The Three Chinese Civilizations

Historians usually divide the history of China into three rough periods, “Ancient China”, “Imperial China”, and “Modern China”. I don’t think this is quite right.

This is similar to how historians divide the history of Europe and the Mediterranean into “Classical Civilization” and “Western Civilization”. It’s clear that Classical Civilization and Western Civilization are different civilizations, that something changed deeply and fundamentally around the time of the fall of Rome. There’s a lot more that could be said on this, and there are many macro-histories of the rise and fall of civilizations. My favorite by far is Carroll Quigley’s The Evolution Of Civilizations, which I highly recommend if you’re interested in a technical definition of what a “civilization” is, a theory of how they develop, or an account of Western Civilization and its predecessors.

Even without going into the definitions and theory, though, it’s very clear that a Chinese civilization ended in the early 1900s, and the people in China today comprise a different civilization, bound to its predecessor in the same way that Western Civilization is bound to its own Classical predecessor. The popular historical narrative is absolutely right about that one. It also seems correct to place e.g. the Zhou dynasty and the Song dynasty in different civilizations. Over the last ~four millennia, China has seen three different civilizations.

Where I disagree with most historians is where to place the end of Ancient Chinese Civilization and the start of its successor. Most historians place the beginning of “Imperial China” with the foundation of the Qin/Han state around 200 BC.¹ However, this does not mark the birth of a new civilization, and the supposed “Imperial China” is no more imperial than “Ancient China”. There were centuries on end when the territory of the “empire” was as scattered and divided as the territory of the Ottoman or Holy Roman empires are today, like the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, or the Sixteen Kingdoms period. The “pre-imperial” early Zhou dynasty has a much better claim to representing a unified Chinese empire than the “imperial” Southern Song dynasty.

The foundation of Qin/Han marks a major political change, as does e.g. the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire around 1 AD in the Mediterranean world, but neither of these are really a new civilization, nor a good place for making your top-level historical divisions. To use Quigley’s definition, the Qin/Han state cannot be a new civilization because it did not have a new mechanism of economic expansion. Or to take a more vibes-based approach, the institutions and culture don’t seem more than usually different from the preceding eras. And of course the most characteristic sign of a civilization’s demise, dissolution by outside invaders, is entirely absent.

Rather, I’d say the Qin/Han state was squarely within Ancient Chinese Civilization. This civilization did not dissolve until about 300-400 AD, as the Cao Wei/Jin state crumbled and the migrants of the Five Barbarians set up states in the Ancient Chinese heartland. Its successor civilization, which I’ll call “Medieval Chinese Civilization”, arose in the 600s with the Sui/Tang state.² Here we see a new instrument of expansion, driven by manorial landlords and provincial officials—who were often the same families or even the same individuals—mobilizing the local peasantry to construct local irrigation works and land reclamation projects. (In contrast, Ancient Chinese Civilization’s instrument of expansion probably was centralized irrigation megaprojects organized by national authorities, in the style of Yu the Great or Li Bing or Sima Yi.) We see the civilization’s economic core and demographic center of gravity move from the Yellow River to the Yangtze River. (Such transitions are characteristic of civilizational succession, which usually see the new core arise on what had been the frontier of the predecessor civilization—compare the shift from Classical Civilization’s core in the northern Mediterranean to Western Civilization’s core in central and northwestern Europe, and perhaps Modern Chinese Civilization’s possible shift to a core along the southern coast.) We see the rise of Medieval Chinese Civilization’s most distinctive institutions and cultural features, like the imperial examination system and the scholar-bureaucrats (displacing the scholar-courtiers of Ancient Chinese Civilization).

It’s true there’s a critical difference between Chinese society in 500 BC and Chinese society in 1000 AD. These are worth calling different civilizations. But if you put the dividing line somewhere around 400 AD instead of around 200 BC, then the history makes a lot more sense.

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1.  The traditional way of categorizing Chinese political history by dynasties places too much emphasis on civil wars and palace coups which have relatively little effect on fundamentals like the structure of institutions, political coalitions, or the boundaries of states. When there is effectively complete continuity between dynasties, I find it easier to think in terms of states. This is for the same reason that I would consider it unhelpful to think about e.g. the “Valentinianic dynasty” and the “Theodosian dynasty” separately, rather than to think about the “Roman empire” (or maybe the “Dominate”).

2.  Quigley’s term for “Ancient Chinese Civilization” is “Sinic Civilization”, and his term for “Medieval Chinese Civilization” is simply “Chinese Civilization”. I don’t like these terms because their meaning isn’t clear unless you already know what he’s talking about. Whenever possible, a technical term should make its own definition apparent.