long history and the thinking that it has produced, we will briefly review its decline from pre-eminence in the early
1800s to insignificance early in the 20th century, and we will more carefully look at its recent emergence from
insignificance to its near comparability to the world’s leading empire today—and its likelihood of becoming the
most powerful empire in the world not many years in the future.
In earlier chapters we saw how the Dutch and then the British each became the richest and most powerful reserve
currency empire and then declined into relative insignificance in cycles that were driven by timeless and universal
archetypical cause/effect relationships. Then we saw how the United States replaced them as the dominant world
empire broadly following the same archetypical cyclical patterns driven by the same archetypical cause/effect
relationships. We saw how some of its eight key powers rose and declined (i.e., education, economic
competitiveness, shares of world trade and output), while others continued to excel (innovation and technology,
reserve currency status, financial market center), and we looked at how a number of the other key drivers (e.g.,
money and debt cycles, wealth/values/political cycles, etc.) are transpiring in the US. In this chapter we will study
China’s way of looking at its past and bring us up to this moment with the aid of objective statistical measures that
help paint the picture objectively. As in the US chapter we will cover the older history superficially; the 220 years
up until 1949 in a bit greater detail; and the last 40 years, when China evolved from relative insignificance to
become a great rival power to the United States, in the most detail. That will complete our examination of the rises
and declines of the leading empires over the last 500 years. Then, in the next chapter, we will look at US-China
relations and wars as they now exist, and in the concluding chapter of this book, “The Future,” we will try to
squint into the future.
China’s Giant History in Brief
Anyone who wants to have a fundamental understanding of China needs to know the basics of China’s roughly
4,000-year history, the many patterns that have repeated in it, and the timeless and universal principles that the
leaders of China have gained from studying these patterns—even though getting that basic understanding is quite
an undertaking. China’s history is so complicated and there are so many opinions about it that I am confident that
there is no single source of truth, and I am especially sure that I’m not it. Still there is a lot that knowledgeable
people agree on, and I have found many scholars and practitioners, both Chinese and non-Chinese, who have
valuable bits that make the exercise of trying to piece them together—along with other bits of history like statistics
and written histories—very valuable as well as damned fascinating. While I can’t guarantee that my perspectives
about China are the best ones to believe, I can guarantee that they have been well-triangulated with some of the
most informed people in the world and are presented here in an exceptionally forthright way. Here it is in brief.
China’s civilization with its highly civilized behavior has a long and continuous history that began about 4,000
years ago. I can’t possibly recount the extensiveness of it because there are far too many dynasties from the Xia
Dynasty around 2000 BC (which lasted about 400 years and was highly civilized and known for creating the
Bronze Age) through over 1,000 years of various dynasties to Confucius around 500 BC (whose philosophy
greatly influenced how the Chinese behave with each other to this day), to the Qin Dynasty (which united most of
the area we now call China for the first time in 221 BC), then through the highly developed Han Dynasty (which