G uanxi 关系

THE CH INA LE TTER (gwan–s he)

A Survey of Chinese History

October 2007

Knowing China through Its Past John Thornton, former co-president of Goldman Sachs and professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has said, “The single greatest need, certainly in [the United States], and probably in the world, is education for the elites about Chinese history. The basic facts just aren’t known.”

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BERKSHIRE PUBLISHING GROUP

This is the first of our Guanxi issues designed as a background briefing on a particular subject—in this case, Chinese dynastic history, from the earliest dynasties, two millennia before the common era, to 1911–12, when the Nationalist revolution brought down China’s last dynasty. (In a future briefing, we will cover the many important events of the rest of the 20th century.) This briefing reflects a key aspect of our mission: to provide essential China intelligence—about Chinese culture and history, economics and commerce, philosophy and perspectives—that will help Westerners and Chinese people build relationships and joint ventures of all types, whether in the spheres of manufacturing, trade, education, or environmental sustainability. To build relationships, and the confidence that will enable us to act wisely and well, we need to become culturally literate about China. We need to know more about its history, culture, and language, its jokes and popular culture. Guanxi therefore explores China from diferent perspectives and in diferent areas—business, education, politics, innovation, and personal life—all with the goal of preparing American and other Western professionals for the business challenges of the next decade.

Every issue of Guanxi has included some history, often the kind of background information that isn’t available outside major research libraries or massive scholarly books. In our December 2006 issue (vol. 1, no. 8) on banking, for example, Linsun Cheng, a wellknown historian of Chinese banking, brought us the engrossing story of the emergence of modern banks in China early in the 20th century. Covering more recent history, the July–August 2007 issue (vol. 2, no. 3–4) on the upcoming Beijing Olympics included an article about the Ping-Pong diplomacy of 1971–72 that featured commentary by some of the people who took part in those historic events. Turning to the makers of history, our January 2007 issue (vol. 1, no. 9) examined the diferences in personality between Mao Zedong and China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, and how their interaction shaped China’s recent past. This issue of Guanxi tackles the history question head on, and we take the traditional approach of dividing China’s history by dynasty. The sidebar on Chinese historical periods that appears on page 2 lists the dynasties chronologically. Our four articles look at groups of dynasties together: the very earli

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CONTENTS

Knowing China through its Past . . . . . . . . . 1

From Khubilai Khan to Sun Yat-sen . . . . . . . . 1

Cultural Glory and Material Abundance: The Tang and Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Centralization of Power: From Qin to Sui . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Notable Events in Chinese History . . . . . . . . 7

China’s Earliest Dynasties . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

From Khubilai Khan to Sun Yat-sen Two of China’s last three dynasties were ruled by foreigners, first the Mongols, who ruled China for the majority of the 14th century, and then the Manchus, who ruled from the mid-17th century until the early 20th century.

The Mongols, who created the world’s largest contiguous empire, established the Yuan dynasty and ruled China for almost 90 years. They were followed by a resurgent ethnically Chinese dynasty, the Ming, noted for its staContinued on page 5

Cultural Glory and Material Abundance: The Tang and Song Poetry, sculpture, and religion flourished in China during the Tang, whose cosmopolitan capital brought together people from all over the Old World, while the Song was a period of great economic prosperity and intellectual advancement.

Seventh-century Chang’an, one of the capitals of the Tang, was the equivalent of modernday London or New York: a cosmopolitan metropolis. With a population of 2 million, it was the most populous city of

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VOL 2  ISSUE 6