the ruling authority of the Mongol Genghis Khan might seem to be an obvious one -- surely a choice would necessitate, on the basis of self-preservation alone, living in the China of the past! But as noted in "Genghis Khan," although Mongol has become almost synonymous with the term barbarian, and the Mongols were indeed a tribal people, living a harsh life as hunters and gatherers, they were not barbaric in the sense that they were bloodthirsty. They raided for a way of obtaining foodstuffs and necessary goods rather than simply to enact sheer bloodshed. The Mongols were not a literate people, but they had a close and clannish sense of primitive obligations to one another, which actually fostered a kind of rough sense of democracy between all Mongol members of a particular tribe. Tribes were not socially stratified by possessions, access to education and material trappings, nor of rural or urban dwelling status, as was characteristic of China.

When comparing the life of a Mongol tribesman or tribeswoman with a Chinese person in China before the Mongol invasion, always one must ask which China, and which Chinese life one was engaging in, as a citizen of the Sung Dynasty? For example, as an ordinary woman living on the Chinese Steppe, foot binding was a common practice, and one might prefer the more free life of a woman following a khan leader and his hordes for sustenance. Rather than being tied to a particular tenant patch of farmed land for a noble in general, and paying disproportionately high taxes, the rough and shared democracy of the harsh steppe, however scarcely it might yield food might seem preferable to either a man or a woman.

Also, the Mongols as rulers were considerably more expansive in their embracing ethnic, cultural, and economic vision of life for ordinary citizens. China retained its sense of specialness, confirmed by the highly structured schema of advancement of its civil administration, where potential officials were examined upon their knowledge of protocol and literature. In the Mongol fold, one was judged upon one's tenacity as a warrior, and simply as a survivor. The more practical Mongols supported foreign mercantile ventures in all spheres of their empire, rather than isolated their peoples from other spheres. Nor were there marked distinctions between urban and rural dwellers, which limited the access of steppe dwellers in China to the range of goods that was open to the dwellers of cities -- as well as the educational opportunities of cities. Even if there was more educational and economic want under the khans, it was a want shared by virtually all, and did not create a geographical caste distinction.