Now on to Chinese History - the Overall Scheme

So having interested myself in this blog in the Arab world, to some extent in the Middle Eastern and Islamic worlds and in the Buddhist world and their consequent worldviews, I now want to examine the Chinese and Confucian world and worldview.

So I’ll start with a historical approach so that I can get to an overview of all that.

Starting with ancient Chinese history, there is a conventional way to do this and I’ll start with that approach. This is the Dynastic Cycle view. In it the history is seen as a series of dynasties that each prosper until a particularly bad/repugnant/evil final (as it turns out) Dynast is duly replaced (generally by a popular revolt and to the great relief of most people) leading on to the succeeding dynasty. The unmodified cycle view thus tends to downplay major historical forces that always worked on China in the pre-Western-imperial historical period so I will modify it as those forces certainly existed and acted and focus on those periods when they acted.

I’ll start by delineating the periods usually noted under the cycle view. From around 5,000 BCE (Before the Common Era – equivalent to BC for many scholars of the East especially) to around 1,900 CE (equivalent to AD) there are about sixteen alleged cycles roughly as follows (I know I'm a famous 'weasel word' user):

1 Earliest Cultures (including Yang Shao) (c. 5,000 BCE to c. 3,000 BCE)

2 Xia (c. 2,070 BCE to 1,600 BCE)

3 Shang (1,600 BCE to 1,046 BCE)

4 Zhou (1,046 BCE to 256 BCE)

5 Warring States (475 BCE to 221 BCE) (note the overlap with the late Zhou period)

6 Qin (the first fully historical dynastic period) (221 BCE to only 206 BCE)

7 Han (206 BCE to 220 CE)

8 Three Kingdoms (220 CE to 280 CE) (this time note the gap before period 9)

9 Sixteen Kingdoms (304 CE to 439 CE) (there's another overlap with period 10)

10 The North/South Divide (420 CE to 589 CE)

11 Sui (581 CE to 618 CE) (another overlap (with period 10))

12 Tang (beginning of the gruelling Confucian examination system for government officials and of the flowering of classic poetry) (618 CE to 907 CE)

13 Song (more and more influenced by foreign forces as it went on) (907 CE to 1,276 CE)

14 Foreign Rule (1,276 CE to 1,368 CE)

15 Ming (1,368 CE to 1,644 CE)

16 Qing (1,644 CE to 1,911 CE - more rule considered foreign (this time Manchurian rule))

Some of the information concerning the first five cycles especially comes down to us via the extant works of the Chinese philosophers and some comes from archaeology. Despite our limitations concerning historicity here, however, we must examine the period to some extent if we hope to understand its influence upon those philosophies, which have continued to exert their own influences.

I’ll only be venturing slightly into the Common Era in examining general philosophies as all the basics of what makes the Confucian/East Asian worldview somewhat unique had occurred by where I’ll leave off. I'll be spending three weeks on this early (pre-Communist) period.

Then I’ll begin another series of posts specifically focusing on the Modern Chinese history that produced Maoism and what that development was. Two more weeks should see me up to the establishment of the People's Republic. Then I'll be doing four weeks of Mao (if I can handle it without gouging something out of somewhere - I see it as a somewhat dark period (though not unalloyedly so) and emotionally difficult to examine). Deng doesn't impress me much more but I need to give him another two weeks. Finally I have a final week in me for discussing China post-Deng and into the future.

Next post: China up to the Xia and Shang Dynasties