(In pinyin, i.e., Chinese Romanized pronunciation, the Q/q is equivalent to "ch", as in Chinese. The h after c, s, and z is pronounced with the tongue against the palate from the front to the back.)

The history of China has a majestic orderliness and solidity no other country can call upon. Only the Chinese and the Greeks can boast of a first precise historical date, and the Chinese date--the beginning of the annals of Zhou in 841--antecedes the Greek date, corresponding to the first Olympiad (778), by over half a century. There are hardly gaps in the immutable procession of the great dynasties and those that appear are soon forced to march in step with the high ceremony of centralized power and empire.

The history of China has something of the inevitabilities that shaped geological eras. Just as the basic study of geology consists in the memorization of the names of eons, eras, periods, and epochs, so the history of China is an inalterable succession of discrete durations called dynasties. One can acquire a functional if elementary knowledge of Chinese historiography by learning the order in which those durations succeed each other. This knowledge is like a bone structure to which one attaches the flesh of ordinary events, such as emperors' reigns, natural cataclysms, and titanic social struggles.

Xia

The scheme is quickly recounted. There was a Xia period with traditional dates (2205-1766) but in its origins it overlaps with pre-literate higher cultures and all that is known of it are some uninformative kings' lists. In a strict historiographical sense, first came a period called the "Shang dynasty" (1766-1122), of which most of what is known reliably comes from plastrons and shoulder blades inscribed with primitive but readable characters. For thousand of years these objects, considered gifts of the gods--strange though it may sound, Chinese religion was and remains basically animist--were ground to make potions, until an antiquary in 1899 recognized them as potential historical documents. As a set, they are known as oracle bones and enough survived to allow the reconstruction of snippets of history. The traditional dates of ancient Chinese history are the work of the historian Sima Qien (145-90), who, with the Greek Herodotus, the Babylonian Berosus, and the Egyptian Manetho, is among the primary sources for the history of Antiquity.

Shang

The Shang period, midway of which it becomes the Yin dynasty, was also when China, long before any civilization, perfected the art of inspired bronze-casting. Shang was followed by Zhou, which ideally exemplifies the complex relation between dynasty and period in Chinese history. There were always Zhou kings during the Zhou era, but they had so little power that all they contribute to Chinese history is nomenclatural continuity.

Some modern estimates place the beginning of Shang at ca1550 and the beginning of Zhou at ca1050. Zhou is considered fully historical and the traditional date of its beginning (1122) is due to chronological correlations within Chinese history itself. The short chronology for Shang also establishes different dates for Yin. According to it, Yin began ca1200, which is within the traditional dates, but it ended ca1050, later than tradition says that Yin ended and Zhou began. In this short chronology, then, Zhou began later than in the traditional chronology. As the discrepancy is only of about 70 years, it hardly dents the impassibility with which the "official" history of China goes on its stately way.

Eastern Zhou

The periods within the over-arching category of Zhou dynasty are Western Zhou (1122-770) and Eastern Zhou (770-256). The weakness and dislocation of the Zhou monarchy resulted in that the Eastern Zhou period is divided into two sub-periods: the Spring and Autumn (Qun Qiu) period (771-484) and the period of the Warring States (Zhan-guo) (484-221).

By the end of Zhou, China was falling into political chaos. It is not impossible that it could have gone the way of India, which before the Raj (19th century) was never an united state. But there are differences. India was never unified. It was born in disunity and never accepted unification, except when the superior weaponry and discipline of British regiments imposed it. China's cultural homogeneity and political unity goes back to pre-history. India attracted invaders from the mountains to the west (Afghanistan), but China could have succumbed to the barbarians which besieged it from the mountain, steppe, and desert frontiers of civilization to the west, north, and northeast. China had to be an empire to survive. India survived countless assaults.

The Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, which legitimizes any dominant dynasty or state because of ethical merits its predecessors lacked, was formulated by Mencius (371-289) during the Warring States period, hence at a time when China was thoroughly divided, as it had been for the preceding centuries. The main warring states, all contenders for the mandate of heaven and dynastic legitimacy, were Qu, Qi, Qin, Song, Wei, and Yen. Wei was located north of the Huang river. Yen had been founded on frontier lands with Manchuria. Qi defeated Wei, Yen, and Song, but an alliance of five states reduced the power of Qi. The gainer was Qin, which geographically was like a western march of Chinese civilization. Qin took measures to strengthen its hand against the other warring states. It organized localities into counties and counties into prefectures.

Qin

As skillful in warfare as it was in administration, Qin gradually annexed kingdoms south of the Huang while elsewhere warfare went on incessantly. By 259, China was mostly unified and only two states remained outside of Qin power: Qao, a kingdom which had arisen in the north, and which fell in 222, and Qi, the oldest kingdom of them all, which was conquered in 221. The period of the Warring States was over. Despite the constant warfare, China had expanded to the Gansu frontier in the west, north to Mongolia, and east to southern Manchuria.

Qin, which had its capital in Xi'an, formerly Changan (Shaanxi province), gave China its name. The ruler of Qin called himself Shi Huangdi (246-210), which means first emperor and that is indeed what he was, Qin Shi Huangdi, or first emperor of Chin or China. His rule was materially constructive but cruel and culturally and politically despotic, even terrorizing. He centralized the kingdom and expanded its territory to Zhejiang and Guangdong (southern China), where however control was not firm. There had been defensive walls against northern invaders, which Shi Huangdi consolidated and extended as far as the western frontier. He also tried to wipe out the past by burning books. When some learned men cited accomplishments in previous historical periods, Shi Huangdi had them buried alive.

Shi Huangdi was accompanied in his awesome underground mausoleum by an army of thousands of realistic, life-size clay figures. Arguably the most sensational archaeological trove in recent times, his mausoleum was discovered in 1974.

Han

Shi Huangdi died in 210. His succession was characterized by Byzantine maneuvers in which wholesale killings were carried out. Despotism continued to be the norm of government and this, according to Soma Qien's chronicle, provoked various uncoordinated peasant uprisings, initially quelled, until the non-aristocratic leader Liu Ban overcame all contenders in 202 and founded the Han dynasty under the regnal name of Han Kaozu.

It is the Han which really inaugurate the succession of the great dynasties of Chinese history. Zhou was hardly an imperial dynasty and Qin's glory barely outlasted one ruler. But Han was a true dynasty which lasted from 206 BCE to 207 CE. Han has two periods: Western Han (206 BCE-9 CE), capital Xi'an, and Eastern Han (25-207 CE), capital Luoyang, with an interregnum from 9 to 25 CE. The ethnic designation the Chinese give themselves is Han, in the sense that Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes called themselves Scandinavians or people from Latin America are called Hispanics.

The interregnal Han period (9-25) was an usurpation by general Wang Mang (nephew of an empress dowager), called the Xin dynasty. Its founder was a reformist and imposed the exchange of gold for bronze, which did not make him popular. He was murdered and the Han resumed, although the relation between the restoration and the last Western Han emperor is not clear.

Towards the end of the 2nd century, warlord Cao Cao controlled the Han dynasty. China fragmented. There was a period of disunity, which in the official version of Chinese history commenced in 221, when Cao Cao's son deposed the last puppet Han emperor, and ended in 589 when the Sui dynasty reunited China.

From Sui to Tang and Song

The Sui ruled only to 618--time for only two emperors--but it primed the kingdom for the Tang dynasty, which lasted to 906, nearly three centuries. The Tang empire disintegrated into another period of disunity, only partially terminated by the Song dynasty (1279), for although it controlled most of China it was forced to co-exist in the north, first with the Khitai (whence Cathay), and then with the Jurchen, Manchurians who founded the Jin or Golden dynasty.

Yuan and Ming

The great Mongol warrior Kublai Khan, grandson of Jenghiz Khan and the employer of Marco Polo, conquered all of China. Mongol rule, known as the Yuan dynasty, was depredatory, as could only have been expected from rulers whose authority relied on savage hordes.

There was a Chinese reaction in which a popular leader came out on top and founded the Ming dynasty (1368-1645). During Ming China, which spans the European Renaissance, the Middle Kingdom re-asserted Confucianism, an extremely conservative social philosophy from the 6th-5th centuries BCE, and re-built extensively the ancient Chinese walls as its ultimate defense. A Ming General, Zheng He, sailed as far as Africa making the Indian ocean a mare sinensis. Most of the great monuments of the past in China date from Ming times.

Qing

The periods of disunity that China had experienced (after Han and after Tang) and the Yuan dynasty had been the result of intruders on China from the north. The Chinese walls had been of little avail. It is often said to impugn Marco Polo's histories that he does not mention the Great Wall. Well, he probably didn't even notice them, because for one they had been in disrepair since the 2nd century CE at least and for another the Mongols, against whom they might have been a barrier, would not have gone out of the way to point them out. The Ming walls, despite their massiveness, didn't prevent the fall of the dynasty either, this time by the final decisive northern onslaught, that of the Manchus, who founded the Qing dynasty.

One of the problems with the imposing conventional version of Chinese history, in which authority degrades but the empire is always re-born, each time to greater grandeur, is that the Qing, who were an energetic lot and extended Chinese rule to Siberia, to Mongolia, to Dzungaria, to Uiguria, and to Tibet, ended sadly as a weak, friable state that was succeeded by a fragmented republic (1912) impotent to contain Japanese aggression. So what went wrong?

Feudalism and despotism

The British historian J. Needham did a vast, minute inventory of Chinese culture and concluded that, after being far ahead of the West in most things, stagnation set in during the Ming period. Marxists blamed feudalism, a world-historical category from Marx's characterization of it as a "mode of production". Marx said that the "forces of production" were what engendered changes in modes of production but it is difficult to find important changes in the forces of production between periods in which slavery, another mode of production, was prevalent and periods in which feudalism was prevalent. Theoretically, in Marx's historical outline the Confederate States of America were pre-feudal.

Strictly speaking, feudalism was an European social system agrarian in nature based on a weave of allegiances from a king down to the lowest nobiliary ranks. These allegiances sometimes were loose, so some domains had more freedom than others. But on the whole the monarchical principle held and what feudalism designates is the lack of centralized control due to the absence of means to impose it and not an universal mode of production or even a social system exclusive to western Europe. China, where paper money was invented during the Song period, is the country least docile to Marxist pigeonholes. We shall see what Mao Zedong did with Marxism.

Another theoretician on China was Karl Wittfogel and his argument was that China never escaped the backward-looking cycle of its dynasties because it was a despotism in which the emperor controlled even his subjects' minds. But this does not square with the powerlessness of Chinese despots, such as those of Han, Tang, and Ming, who were overthrown precisely because they lost control of their kingdom not having the means to coerce loyalties, let alone pull psychological strings.

Western Jin

Even official Chinese dynastology, despite the ponderousness with which it is presented, despite the centuries during which some dynasties ruled and thereby seem to prove the point of Chinese insuperable imperial might, is not devoid of chinks and creaks. Not all the dynasties seem dynastic in the grand sense of the term, and in the accepted roster of dynasties there is at least one arbitrary exclusion. The Xin interregnum and the Sui prelude to Tang hardly seem like great dynasties. They probably obtain their historical weight through their relation to real dynastic powerhouses such as Han and Tang. The seemingly unjustified exclusion is a minor dynasty, so unremarkable by Chinese standards that it is called Western Jin to distinguish it from the Jin dynasty of the Jurchen, who before invading China were barbarians of the drink-and-dance-till-you-drop type. Yet, after the final dethronement of the Han, Western Jin unified China for the half century from 266 to 316, which is more than Xin and Sui combined.

The 20th century from the dynastological perspective

Did the vast cycle of Chinese dynasties end with the Qing? The feckless republic that followed the wizened empire cannot but suggest the periods of disunity that China had experienced before. Chiang Kai-shek, who claimed Chinese legitimacy the way successor kingdoms to great dynasties had done before, was so powerless against the warlords that in 1936 he was arrested in Xi'an by a Manchurian general displaced by the Japanese. He was saved by the skin of his teeth. The period of republican disunity lasted only from 1912 to 1949, barely 37 years where previous periods of disunity has lasted centuries, but then those were times of archaic weaponry and China was not then enmeshed in a net of international constraints.

Surely, though, the restoration of central authority by Mao Zedong and his forces does seem to mark the beginning of a new dynasty in the sense of a renovated, strong new imperial China. What name to give it? Mao himself did not found a dynasty. After him there have been four supreme leaders and none owed his legitimacy to loyalty to Mao's beliefs. The Marxist dynasty then? But let us see what Mao's version of Marxism was and what has become of it.

Mao's Mad Hatter Marxism

In the Marxist historical fairy tale, humanity progresses from less productive to more productive modes of production. In the end, the workers will run the world economy with the greatest possible efficiency and in perfect social harmony. Mao liked to project himself as a know-it-all. But he was probably as puzzled as the next mortal on the relevance of Marxism to China. What he did know was strategy and politics. Whatever Marx had said about the revolution, Mao knew that in China it could only be an agrarian revolution. Mao wanted to turn his peasants into industrial workers to conform with Marx's revolutionary pattern, so he devised the "great leap forward" which turned out to be a long jump backwards (imagine what will happen to an athlete who attempts this feat). So much for the proletarian revolution.

Mao still had two Marxist cards to play, or what he thought of as Marxist. One was to place Marx's antithesis between exploiters and exploited on the international level. The exploiters were not the individual capitalists but the capitalist nations and the exploited were not workers but entire underdeveloped, non-industrialized nations. Where to put the USSR in this scheme? While Stalin lived, Mao deferred to the Soviet party. But when Nikita Khrushchev rose to power, Mao thought he could treat him like an upstart and get whatever he demanded from the USSR. Khrushchev thought that Mao was barmy. The two great communist states started drifting apart and in 1961 they became antagonists. That gave Mao the crucial part he needed to assemble his "Marxist" international policy: the USA and its rich allies were the first world, the USSR and its empire was the second world, and China and all developing countries were the third world. So much for Marx's international workers' solidarity.

The other "Marxist" card that Mao played was extreme egalitarianism. Marx, who would first have amputated his tongue than admit any one was equal to him, had talked of a future in which inequalities disappeared. True, the formula he or some epigone came up with (maybe Engels himself) was that from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs, but as inequality was the major premise equality could hardly be the conclusion. Mao also would not have accepted any one as his equal, but he was perfectly willing to put China through a wringer called the Cultural Revolution which reduced all other Chinese to absolute, all-are-the-same anonymity. So much for Marxist humanism.

The communist dynasty

Mao's ideas were the absurdist extreme to which Marxism could be stretched. They were so counter-intuitive that relativity and quantum physics seem like domesticated versions of Newton's mechanics. Toppling a despot like Mao was unthinkable. This is a common feature of history. Nothing new. But when he died, things began to change. Even mummification, the ultimate communist accolade, went wrong. The job on Mao's body was terribly botched and the Chinese had to appeal to the Russians for help despite their ideological discrepancies. Eventually, Mao's cadaver was reduced from bloat to its normal jowliness. His ideas and obsessions had begun fading long before. Neither Maoism nor Marxism can serve to identify China's latest dynasty.

To everything in China after 1949 could be applied the label of communism, so if a name must be chosen for the period it could the Communist Dynasty. China in the 20th century is a repetition of China during the previous four thousand years, but, as would be expected in the era of atomic warfare, the world wide web, and cloning, compressed to a singularity. There has never been a Chinese dynasty quite like the Communist Dynasty. China is not what it was before and it can never return back to what it was. Communist hierarchs so far can assure the continuity of their dynasty. But they have chosen to travel a historical path whose consequences they might not be able to control, in what they would be very much like the last rulers of the previous dynasties, whom circumstances overwhelmed.

The Communist Dynasty is going now towards its 55th year. This is already more than Western Jin. The big chuckle about Zhou Enlai and the Chinese long view of history is that when he was asked what he thought the historical consequences of the French Revolution were he answered that it was too early to tell. If Chinese Marxists said anything really worth keeping in mind, this at least seems to be a likely candidate.