Angelica Oung
As we go through a tumultuous time in the world, there is no better time to learn about Chinese history. You see, China was unified more than 2,000 years ago, and since then it's been its own unipolar world with some messy interstitials. While Great Powers competition happens in overlapping parallels in the rest of the world, Chinese history unfolds as a series of dynasties.
Every new dynasty that holds the baton of legitimacy is painfully aware of all the other dynasties that has gone before, and as a result, is determined not to make the same mistakes. The first task of the new dynasty is to write the official history of the old dynasty it replaced.
In the west in contrast, the failure of a rival was rarely internalized as an existential warning. Instead there's what I call a "Lol Those Fools Lost" mentality. The assumption is when two rivals clash, the one with the superior system would naturally prevail. Failure is externalized as something done to you by somebody else instead of something you become through internal imbalances that build up inexorably over time. Dynastic cycles? Wasn't that something that happened to the Romans?
Well...it's happening to us now. I believe my late-onset interest in Chinese history is not just because China became so strong, but also because the vocabulary of Chinese history suddenly became startlingly legible and relevant.
"elite overproduction" "loss of legitimacy" "center-periphery breakdown" "peasant immiseration" "fiscal exhaustion" "military overextension" "bureaucratic sclerosis" "monstrous courtiers" "inability to reform due to entrenched interests"
My model of the world has changed from "in the end there can be only one system (liberal democracy)" to "in any system success itself generates the conditions of decay." There is no escape from history. We are trapped in dharma.
In the end, dynastic cycle theory isn't really about China at all. It's about becoming historically self-aware through feeling connected to the past. A unipolar civilization system like dynastic China could not help but confront themselves over and over again. In a multipolar system, we can still do it, but only as a choice.
