developed governance systems that are still in use today) that lasted from around 200 BC to around 200 AD, and
then a number of other dynasties until the Tang Dynasty in 618. While I scanned China’s history from the Xia
Dynasty1 through the year 600 AD (i.e., just before the remarkable Tang Dynasty), I looked at most of the
dynasties since then more carefully to see the patterns. I wrote up my study of them that I will share later. I will
now focus very briefly on the post-600 AD period.
In the chart below I plotted the same overall power gauge that I showed you in the first chart but applied
only to China from 600 AD until now. It conveys how powerful China was relative to other empires in the
world over that time frame. While there were many more dynasties that existed in various parts of the country
and various other slivers in time, I didn’t show them in this chart because that would have produced too much
detail for the really big picture to come through. As you can see, for most of that time China was one of the
world’s most powerful empires, with the notable exception from around 1840 until around 1950 when it
went into a steep decline. As shown, around 1950 it started to rise again, at first slowly and then very
rapidly, to regain its position as one of the two most powerful empires in the world.
Over most of last 1,400+ years most dynasties were very powerful, civilized, and cultured. Under the Tang
Dynasty, China expanded its borders extensively and experienced a cultural flourishing; in the Northern and
Southern Song Dynasties (from the 900s to the 1200s), China was the most innovative and dynamic economy in
the world; in the Ming Dynasty (1300s to 1600s), China was a great power that enjoyed an extended wonderful
period that was both very prosperous and very peaceful; and in the early Qing Dynasty (1600s to 1700s), China
had its maximum territorial expansion, governing over a third of the world’s population while having an extremely
strong economy. Then in the early 1800s and through the first half of the 1900s, China lost its power while
European countries, and especially the British Empire, gained theirs. The shift of relative wealth and power from
Asia to Europe from around 1800 until recently, which created one of the biggest wealth and power shifts in world
history in which China was uniquely weak, should be considered an anomaly rather than a norm. This evolution
and the lessons this history provides are very much in the minds of Chinese leaders and are especially interesting
to me.
In the chart above, note the cyclical ups and downs. The reasons for them are mostly the reasons I explained in my
description of the archetypal Big Cycle—because of the gaining and losing of the most important strengths and
weaknesses in cyclical and mutually reinforcing ways. (My more detailed descriptions of the rises and falls of
these dynasties will be given to you in Part 2 of this book, which covers the major cycles of the major empires and
dynasties covered in this book in greater depth.) Notice that these dynasties’ Big Cycles typically lasted about 300
years. Within each of these were the different stages of development and the things done by emperors to bring the
dynasties from one stage to the next, and the reasons for setbacks and declines. In other words, there are many
lessons embedded in these histories. That is why Chinese leaders study history to learn lessons that help them plan
for the future and deal with the cases at hand. Believe me, the lessons learned from these histories are now guiding
Chinese leaders’ decision making. What was especially interesting to me was to see the patterns of the archetypal
Big Cycle go back much further in history and be described in such detail because China’s continuous history is so
ancient and so well-documented. It has also been interesting to see what happened when the Eastern and Western
worlds met each other and interacted from the 17th through the 19th centuries and how, as the world has become
much smaller and more interconnected since then, the Chinese and Western Big Cycles affected each other so that
they are now one of the biggest influences on both these two regions and the entire world.