china history essay

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• The Northeast Plain
• The Changbai Mountains
• The North China Plain
• The Loess Plateau
• The Shandong Hills
• The Qin Mountains
• The Sichuan Basin
• The southeastern mountains
• Plains of the middle and lower Yangtze
• The Nan Mountains
• The Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau
• The Plateau of Tibet
• The Tarim Basin
• The Junggar Basin
• The Tien Shan
• The air masses
• Temperature
• Precipitation
• Animal life
• Ethnic groups
• Sino-Tibetan
• Other languages
• Rural areas
• Urban areas
• Population growth
• Population distribution
• Internal migration
• The role of the government
• Economic policies
• Farming and livestock
• Forestry and fishing
• Hydroelectric potential
• Energy production
• Manufacturing
• Labor and taxation
• Road networks
• Port facilities and shipping
• Posts and telecommunications
• Parallel structure
• Constitutional framework
• Role of the CCP
• Administration
• Health and welfare
• Cultural milieu
• Visual arts
• Performing arts
• Cultural institutions
• Daily life, sports, and recreation
• Media and publishing
• Archaeology in China
• Early humans
• Climate and environment
• Food production
• Incipient Neolithic
• 6th millennium bce
• 5th millennium bce
• 4th and 3rd millennia bce
• Regional cultures of the Late Neolithic
• Religious beliefs and social organization
• The advent of bronze casting
• Royal burials
• The chariot
• Late Shang divination and religion
• State and society
• Zhou and Shang
• The Zhou feudal system
• The decline of feudalism
• Urbanization and assimilation
• The rise of monarchy
• Economic development
• Cultural change
• The Qin state
• Struggle for power
• Prelude to the Han
• The imperial succession
• From Wudi to Yuandi
• From Chengdi to Wang Mang
• Dong (Eastern) Han
• The civil service
• Provincial government
• The armed forces
• The practice of government
• Relations with other peoples
• Cultural developments
• Sanguo (Three Kingdoms; 220–280 ce )
• The Xi (Western) Jin (265–316/317 ce )
• The Dong (Eastern) Jin (317–420) and later dynasties in the south (420–589)
• The Shiliuguo (Sixteen Kingdoms) in the north (303–439)
• Confucianism and philosophical Daoism
• Wendi’s institutional reforms
• Integration of the south
• Foreign affairs under Yangdi
• Administration of the state
• Fiscal and legal system
• The “era of good government”
• Rise of the empress Wuhou
• Prosperity and progress
• Military reorganization
• Provincial separatism
• The struggle for central authority
• The influence of Buddhism
• Trends in the arts
• Decline of the aristocracy
• Population movements
• Growth of the economy
• The Wudai (Five Dynasties)
• The Shiguo (Ten Kingdoms)
• Unification
• Consolidation
• Decline and fall
• Survival and consolidation
• Relations with the Juchen
• The court’s relations with the bureaucracy
• The chief councillors
• The bureaucratic style
• The clerical staff
• The rise of neo-Confucianism
• Internal solidarity during the decline of the Nan Song
• Song culture
• Invasion of the Jin state
• Invasion of the Song state
• Early Mongol rule
• Changes under Kublai Khan and his successors
• Foreign religions
• Confucianism
• Yuan China and the West
• The end of Mongol rule
• The dynasty’s founder
• The dynastic succession
• Local government
• Central government
• Later innovations
• Foreign relations
• Agriculture
• Philosophy and religion
• Literature and scholarship
• The rise of the Manchu
• Political institutions
• Social organization
• Trends in the early Qing
• The first Opium War and its aftermath
• The anti-foreign movement and the second Opium War (Arrow War)
• The Taiping Rebellion
• The Nian Rebellion
• Muslim rebellions
• Effects of the rebellions
• Foreign relations in the 1860s
• Industrialization for “self-strengthening”
• East Turkistan
• Tibet and Nepal
• Myanmar (Burma)
• Japan and the Ryukyu Islands
• Korea and the Sino-Japanese War
• The Hundred Days of Reform of 1898
• The Boxer Rebellion
• Sun Yat-sen and the United League
• Constitutional movements after 1905
• The Chinese Revolution (1911–12)
• Early power struggles
• Japanese gains
• Yuan’s attempts to become emperor
• Conflict over entry into the war
• Formation of a rival southern government
• Wartime changes
• An intellectual revolution
• Riots and protests
• The Nationalist Party
• The Chinese Communist Party
• Communist-Nationalist cooperation
• Militarism in China
• The foreign presence
• Reorganization of the KMT
• Clashes with foreigners
• KMT opposition to radicals
• The Northern Expedition
• Expulsion of communists from the KMT
• Japanese aggression
• War between Nationalists and communists
• The United Front against Japan
• Phase two: stalemate and stagnation
• Renewed communist-Nationalist conflict
• U.S. aid to China
• Conflicts within the international alliance
• Phase three: approaching crisis (1944–45)
• Nationalist deterioration
• Communist growth
• Efforts to prevent civil war
• Attempts to end the war
• Resumption of fighting
• A land revolution
• The decisive year, 1948
• Communist victory
• Reconstruction and consolidation, 1949–52
• Rural collectivization
• Urban socialist changes
• Political developments
• Foreign policy
• New directions in national policy, 1958–61
• Readjustment and reaction, 1961–65
• Attacks on cultural figures
• Attacks on party members
• Seizure of power
• The end of the radical period
• Social changes
• Struggle for the premiership
• Consequences of the Cultural Revolution
• Readjustment and recovery
• Economic policy changes
• Educational and cultural policy changes
• COVID-19 outbreak
• Allegations of human rights abuses
• International relations
• Relations with Taiwan
• Leaders of the People’s Republic of China since 1949

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How big is China?

China, the largest of all Asian countries, occupies nearly the entire East Asian landmass and covers approximately one-fourteenth of the land area of Earth, making it almost as large as the whole of Europe.

China, which has the largest population of any country in the world, is composed of diverse ethnic and linguistic groups. The Han are the largest group in China, while the Zhuang is the largest minority group. In some areas of China, especially in the southwest, many different ethnic groups are geographically intermixed, including Buyi, Miao, Dong, Tibetans, Mongolians, and others.

Does China have an official language?

The official language of China is Mandarin, or putonghua , meaning “ordinary language” or “common language.” There are three variants of Mandarin—Beijing, Chengdu, and Nanjing. Of these, the Beijing dialect is the most widespread Chinese tongue and has officially been adopted as the basis for the national language.

How long has China existed as a discrete politico-cultural unit?

With more than 4,000 years of recorded history, China is one of the few existing countries that also flourished economically and culturally in the earliest stages of world civilization. China is unique among nations in its longevity and resilience as a discrete politico-cultural unit.

What crops are grown in China?

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and is among the principal sources of wheat, corn (maize), tobacco, soybeans, peanuts (groundnuts), and cotton.

China , country of East Asia . It is the largest of all Asian countries. Occupying nearly the entire East Asian landmass, it covers approximately one-fourteenth of the land area of Earth , and it is almost as large as the whole of Europe . China is also one of the most populous countries in the world, rivaled only by India , which, according to United Nations estimates, surpassed it in population in 2023.

China has 33 administrative units directly under the central government; these consist of 22 provinces , 5 autonomous regions, 4 municipalities ( Chongqing , Beijing , Shanghai , and Tianjin ), and 2 special administrative regions ( Hong Kong and Macau ). The island province of Taiwan , which has been under separate administration since 1949, is discussed in the article Taiwan . Beijing (Peking), the capital of the People’s Republic, is also the cultural, economic, and communications center of the country. Shanghai is the main industrial city; Hong Kong is the leading commercial center and port.

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Within China’s boundaries exists a highly diverse and complex country. Its topography encompasses the highest and one of the lowest places on Earth, and its relief varies from nearly impenetrable mountainous terrain to vast coastal lowlands . Its climate ranges from extremely dry, desertlike conditions in the northwest to tropical monsoon in the southeast, and China has the greatest contrast in temperature between its northern and southern borders of any country in the world.

The diversity of both China’s relief and its climate has resulted in one of the world’s widest arrays of ecological niches , and these niches have been filled by a vast number of plant and animal species. Indeed, practically all types of Northern Hemisphere plants, except those of the polar tundra, are found in China, and, despite the continuous inroads of humans over the millennia, China still is home to some of the world’s most exotic animals.

Probably the single most identifiable characteristic of China to the people of the rest of the world is the size of its population. Some one-fifth of humanity is of Chinese nationality. The great majority of the population is Chinese (Han), and thus China is often characterized as an ethnically homogeneous country, but few countries have as many diverse Indigenous peoples as does China. Even among the Han there are cultural and linguistic differences between regions; for example, the only point of linguistic commonality between two individuals from different parts of China may be the written Chinese language. Because China’s population is so enormous, the population density of the country is also often thought to be uniformly high, but vast areas of China are either uninhabited or sparsely populated.

With more than 4,000 years of recorded history , China is one of the few existing countries that also flourished economically and culturally in the earliest stages of world civilization. Indeed, despite the political and social upheavals that frequently have ravaged the country, China is unique among nations in its longevity and resilience as a discrete politico-cultural unit. Much of China’s cultural development has been accomplished with relatively little outside influence, the introduction of Buddhism from India constituting a major exception. Even when the country was penetrated by such foreign powers as the Manchu , these groups soon became largely absorbed into the fabric of Han Chinese culture .

This relative isolation from the outside world made possible over the centuries the flowering and refinement of the Chinese culture, but it also left China ill prepared to cope with that world when, from the mid-19th century, it was confronted by technologically superior foreign nations. There followed a century of decline and decrepitude, as China found itself relatively helpless in the face of a foreign onslaught. The trauma of this external challenge became the catalyst for a revolution that began in the early 20th century against the old regime and culminated in the establishment of a communist government in 1949. This event reshaped global political geography, and China has since come to rank among the most influential countries in the world.

Central to China’s long-enduring identity as a unitary country is the province, or sheng (“secretariat”). The provinces are traceable in their current form to the Tang dynasty (618–907 ce ). Over the centuries, provinces gained in importance as centers of political and economic authority and increasingly became the focus of regional identification and loyalty. Provincial power reached its peak in the first two decades of the 20th century, but, since the establishment of the People’s Republic, that power has been curtailed by a strong central leadership in Beijing. Nonetheless, while the Chinese state has remained unitary in form, the vast size and population of China’s provinces—which are comparable to large and midsize nations—dictate their continuing importance as a level of subnational administration.

China stretches for about 3,250 miles (5,250 km) from east to west and 3,400 miles (5,500 km) from north to south. Its land frontier is about 12,400 miles (20,000 km) in length, and its coastline extends for some 8,700 miles (14,000 km). The country is bounded by Mongolia to the north; Russia and North Korea to the northeast; the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea to the east; the South China Sea to the southeast; Vietnam , Laos , Myanmar (Burma), India , Bhutan , and Nepal to the south; Pakistan to the southwest; and Afghanistan , Tajikistan , Kyrgyzstan , and Kazakhstan to the west. In addition to the 14 countries that border directly on it, China also faces South Korea and Japan , across the Yellow Sea, and the Philippines , which lie beyond the South China Sea.

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Modern chinese history.

Two main themes run throughout Modern Chinese History . First, it emphasizes the role of foreign actors in China’s past. Cross-cultural contacts have deeply influenced the shape and trajectory of modern China. However, this text moves beyond the “impact-response” narrative, which outlines repeated conflicts with the superior West followed by China’s belated, inadequate responses. Not only is this narrative inaccurate and Eurocentric, it is also incomplete. Modern Chinese History emphasizes the importance of cross-cultural contacts but provides a more balanced approach to the topic. It includes encounters with the West, as well as interactions with China’s Asian neighbors. Second, this volume highlights the roles of domestic actors in China’s history, recognizing that these include far more than simply political and military elites. Modern Chinese History provides room for both men and women peasants, soldiers, and intellectuals to enter the stage of history.

Modern Chinese History provides room for both men and women peasants, soldiers, and intellectuals to enter the stage of history.

Whereas many scholars suggest modern China began during the mid-Qing period in 1840—the date of the Opium War and the beginning of the impact-response cycle—this work begins with the Qing dynasty (1644) and continues to the present day. Furthermore, rather than focusing primarily on twentieth-century events at the expense of earlier eras, roughly half the text covers the Qing period with the other half covering the Republican and Communist eras.

Several individuals will benefit from Modern Chinese History. Teachers of history, international studies, cultural studies, and Asian studies will find this text useful. Most notably, it will supplement the world history survey, which is becoming increasingly common on high school and college campuses. Even those colleges that have maintained the Western civilization survey will find this an appealing option, as instructors are emphasizing the West’s interaction with the larger world. Naturally, all types of Asian history classes will profit from this volume.

Modern Chinese History offers a succinct introduction to the political, economic, cultural, and social heritage of this powerful and influential nation. Because our students will increasingly interact with this region of the world, it is imperative they have a basic understanding of China.

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The Cambridge History of China

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The Cambridge History of China is the largest and most comprehensive history of China in the English language. Planned in the 1960s by the late, distinguished China scholar Professor John K. Fairbank of Harvard, and Denis Twitchett, Professor Emeritus of Princeton, the series covers the grand scale of Chinese history from the 3rd century BC, to the death of Mao Tse-tung. Consisting of fifteen volumes (two of which, Volumes 5 and 9 are to be published in two books), the history embodies both existing scholarship and extensive original research into hitherto neglected subjects and periods. The contributors, all specialists from the international community of Sinologists, cover the main developments in political, social, economic and intellectual life of China in their respective periods. Collectively they present the major events in a long history that encompasses both a very old civilisation and a great modern power. Written not only for students and scholars, but with the general reader in mind, the volumes are designed to be read continuously, or as works of reference. No knowledge of Chinese is necessary; for readers with Chinese, proper names and terms are identified with their characters in the glossary, and full references to Chinese, Japanese, and other works are given in the bibliographies. Numerous maps illustrate the texts. The published volumes have constituted essential reading in Chinese history. See also, The Cambridge History of Ancient China, Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy, eds., a companion to this series covering the period 1500 to 221 BC.

• General Editors: John K. Fairbank , Denis Twitchett

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16 results in The Cambridge History of China

• Volume 2, The Six Dynasties, 220–589
• Edited by Albert E. Dien , Keith N. Knapp
• Published online: 28 October 2019 Print publication: 07 November 2019
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• View description The Six Dynasties Period (220–589 CE) is one of the most complex in Chinese history. Written by leading scholars from across the globe, the essays in this volume cover nearly every aspect of the period, including politics, foreign relations, warfare, agriculture, gender, art, philosophy, material culture, local society, and music. While acknowledging the era's political chaos, these essays indicate that this was a transformative period when Chinese culture was significantly changed and enriched by foreign peoples and ideas. It was also a time when history and literature became recognized as independent subjects and religion was transformed by the domestication of Buddhism and the formation of organized Daoism. Many of the trends that shaped the rest of imperial China's history have their origins in this era, such as the commercial vibrancy of southern China, the separation of history and literature from classical studies, and the growing importance of women in politics and religion.

• Volume 9, The Ch'ing Dynasty to 1800, Part 2
• Edited by Willard J. Peterson
• Published online: 05 April 2016 Print publication: 04 April 2016
• View description Volume 9, Part 2 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes which together explore the political, social and economic developments of the Ch'ing Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prior to the arrival of Western military power. Across fifteen chapters, a team of leading historians explore how the eighteenth century's greatest contiguous empire in terms of geographical size, population, wealth, cultural production, political order and military domination peaked and then began to unravel. The book sheds new light on the changing systems deployed under the Ch'ing dynasty to govern its large, multi-ethnic Empire and surveys the dynasty's complex relations with neighbouring states and Europe. In this compelling and authoritative account of a significant era of early modern Chinese history, the volume illustrates the ever-changing nature of the Ch'ing Empire, and provides context for the unforeseeable challenges that the nineteenth century would bring.

• Volume 5, Sung China, 960–1279 AD, Part 2
• Edited by John W. Chaffee , Denis Twitchett
• Published online: 05 March 2015 Print publication: 05 March 2015
• View description This is the second of two volumes on the Sung Dynasty, which together provide a comprehensive history of China from the fall of the T'ang Dynasty in 907 to the Mongol conquest of the Southern Sung in 1279. With contributions from leading historians in the field, Volume 5, Part Two paints a complex portrait of a dynasty beset by problems and contradictions, but one which, despite its military and geopolitical weakness, was nevertheless economically powerful, culturally brilliant, socially fluid and the most populous of any empire in global history to that point. In this much anticipated addition to the series, the authors survey key themes across ten chapters, including government, economy, society, religion, and thought to provide an authoritative and topical treatment of a profound and significant period in Chinese history.

• Volume 5, The Sung Dynasty and its Precursors, 907–1279, Part 1
• Edited by Denis Twitchett , Paul Jakov Smith
• Published online: 28 March 2010 Print publication: 23 March 2009
• View description This first of two volumes on the Sung Dynasty (960–1279) and its Five Dynasties and Southern Kingdoms precursors presents the political history of China from the fall of the T'ang Dynasty in 907 to the Mongol conquest of the Southern Sung in 1279. Its twelve chapters survey the personalities and events that marked the rise, consolidation, and demise of the Sung polity during an era of profound social, economic, and intellectual ferment. The authors place particular emphasis on the emergence of a politically conscious literati class during the Sung, characterized by the increasing importance of the examination system early in the dynasty and on the rise of the tao-hsueh (Neo-Confucian) movement toward the end. In addition, they highlight the destabilizing influence of factionalism and ministerial despotism on Sung political culture and the impact of the powerful steppe empires of the Khitan Liao, Tangut Hsi Hsia, Jurchen Chin, and Mongol Yüan on the shape and tempo of Sung dynastic events.

• Volume 9, Part 1, The Ch'ing Empire to 1800
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 16 December 2002
• View description This volume of the Cambridge History of China considers the political, military, social, and economic developments of the Ch'ing empire to 1800. The period begins with the end of the resurgent Ming dynasty, covered in volumes 7 and 8, and ends with the beginning of the collapse of the imperial system in the nineteenth century, described in volume 10. Taken together, the ten chapters elucidate the complexities of the dynamic interactions between emperors and their servitors, between Manchus and non-Manchu populations, between various elite groups, between competing regional interests, between merchant networks and agricultural producers, between rural and urban interests, and, at work among all these tensions, between the old and new. This volume presents the changes underway in this period prior to the advent of Western imperialist military power.
• Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty, Part 2, 1368–1644
• Denis C. Twitchett , Frederick W. Mote
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 28 January 1998
• View description Volumes seven and eight of The Cambridge History of China are devoted to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the only segment of later imperial history during which all of China proper was ruled by a native, or Han, dynasty. These volumes provide the largest and most detailed account of the Ming period in any language. Summarising all modern research, volume eight offers detailed studies of governmental structure, the fiscal and legal systems, international relations, social and economic history, transportation networks, and the history of ideas and religion, incorporating original research on subjects never before described in detail. Although it is written by specialists, this Cambridge History intends to explain and describe the Ming dynasty to general readers who do not have a specialised knowledge of Chinese history, as well as scholars and students. This volume can be utilised as a reference work, or read continuously.

• Volume 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368
• Edited by Herbert Franke , Denis C. Twitchett
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 25 November 1994
• View description This volume deals with four non-Chinese regimes: the Khitan dynasty of Liao; the Tangut state of Hsi Hsia; the Jurchen empire of Chin; and the Mongolian Yuan dynasty that eventually engulfed the whole of China. It investigates the historical background from which these regimes emerged and shows how each in its own way set up viable institutions for the control of a multi-racial, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural population. It discusses these problems not just as a long negative episode in China's history, but shows the ingenuity and adaptability of these states, and their success in achieving political and social stability. The volume presents the fullest chronological account of the period, in which political, institutional, social, and economic changes are integrated as far as possible, and sees the period against a broad background of international relations in Northern and Central Asia.

• Volume 15, The People's Republic, Part 2, Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution, 1966–1982
• Edited by Roderick MacFarquhar , John K. Fairbank
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 29 November 1991
• View description Volume 15 of The Cambridge History of China is the second of two volumes dealing with the People's Republic of China since its birth in 1949. The harbingers of the Cultural Revolution were analyzed in Volume 14 and Volume 15 traces a course of events still only partially understood by most Chinese. It begins by analysing the development of Mao's thought since the Communist seizure of power, and, in doing so, attempts to understand why he launched the movement. The contributors grapple with the conflict of evidence between what was said favourably about the Cultural Revolution at the time and the often diametrically opposed retrospective accounts. Volume 15, together with Volume 14, provides the most comprehensive and clearest account of how revolutionary China has developed in response to the upheavals initiated by Mao and Teng Hsiao-p'ing.

• Volume 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1
• Edited by Frederick W. Mote , Denis Twitchett
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 26 February 1988
• View description This volume in The Cambridge History of China is devoted to the history of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), with some account of the three decades before the dynasty's formal establishment, and for the Ming courts that survived in South China for a generation after 1644. Volume 7 deals primarily with the political developments of the period, but it also incorporates background in social, economic, and cultural history where this is relevant to the course of events. The Ming period is the only segment of later imperial history during which all of China proper was ruled by a native, or Han, dynasty. The volume provides the largest and most detailed account of the Ming period in any language. Summarizing all modern research, both in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages, the authors have gone far beyond a summary of the state of the field, but have incorporated original research on subjects that have never before been described in detail.

• Volume 14, The People's Republic, Part 1, The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949–1965
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 26 June 1987
• View description This is the first of the two final volumes of The Cambridge History of China, which describe the efforts of the People's Republic of China to grapple with the problems of adaptation to modern times. Volume 14 deals with the achievements of the economic and human disasters of the new regime's first sixteen years (1949–65). Part I chronicles the attempt to adapt the Soviet model of development to China, and Part II covers the subsequent efforts of China's leaders to find native solutions that would provide more rapid and appropriate answers to China's problems. Each of the two parts of the volume analyzes the key issues and developments in the spheres of politics, economics, culture, education, and foreign relations. The contributors, all leading scholars of the period, show the interrelation of Chinese actions in all these spheres, and the describe how, gradually, events led to the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Tse-tung in 1966.

• Volume 1, The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC–AD 220
• Edited by Denis Twitchett , Michael Loewe
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 26 December 1986
• View description This volume begins the historical coverage of The Cambridge History of China with the establishment of the Ch'in empire in 221 BC and ends with the abdication of the last Han emperor in AD 220. Spanning four centuries, this period witnessed major evolutionary changes in almost every aspect of China's development, being particularly notable for the emergence and growth of a centralized administration and imperial government. Leading historians from Asia, Europe, and America have contributed chapters that convey a realistic impression of significant political, economic, intellectual, religious, and social developments, and of the contacts that the Chinese made with other peoples at this time. As the book is intended for the general reader as well as the specialist, technical details are given in both Chinese terms and English equivalents. References lead to primary sources and their translations and to secondary writings in European languages as well as Chinese and Japanese.

• Volume 13, Republican China 1912–1949, Part 2
• Edited by John K. Fairbank , Albert Feuerwerker
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 24 July 1986
• View description This is the second of two volumes of this authoritative history which review the Republican period. The titanic drama of the Chinese Revolution is one of the major world events of modern times. The fifteen authors of this volume are pioneers in its exploration and analysis, and their text is designed to meet the needs of non-specialist readers. After a preliminary overview stressing economic and social history, the History presents a narrative of events in China's foreign relations to 1931, and in the political history of the Nationalist government and its Communist opponents from 1927 to 1937. Subsequent chapters analyse key governmental, educational and literary - offering critical appraisal of the major achievements and problems in each of these areas. Finally, the volume examines China's war of resistance, the civil war to 1949, and the portentous development of the thought of Mao Tse-tung before coming to power.

• Volume 12, Republican China, 1912–1949, Part 1
• Edited by John K. Fairbank
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 30 September 1983
• View description This is the first of two volumes of this authoritative Cambridge history which review the Republican period, between the demise of imperial China and the establishment of the People's Republic. These years from 1912 to 1949 were marked by civil war, revolution and invasion; but also by change and growth in the economic, social, intellectual and cultural spheres. The chapters examine economic trends in the period and the rise of the new middle class. Intellectual trends are surveyed to show the changes in traditional Chinese values and the foreign influences which played a major role in Republican China. Although it is written by specialists, the goals and approach of this Cambridge history are to explain and discuss republican China for an audience which will include scholars, students and general readers who do not have special knowledge of Chinese history. It will be useful both as narrative history and as a reference source on the history and politics of China.

• Volume 11, Late Ch'ing, 1800–1911, Part 2
• Edited by John K. Fairbank , Kwang-Ching Liu
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 30 September 1980
• View description This is the second of two volumes in this major Cambridge history dealing with the gradual decline of the Ch'ing empire in China (the first was volume 10). Volume 11 surveys the persistence and deterioration of the old order in China during the late nineteenth century, and the profound stirring during that period, which led to China's great twentieth-century revolution. The contributors focus on commercial and technological growth, foreign relations, the stimulation of Chinese intellectual life by the outside world, and military triumphs and disasters. They show that the effects of the accelerating changes were to fragment the old ruling class and the ancient monarchy, finally bringing the Chinese people face to face with the challenges of the new century. For readers with Chinese, proper names and terms are identified with their characters in the glossary, and full references to Chinese, Japanese and other works are given in the bibliographies.

• Volume 3, Sui and T'ang China, 589–906 AD, Part One
• Edited by Denis C. Twitchett
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 27 September 1979
• View description The Cambridge History of China is one of the most far-reaching works of international scholarship ever undertaken, exploring the main developments in political, social, economic and intellectual life from the Ch'in empire to the present day. The contributors are specialists from the international community of sinological scholars. Many of the accounts break new ground; all are based on fresh research. The works are written not only with students and scholars but also with the general reader in mind. No knowledge of Chinese is assumed, though for readers of Chinese, proper and other names are identified with their characters in the index. Numerous maps and tables illustrate the text. Volume 3, covers the second great period of unified imperial power, 589–906, when China established herself as the centre of a wider cultural sphere, embracing Japan, Korea and Vietnam. It was an era in which there was a great deal of rapid social and economic change, and in which literature and the arts reached new heights of attainment.

• Volume 10, Late Ch'ing 1800–1911, Part 1
• Published online: 28 March 2008 Print publication: 05 June 1978
• View description This is the first of two volumes in this major Cambridge history dealing with the decline of the Ch'ing empire. It opens with a survey of the Ch'ing empire in China and Inner Asia at its height, in about 1800. Contributors study the complex interplay of foreign invasion, domestic rebellion and Ch'ing decline and restoration. Special reference is made to the Peking administration, the Canton trade and the early treaty system, the Taiping, Nien and other rebellions, and the dynasty's survival in uneasy cooperation with the British, Russian, French, American and other invaders. Each chapter is written by a specialist from the international community of sinological scholars. No knowledge of Chinese is necessary; for readers with Chinese, proper names and terms are identified with their characters in the glossary, and full references to Chinese, Japanese and other works are given in the bibliographies. Numerous maps illustrate the text, and there are a bibliographical essays describing the source materials on which each author's account is based.

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Art of Asia

Course: art of asia   >   unit 2, introduction to china.

• Imperial China, an introduction
• Archaeology and the study of ancient China
• Discoveries in Chinese archaeology
• Buddhist Temples at Wutaishan
• Chinese calligraphy, an introduction
• Decoding Chinese calligraphy
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• Ascending the Heron Tower written in cursive script

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The Cycles—or Stages—of Chinese History

The logic of strategy and all that comes from it, including the idea of the “balance of power,” for example, is inherently universal, transcendental, and timeless, but each clan, tribe, nation, and state has its own peculiar political constructs—that is why seemingly homogeneous systems, for example parliamentary democracy, function in ways so radically different from country to country.

Equally, the elemental sense of the centrality of any polity takes very different forms, ranging from the quiet certitudes of the Kingdom of Denmark to that well-known Chinese construct, the Tianxia (whose logographs 天下 have been much seen in the Japanese press of late, their Kanji versions being identical). Literally “under heaven,” short for “all under heaven” or more meaningfully, “the rule of all humans,” it defines an ideal national and international system of ever-expanding concentric circles centered on a globally benevolent emperor, now Xi Jinping or more correctly perhaps, the seven-headed standing committee of the Politburo.

The innermost circle of the Tianxia is formed by the rest of the Politburo and top Beijing officialdom, while its outermost circle comprises the Solomon Islands along with the twenty or so other utterly benighted “outer barbarian” countries that still do not recognize Beijing, preferring Taipei. In between, all other Chinese from officials and tycoons to ordinary subjects and overseas Chinese fit in their own circles, further and further from the imperial coreas do foreign states both large and small, both near and far, both already respectful (too few) and those still arrogantly vainglorious. It is the long-range task of China’s external policy to bring each and every state into a proper relationship with the emperor—that is, a tributary relationship, in which they deliver goods and services if only as tokens of fealty, in exchange for security and prosperity, but even more for the privilege of proximity to the globally benevolent emperor 1 . All this is of course nothing more than an exceptionally elaborate rendition of universal ambitions that are merely grander for the greater—the Byzantine ranking of foreign potentates by their proximity to the emperor was only slightly less elaborate.

Nor is there anything peculiarly Chinese about the desire to bring other states into a tributary relationship—often better than a full incorporation, which may be unwanted for any number of reasons, and obviously superior to an alliance however close and secure but between equals, whereby there must be reciprocity, a quid for every quo, usually costly or irksome in some way. Hence from time immemorial, stronger clans, tribes, potentates, and entire nations have done their best to impose tributary relations on weaker clans, tribes, potentates and nations, obtaining goods and services for their forbearance and perhaps protection, or at least tokens of respectful subordination. Chinese emperors wanted no more than that, and unlike most recipients, not infrequently gave gifts more valuable than the tribute they received (as did many Byzantine emperors, by the way).

What is peculiar to China’s political culture, and of very great contemporary relevance is the centrality within it of a very specific doctrine on how to bring powerful foreigners—indeed foreigners initially more powerful than the empire—into a tributary relationship. Specialists concur that this doctrine emerged from the very protracted (3rd century BCE to 1st century CE) but ultimately successful struggle with the Xiongnú (匈奴) horse-nomad state, 2 just possibly remote ancestors of Attila’s Huns, but definitely the inventors of the Steppe State political system that would be replicated by all their successors, and more adapted than replaced even by the Mongols 3 .

Formidable mounted archers and capable of sustained campaigning (a primary objective of the Steppe State), the Xiongnú ravaged and savaged and extorted tribute from the perpetually less martial, and certainly cavalry-poor Han until the latter finally felt able to resist again. Even then, 147 years of intermittent warfare ensued until Huhanye (呼韓邪), the paramount Chanyu (Qagan, Khan) of the Xiongnú, personally and formally submitted to the emperor Han Xuandi in 51 BCE, undertaking to pay homage, to leave a son at court as a hostage, and to deliver tribute, as befitted a vassal. That was a very great downfall from the familial status of earlier Chanyus of the epoch of Xiongnú predominance, who were themselves recognized as emperors, whose sons and heirs could have imperial daughters in marriage, and who from 200 BCE had received tribute from the Han, instead of the other way around.

It is this successful transformation of a once superior power first into an equal (signified by imperial marriages) and then into a subservient client-state that seems to have left an indelible residue in China’s tradition of statecraft. It was achieved with a specific “barbarian-handling” tool box first described by its early practitioner, the scholar and imperial advisor Lou Jing (婁敬) 199 BCE. His method was first applied when the Xiongnú were still very strong and the Han were not only tactically inferior (their chariots were totally obsolete for fighting mounted archers) but also beset by political divisions, so much so that a 198 BCE 4 treaty required the payment of an annual tribute in kind (silk, grain, etc.), and the formal attestation of equality for the Chanyu embodied in a marriage alliance, formalized by imperial letters that make the equality fully explicit.

The first barbarian-handling tool is normally translated as “corruption” in English translations, but perhaps “addiction,” or more fully “induced economic dependence” are more accurate: the originally self-sufficient Xiongnú were to be made economically dependent on Han-produced goods, starting with silk and woolen cloths instead of their own rude furs and felt. At first supplied free as unrequited tribute, these goods could still be supplied later on when the Han were stronger, but only in exchange for services rendered.

The second tool of barbarian handling, is normally translated as “indoctrination”: the Xiongnú were to be persuaded to accept the authoritarian Confucian value system and the collectivistic behavioral norms of the Han, as opposed to the steppe value system, based on voluntary allegiance to a heroic (and successful in looting) fighting and migration leader. One immediate benefit was that once the Chanyu’s son and heir married an imperial daughter, he would be ethically subordinated to the emperor as his father-in-law—remaining so when he became Chanyu in turn.

The much larger, longer-term benefit of the second tool was to undermine the entire political culture of the Xiongnú, and make them psychologically well as economically dependent on the imperial radiance, which was willingly extended in brotherly fashion when the Han were weak, and then contemptuously withdrawn when the Xiongnú were reduced to vassalage. What happened between the Han and the Xiongnú from the equal treaty of 198 BCE to the vassalage treaty of 51 BCE, remained thereafter, and still remains today the most hopeful precedent for Han dealings with powerful and violent states—evidently the assigned role of the United States in the present Beijing world-view.

The method forms a logical sequence: Stage One: start by conceding all that must be conceded to the superior power including tribute, in order to avoid damage and obtain whatever forbearance is offered. But this in itself entangles the ruling class of the still-superior power in webs of material dependence that reduce its independent vitality and strength. Stage Two: offer equality in a privileged bipolarity that excludes all lesser powers, or “G-2” in current parlance. That neutralizes the still powerful Other party, and isolates the manipulated soon-to-be former equal from all its potential allies, preventing from balancing China with a coalition. Stage Three: finally, when the formerly superior power has been weakened enough, withdraw all tokens of equality and impose subordination.

Until the Chinese government decided—very prematurely I believe—to awaken the world to its classically imperial territorial ambitions by demanding the cession of lands, reefs, rocks, and sea waters from India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam (demands that disturb and damage the concurrent Tianxia narrative of an alternative and more harmonious state system, disseminated even within the confines of Stanford University 5 ), it was making much progress towards Stage Two, the stage of equality preparatory to the final stage of subordination.

Of this progress—now interrupted, one may hope—one example suffices, though Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Zoellick among many others have expressed similar notions: at the end Dr. Henry Kissinger’s very widely read On China , after 526 pages of historical retrospectives and personal reminiscences, definite prescriptions are offered, summarized in the heading “Toward a Pacific Community,” i.e. a harmonious US-Chinese “G-2” that logically proceed from his relentlessly benign assessment of Chinese intentions. Dr. Kissinger’s G-2 is identical to that relationship very persistently advocated by Chinese officials high and low, and by senior advisors such as Zhen Bijian (郑必坚) of “Peaceful Rise” fame.

That Stage Two could be achieved only by persuading the still-powerful Other party to accept equality and its limitations , most notably the isolation of the soon-to-be former equal from all its potential allies, preventing it from balancing China with a coalition. Indeed, Dr. Kissinger calls for the creation of a Chinese-American “commonwealth”: one “which would enable [sic] other major countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India and Australia to participate in the construction of a system perceived as joint rather than polarized between ‘Chinese’ and ‘American’ blocs.” But Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Australia are hardly likely to share Dr. Kissinger's optimism. Deprived of American support in facing Chinese demands, forced to become the objects of a Chinese-American entente, today’s actual and potential allies would have to make their own accommodations, eliminating the one and only potential long-term counterweight to China, the coalescence of all lesser powers menaced by its expansionism. As the man said, history need not be remembered but must still be lived.

1. It was thus at Mao’s lying in state, which I attended: diplomats accredited to Beijing were brought in to view the body in clusters, each forming a circle of the Tianxia—the innermost and the first to join us, most privileged guests, were the ambassadors of Romania, the Khmer Rouge, North Vietnam (soon to be demoted), and North Korea, with the Russian only coming in at the very end, in the outermost circle at that time.

2. Described in a military report in Book 88 of the Hòu hànshu (Book of the Later Han) attributed to Fan Ye (John E. Hill, tr.) http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/hhshu/hou_han_shu.html .

3. See Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 206 ff.

4. In the Shiji (史记), the Records of the Grand Historian (or Grand Scribe) of Sima Qian, 司馬遷, Vol. 99, Cols. 2144 and 2179. Increasingly available in English translations.

5. Stanford University Tianxia Workshop: Culture, International Relations, and World History May 6-11, 2011. The workshop will gather together a small group of distinguished scholars to engage in sustained conversations on the theoretical implications and practical values of the traditional Chinese vision of world order, or tianxia (all under heaven). Varied discourses indebted to tianxia have resurfaced in modern China in quest of moral and cultural ways of relating to and articulating an international society. We believe that the Chinese vision may prove productive in exploring possibilities of world culture and literature in the tension-ridden yet interconnected world. [author’s emphasis] http://www.stanford.edu/dept/asianlang/cgi-bin/about/tianxia_workshop.php

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China History: The Sui Dynasty Unified China in the 6th Century Essay

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China has a rich and vibrant history that includes many periods. Each era implemented new reformations and improvements in the country, thus laying the foundation for the future. This paper summarizes the history of The Sui Dynasty that unified China in the 6th century. Despite the fact that the reign of the Sui Dynasty lasted for almost 4 decades, their decisions provided the basis for the reunion and prosperity of divided China after a long war.

The rule of the Sui Dynasty officially started when Yang Jian with the help of the military overthrew and killed the previous Emperor’s family. In 581 CE, he became the Emperor, and later in history, he was known under the name of Wendi. In the beginning, Emperor Wendi controlled regions of Northern China, but in the next ten years, he had united all regions. Eight years after the beginning of his reign, Yang Jian eliminated the Chen Dynasty, which ruled over southern China, and implemented many successful initiatives during his rule in united China.

Although Emperor Wendi was celebrated by the Chinese people for unifying the country and changing the structure of the local government, he accomplished other important achievements that improved the government and made life for Chinese citizens easier. Those reformations included coming back to Confucianism and the increasing Buddhism practices and expanding the army. The rule of Emperor Wendi lasted until 604 AC when he was killed by his son Yang Guang, who is also known as Yangdi.

The first emperor Wendi was previously a general for the Northern Zhou dynasty. Although the reign of the Sui Dynasty lasted only for roughly thirty to forty years, many developments started during his rule. For example, as it was previously noted that he modified local government in order to make internal administration more transparent. Moreover, he reconsidered and changed the criminal law, as well as several public work projects, that involved developing a complex canal system. It connected three main rivers of China and was named the Grand Canal.

The first Emperor of the Sui Dynasty also took some serious action to protect the borders of his newly unified empire. At that time, China was surrounded by many strong and dangerous empires. On the northern border the domain of the Yuezhi was located, a federation of nomadic warriors of Turkic heritage. They controlled the territory of Mongolia from Manchuria to the western border of the Byzantine Empire. Nevertheless, on the inside, the confederacy experienced a division into two competing groups, the Greater Yuezhi and Lesser Yuezhi.

The Greater Yuezhi controlled the western half of confederacy territory, up to IIi River. The Lesser Yuezhi controlled the eastern and southern territory on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Emperor Wendi offered his assistance to the Greater Yuezhi and tried to lessen the strength and political power of the Lesser Yuezhi khan. This conspiracy significantly reduced the risk of being attacked by the Greater Yuezhi.

Moreover, the other reasons for the decreased threat included an improved Great Wall and the expansion of Chinese army troops, who constantly patrolled the northern frontiers. At the same time, these strategic moves enabled the reopening of the western trade routes. Thus, a successful trade relationship with Central and Western Asia was established yet again. Considering the changes in political structure, it can be said that during the rule of the Sui Dynasty, both Emperors Wendi and Yangdi developed strong military forces. They were very successful not only in protecting borders but also in fighting the Emperor’s own wars. As a result, the Chinese army was victorious in the conquest of Vietnam and the Champa Kingdom, which allowed the territory of the Empire of China to spread.

It is also worth noticing that Emperor Wendi contributed to the rise of the Chinese economy by creating improved infrastructures. Apart from this, Yang Jian provided the granaries, which were used to save up food and keep market prices under control. Those reformations played a crucial role in the economic advancement of the empire. Following the success of the Jin dynasty, the economy of the Sui reign thrived. Moreover, the economic field also prospered after the flourishing of agriculture, because after previous wars, soldiers returned home and started farming. Another economic accomplishment of the Sui also was the Juntian system of splitting farming fields evenly among people. Moreover, in order to encourage trade, the taxes were also lowered.

Historians consider it a significant dynasty owing to the changes that took place during its period. There were notable political changes during the reign Sui dynasty. For the first time in the history of the Chinese Empire, there was a creation of a new political system with a modified structure. Three separate departments and six new ministries were formed. This reformation was studied and analyzed by many history researchers. For instance, Man Meng mentions that the Sui Dynasty also founded Three-Provinces-Six-Department system.

Additionally, the royal rule was improved, and the labor division in the courts became more informative. Consequently, the system for talent choice was seriously altered. The original hierarchical style of nine ranks of officials was substituted by the imperial examination style.

Wendi’s successor was Yangdi, who in many ways was even more ambitious than his father. Yangdi built a second capital at Loyang in the east to complement the site constructed by Wendi southeast of Changan. He oversaw the return of the southernmost regions of China into the empire and the addition of the Champa kingdom in Vietnam. Yet it was Yangdi’s ambitions, combined with financial mismanagement that ultimately led to the end of the reign of his clan. His attempts to meddle in the internal politics of his nomadic neighbors led to the alienation of the western Yuezhi fraction, which wrested away control of the city-states of the Tarim Basin, formerly under Sui protection.

Nevertheless, Yangdi was an educated Emperor, he encouraged the spread of Confucian culture and restored the principles of Confucian Education. Although Emperor Yang was called the tyrannical monarch, he had been careful before winning the throne and then gave grant indulgence to music after winning the trust of Emperor Wen of Sui and his mother. Emperor Yang was a talent in literacy, his creation of poetry style and series of policies in music have a great impact on China’s music culture.

Furthermore, one of the most remarkable projects of the Sui Dynasty was the creation of the Grand Canal, which joined the Yellow River together with the Huai and Yangtze Rivers. From that moment on, the transportation and shipping of goods from north to south was much easier. This improvement laid a crucial foundation for the economic and social advancement of the Chinese Empire. However, those constructions and wars were expensive. People suffered from intensive labor camps. Ten of thousands of able-bodied men were taken from rural farms and other occupations, which damaged the agricultural base and the economy. Peasant uprisings broke out one after another.

The fall of the Sui started relatively early; Emperor Yang was the second and the last Emperor. Several reasons contributed to the end of the Sui Dynasty. For example, the great famine caused peasants’ rebellions across the empire. To be more specific, a rebellion at Mt. Changbaishan in 611 seriously damaged the reputation of Emperor. The peasants believed that the Emperor was corrupt, and later they united their troops to create and expand the Wagang army. The movement was controlled by the agrarian leaders Zhai Rang and Li Mi who attacked and took over a granary to steal the food and distribute it among the poor. After this raid, the army killed Emperor Yangdi, thus ending the Sui Dynasty in 618.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that even though the reign of the Sui Dynasty was relatively short, it had a profound effect on the empire. Two emperors greatly contributed to the prosperity of the political, social and economic life of Chinese citizens. Their decisions and reformations united previously divided regions and laid the basis for future improvements. Understanding these changes is crucial for creating a foundation for understanding Chinese history.

Ding, Shuyue. The Music Complex of Emperor Yang of Sui Dynasty . Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Intercultural Communication. Atlantis Press. 2017.

Jia, Jierui, Junyang Li, and Ke Gao. The Track of History: Finance and National Governance in Ancient China. International Journal of Education, Culture and Society 4, no. 1. 2019.

Jindong, C. A. I., and P. E. N. G. Jing. Introduction of Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal and analysis of its heritage values. Journal of Hydro-environment Research 26. 2019.

Jinwung, K. I. M., and Spencer C. Tucker. How did the Weaker Actor Defeat the Stronger Actor? Koguryŏ’s War with Sui (612–614) Revisited. Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 18, no. 2 (2018).

Kaili, C. H. E. N. G. Emperor Wen of Sui Dynasty and Buddhism . Journal of Chongqing Three Gorges University 6. 2015.

Man, Meng. Rich Sui Dynasty and Strong Tang Dynasty: Dream of Great Power and Humanity Spirit . Journal of PLA Academy of Art 1. 2017.

Rodzinski, Witold. A History of China . Pergamon Press. 2017.

Xue, Da. Prosperity in Sui and Tang Dynasties . DeepLogic. 2019.

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IvyPanda. (2022, February 11). China History: The Sui Dynasty Unified China in the 6th Century. https://ivypanda.com/essays/china-history-the-sui-dynasty/

"China History: The Sui Dynasty Unified China in the 6th Century." IvyPanda , 11 Feb. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/china-history-the-sui-dynasty/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'China History: The Sui Dynasty Unified China in the 6th Century'. 11 February.

IvyPanda . 2022. "China History: The Sui Dynasty Unified China in the 6th Century." February 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/china-history-the-sui-dynasty/.

1. IvyPanda . "China History: The Sui Dynasty Unified China in the 6th Century." February 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/china-history-the-sui-dynasty/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "China History: The Sui Dynasty Unified China in the 6th Century." February 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/china-history-the-sui-dynasty/.

Paper in Ancient China

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The widespread use of paper and printing were features of ancient China which distinguished it from other ancient cultures. Traditionally, paper was invented in the early 2nd century CE, but there is evidence it was much earlier. As a cheaper and more convenient material than bamboo, wood, or silk , paper helped spread literature and literacy but it was used for many other purposes from hats to packaging. The material was made finer over the centuries, was traded across Asia and was used in the first paper money from the early 12th century CE.

The Invention of Paper

There is ample archaeological evidence of primitive paper types from the 2nd century BCE in China, largely using hemp. It is believed that the invention of this early form of paper was accidental after clothes, which were made of hemp, were left too long after washing, and a residue formed in the water which could then be pressed into a useful new material. The traditional date for the invention of more refined paper has long been 105 CE. Cai Lun, the director of the Imperial Workshops at Luoyang , is the one credited with creating paper by using soaked and then pressed plant fibres which were dried in sheets on wooden frames or screens. Cumbersome bamboo or wooden strips and expensive silk had been used for centuries as a surface for writing but, after much endeavour, a lighter and cheaper alternative had finally been found in the form of paper scrolls.

Over time different fibres were experimented with to make paper, and so the quality had greatly increased by the end of the Han period (206-220 CE). Fibres from many different plants, the stems of grasses, vegetable matter, hemp, tree bark, and even rags were used and blended in a constant quest of experimentation to find the cheapest mix of materials which produced the highest quality of paper. Rattan replaced the early hemp paper and was favoured for centuries until it was replaced by bamboo fibres as the most common raw material from the 8th century CE. One of the reasons for rattan's replacement was that the demand for paper was so great the slow-growing plant had almost been wiped out in certain regions of China. Bamboo grows much quicker than hemp and so was a significantly cheaper option. From the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) paper production techniques became even better and the main raw material was now the boiled bark of the mulberry tree. Chinese paper was of such high quality that it was traded to foreign states along the Silk Road .

Sheets of paper came in all sizes and many colour shades. Materials, techniques, and preferences varied from region to region, but there were helpful treatises written on the subject, the earliest being by Su I-chien (957-995 CE). Special paper with an appealing texture, pattern or colouring was reserved for calligraphy and art. These paper types were made using rice, wheat straw, sandalwood bark, hibiscus stalks, and even seaweed.

The Chinese were naturally rather secretive about their papermaking skills, just as they were with silk production but secrets rarely remain so for ever. The outside world, or at least the world west of China, acquired the knowledge of paper manufacturing in the 8th century CE (or plausibly even earlier). The trigger was when a group of papermakers were taken prisoner by their Arab victors following the Battle of Talas. Soon Baghdad would become a major producer of paper, and Medieval Europe , too, would eventually produce high-quality paper of its own.

Uses of Paper

The invention of paper greatly helped the spread of literature and literacy, making books more convenient to use and cheaper. Scholars at the Imperial academies were issued with thousands of sheets of paper each month by the government. Further, the combination of brush, ink, and paper would establish painting and calligraphy as the most important areas of art in China for the next two millennia. With the invention of block printing - either in Korea or China and perhaps in the 8th century CE - the demand for paper rocketed, especially from Buddhist scholars and temples. In the 10th century CE, when there was the Neo-Confucian revival, the printing of Confucian classics positively boomed. With the invention of moveable type printing, from the 11th or 12th century CE, paper needed to be thicker to resist the heavy metal blocks of type, but the two inventions - press and paper - would revolutionise communication and remain unchallenged as the means to send and store information until the arrival of the computer.

Paper was so highly valued in ancient China that it was used to pay tribute and taxes to the state during the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). The Tang also imposed a colour code on the use of paper, with white paper being reserved for legal documents, yellow for government purposes, and blue for communications with Taoist temples.

Besides its use for writing and books, paper was used to produce topographical and military maps from the Han dynasty onwards. Drawn to a reasonably accurate scale, they included colour-coding and symbols for local features and included specific areas of enlarged scale. Other uses of paper included as packaging for delicate items such as medicine and as wrapping paper, especially for parcels of tea. Paper was widely used to make hats, stiffened it was used for armour, and thinned it could be used for windows. There were paper screens, sheets, curtains, clothes, and, eventually, money.

Paper Money

Following increases in trade , the system of barter, or the exchange of one material for another, was replaced by a system where one particular commodity came to be a common form of payment. In China rolls of silk or gold ingots could be used to pay for any other type of goods. For smaller exchanges metal coinage was used, first in the shape of tools, then in the form of more convenient small coins. As trade and the number of people involved in it grew ever larger, an even more convenient method of payment was sought. Another problem with coinage was the sheer quantity of copper required to make enough coins for the economy 's needs.

Paper money of a sort first appeared during the Tang Dynasty. The development sprang from merchants relying on paper documents. This was especially so for tea merchants, one of China's best-selling commodities. Merchants were wary of carrying valuable ingots to and from the state treasury and so preferred to use receipts instead. These paper documents allowed a merchant to make or collect his payment in any local treasury and so they became known as 'flying money'. This first form of paper money was not actually much of a success and, for larger transactions, merchants still preferred the greater security of silver ingots. The ideas was a good one, though, and paper money made a comeback in the 11th and 12th century CE.

In the 11th century CE in the Szechwan province, the use of heavy iron coinage necessitated the wealthy to leave their money in state deposit houses where it was more secure. Around 1023 CE, in order to indicate what money they had on deposit, people were issued with a paper certificate by the Song government. These certificates could also be used in transactions instead of physically moving the coinage. By the 12th century CE merchants elsewhere in China were again using more convenient paper receipts for their transactions instead of heavy bags of coins. These, in turn, led to the development of paper money around 1120 CE when the Chinese government established a monopoly on the issue of such receipts, in effect, creating the world's first banknotes. By 1260 CE the paper money had become what we would today call real banknotes - they could be kept for as long as one wished, used across the country to make purchases, and converted into gold or silver at any time.

The Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo gave one of the earliest accounts of Chinese paper money following his travels in Asia in the 13th century CE:

The coinage of this paper money is authenticated with as much form and ceremony as if it were actually of pure gold or silver; for to each note a number of officers, specially appointed, not only subscribe their names, but affix their signets also; and when this has been regularly done by the whole of them, the principle officer…having dipped into vermilion the royal seal committed to his custody, stamps with it the piece of paper, so that the form of the seal tinged with vermilion remains impressed upon it. (in Ebrey, 156-7)

Paper money still had its problems, though. Despite the precautions described by Marco Polo, paper money was just as likely to be counterfeited as coins were. The biggest blow came with high inflation. This was so rampant that paper money quickly became worthless and all but disappeared. A brief return during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 CE) was again ill-fated and the wide circulation of reliable banknotes would only become a reality in 1866 CE when they were issued by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

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Bibliography

• Dawson, R. The Chinese Experience. Phoenix Press - Orion, 2017.
• Dillon, M. China. Routledge, 1998.
• Ebrey, P.B. East Asia. Wadsworth Publishing, 2013.
• Pickering, J. "The History of Paper Money in China." Journal of the American Oriental Society , Vol. 1, No. 2 (1844), pp. 136-142.
• Ten Grotenhuis, E. "Stories of Silk and Paper." World Literature Today, , Vol. 80, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 2006), pp. 10-12.
• Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien. "Raw Materials for Old Papermaking in China." Journal of the American Oriental Society , Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1973), pp. 510-519.

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China's Road to Modernity: from Empire to Republic (1817-1949) by Hao Gao

Our modern-day fascination with China derives in large part from its recent rise as a modernised global power. Indeed, such terms as ‘the rise of China’ or ‘modern China’ are almost ubiquitous if one lives in today’s West. Perhaps as a result of this new public interest, increasing numbers of academics have been attracted to research China and its modernity. Some fundamental questions, however, arise: What does it mean when we talk about ‘modernity’ in China? Is China’s modernity any different from Western modernity? If so, what is China’s place in the long process of global modernisation? For those who are interested in China’s past, these questions are often reduced to the long-lasting debate on Chinese social, economic and intellectual history: Was China ‘stagnant’ before its historic encounter with the expanding West in the nineteenth century? Or was it undergoing its own form of journey towards modernity? To interpret these questions in another way: When did modern China begin? How do we explain China’s road to modernity (which doesn’t have to be a one-way road)? A conventional view dates the beginning of modern China from the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, following the First Anglo-Chinese War (1840–1842, commonly known as the First Opium War). The great German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) believed that before the Opium War China was essentially a ‘traditional’ society that was similar to the pre-capitalist West. In his view, unlike Western countries, China was stagnant, unable to make its own transition into a rational modern entity until it received this transformative shock from the outside. About half a century later, in the 1950s and 1960s, a school of American sinologists led by John K. Fairbank (1907–1991) elaborated on Weber’s view and developed what became known as ‘modernisation theory’. Compared to Weber’s typical nineteenth-century view of ‘the West and the Rest’, this theory showed a greater appreciation of China’s unique political and cultural achievements and was less loaded with ethnocentric value judgements. It was still based, however, on the model of ‘Western modernity’, from which Fairbank and his fellow scholars developed their narrative about the ‘impact of the West’ and ‘China’s response to the West’. In this interpretation, the pre-1840 China was still assumed to be largely stagnant and backward, so that it had to ‘respond’ to the challenge of the West in order to become modern. The Western impact on Chinese history, therefore, continued to be seen in positive terms, because it facilitated China’s ‘modernisation’. This traditional view of seeing the Opium War as the dividing line between pre-modern and modern Chinese history, although still influential in some parts of the world, had its critics in both the West and the East. Philip A. Kuhn (1933–2016), one of Fairbank’s students, refused to accept that China’s modernisation was brought from the outside. Looking closely at China’s internal changes from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, Kuhn argued in his famous book Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China that China’s modern age started ‘no earlier than 1864, the year the Taiping Rebellion was destroyed’. 1 The Opium War, therefore, should not be regarded as the key event leading China to its age of modernity. Naitō Konan (1866–1934), an eminent Japanese scholar from Kyoto University, shared Kuhn’s view that the pre-modern and modern periods of Chinese history should not be demarcated by external events. Konan argued that, if one could discover evidence of modernity in China before 1840, then it would prove the conventional view incorrect. He looked back to the Song Dynasty (960–1279), a great age in which China witnessed a series of technological innovations, the rise of commercial wealth, and the replacement of hereditary aristocracy by a system of meritocracy. It was these ‘elements’ of modernity that allowed Konan to locate China’s transition to modernity in the ninth and tenth centuries and hence to maintain that China actually anticipated Europe’s modern age by several centuries. Konan’s view, although innovative and non-Euro-centric, struggled to explain why these new trends and changes emerged in the Song Dynasty, and, particularly, why China declined in subsequent centuries after it had entered a ‘modern’ era. In recent decades, social and economic historians have increasingly been turning their focus to the late Ming and Qing period (or ‘late imperial China’), in which they hope to find out how China became modern. As opposed to the approaches based on either external or internal events, these scholars advocated a more holistic view of Chinese history. They maintained that the long period from the 1550s to the 1930s constituted a coherent whole, because, in these nearly four centuries, indigenous causes of change, together with those imposed from outside, drove China to a series of dramatic social transformations—the urbanisation of the lower Yangzi area, the development of regional and interregional trade, the growth of mass literacy and the increase in the number of the gentry, and so on. According to these scholars, it was these social and economic developments starting from the late Ming period that gradually led China into the modern era and ‘set in motion administrative and political changes that continued to develop over the course of the [Qing] and in some ways culminated in the social history of the early twentieth century’. 2 The above-mentioned conventional and revisionist views of China’s modernity have revealed many significant aspects of the rise of China from the pre-modern to the modern age, but, meanwhile, even viewed as a whole, this scholarship is far from perfect. In particular, in explaining how China became modernised, the existing literature tends to look at either a courte durée that ‘centred on the drama of “great events”’, 3 such as the years around the Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, or a Longue durée spanning three to four centuries. The very critical process in which China was transformed from a nineteenthcentury imperial dynasty into a globally engaged modern power has to some extent been under-researched. In other words, a moyenne durée scope is missing in this scholarship. This flaw in current research, of course, cannot be attributed to a lack of wisdom in the academics involved. As the Chinese saying goes, ‘Qiaofu nanwei wumi zhi chui (Even the most competent housewife cannot cook a meal without rice)’, 4 concentrated moyenne durée research on China’s journey to modernity would not have been possible without a sufficient amount of easily accessible primary sources. This new Gale digital collection China and the Modern World: Missionary, Sinology, and Literary Periodicals (1817– 1949) will be extremely significant to researchers of China and the wider field. With its focus on a 132-year period, a not-too-long not-too-short timespan that does not start from the traditional dividing line in 1840, this collection offers a wealth of precious historical sources that minutely recorded the most critical phase in China’s road to modernity. If one is familiar with this period of Chinese history, 1817 is the year that the Amherst embassy, the second British embassy to China, was rejected by the Qing court. It was this journey into the heartland of China that provided British travellers, including Robert Morrison (1782–1834), the first Protestant missionary in China and the founder of Indo-Chinese Gleaner (印中搜 聞, 1817–1822), with solid first-hand evidence of the Qing Dynasty’s decline. The year 1949 is when the Chinese Civil War concluded with the victory of the Communist Party, which allowed Mao Zedong to declare the founding the People’s Republic of China and proclaim that ‘the Chinese people have stood up’. In between these years, it was China’s ‘century of humiliation’. Foreign incursions—the two Opium Wars (1840–1842; 1856–1860) and the two Sino-Japanese Wars (1894–1895; 1937–1945)—as well as a series of domestic upheavals, most notably the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899– 1901), radically transformed the country. In consequence, thousands of years of imperial China ended in a globally interconnected modern world. China and the Modern World provides first-hand accounts written by both prominent figures and common people who lived through this crucial period in the history of Chinese modernity. These uniquely valuable sources are presented in seventeen English-language periodicals published by Western and Chinese authors inside and outside of China. Although their backgrounds varied, they shared experience in cross-cultural communication between China and the West at different levels. It was these individuals that, in one way or another, witnessed, recorded, and even contributed to the transformation of China from a declining, ‘traditional’ society into a modernised power on the global stage. Contributors to these journals can generally be categorised into the following groups: First, Western missionaries who spent a long time in China, trying to understand the country from within and even to help its progression towards modernity. In this regard, relatively unknown Protestant missionaries travelled to and lived in various corners of China. They produced The Chinese Recorder (教務雜誌, 1867–1941) and The West China Missionary News  聞, 1899–1943), two of the most important accounts for us to understand rural and western China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In major cities and cultural centres such as Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai, a number of influential missionary educators established universities and schools according to the Western model. Among others, Bulletin of the Catholic University of Peking (輔仁英文學志, 1926–1934) and The Yenching Journal of Social Studies (燕京社會學界, 1938– 1950) are two superb sources that provide unique insights into Christian higher education in China. Second, renowned sinologists who had experience in China but later returned to the West, promoting knowledge about China and Chinese culture in Western societies. Most notably, James Legge (1815–1897), the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University who translated the Analects and other Confucian classics into English, and Herbert A. Giles (1845–1935), inventor of the WadeGiles Chinese Romanisation system, were leading figures in the field of Chinese studies at the time. Together with other prominent sinologists such as Joseph Edkins, Ernst Faber and Edward Parker, they wrote extensively for The China Review (中國評論, 1872–1901), arguably the first major Western journal of sinology, and its sequel The New China Review (新中國評論, 1919–1922). These two journals are vital to any study of Western scholarship on China for the period from the late Qing to the early Republican years. Third, Chinese intellectuals who received education in the West or were influenced by Western thinking, trying to ‘save’ China from its political, economic and cultural crisis and to transform the nation towards modernity. These scholars, including Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培 1868–1940), president of Peking University, Lin Yu-tang (林語堂 1895–1976), a prominent writer and translator, and a group of American-educated Chinese scholars, were both eye-witnesses of and key contributors to China’s transition from an imperial dynasty to a modernised nation. Their observations on contemporary affairs and attempts to promote mutual understanding between China and the West, as presented in such major journals as The China Critic (中國評論週報, 1928–1946), The China Quarterly (英文中國季刊, 1935–1941) and T’ien Hsia Monthly (天下月刊, 1935–1941), were invaluable assets to academics who are interested in this unique period that gave rise to today’s modern China. In conclusion, China and the Modern World is an invaluable collection of much-needed historical sources that enable scholars across academic disciplines to research China according to their own individual needs. With a unique moyenne durée scope which focuses on the most critical period in China’s road to modernity, China and the Modern World offers approximately 160,000 pages of new sources, as well as new perspectives for researchers to contribute to the debates which will be fundamental to any research about China.

1 Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: militarization and social structure, 1796–-1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 8.

2 William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: the Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009), p. 5. 

3 Fernand Braudel, On History , translated by Sarah Matthews. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 28. 

4 Or the English equivalent, "One cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear". 

CITATION: Gao, Hao: "China's Road to Modernity: from Empire to Republic (1817-1949)." China and the Modern World , Cengage Learning (EMEA) Ltd, 2018

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March 27, 2015 Among Old Friends: A History of the Palestinian Community in China Mohammed Turki Al-Sudairi Following the Bandung Conference in 1955, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) espoused―in an unusual contrast with other major powers of the “socialist” and “nonaligned” camps―a pro-Palestinian stance in its foreign policy toward the Middle East. This did not entail, however, any direct contact with the Palestinians, a development that did not appear until the mid-1960s emergence of a more autonomous and coherent Palestinian national movement embodied in the PLO. Contact prior to the establishment of formal channels of communication took place through a number of unofficial and semi-official conduits, ranging from the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), the Chinese embassies in Egypt and South Yemen after 1967, and the “underground” Communist networks (mainly Iraqi, Sudanese, and Yemeni) to such bodies as the Chinese Committee for Afro-Asian Solidarity and the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. These contacts enabled the PRC to eventually extend formal diplomatic recognition of the PLO in 1964, making it the first non-Arab country to do so.

April 2, 2015 Mosques and Islamic Identities in China Lawrence E. Butler    The great trading routes connecting medieval Eurasia by land and sea brought Islam, like Buddhism centuries earlier, to China. Somewhere between 20 and 40 million Muslims—reliable data remains elusive—now live in China. They acknowledge a variety of official and unofficial ethnic identities due to the diverse origins of Islam in China as well as the complexities of modern Chinese ethnic policies. The architecture of China’s mosques, both historic and modern, reflects this diversity. This essay examines the development of mosque architecture in southern China, in the old central capitals, and in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region from earliest times up to the present. In the twenty-first century, modern construction techniques allow patrons to choose from a variety of styles and materials as they design mosques to reflect a particular version of Islamic identity.

April 8, 2015 Searching for Continuity in Sino-Arab Relations    Kyle Haddad-Fonda    Too often, historians of Sino-Arab relations do not engage in a meaningful dialogue with the political scientists, economists, and anthropologists who are the most vocal commentators on China’s increasing role in the region. Today’s China, with its growing wealth and unprecedented ability to project political and economic power abroad, may appear at first glance to bear little resemblance to the China of the 1950s, when the Communist government of Mao Zedong was reaching out for the first time to the other countries of the developing world. Nevertheless, one can identify several continuities that have long informed China’s interactions with the Arab world. First, Beijing insists that its foreign policy is based on the same ironclad commitment to nonintervention in the affairs of other sovereign countries that it articulated in the 1950s. Second, China has long held special meaning for Arab politicians and intellectuals who wish to use the example of China to promote authoritarian order in their own societies. Finally, the Chinese government has relied on Chinese Muslims to mediate its relations with other Islamic countries for nearly a century. It is only by recognizing these longstanding hallmarks of Sino-Arab relations that commentators can fully appreciate the complexities of China’s interactions with the Arab world in the twenty-first century.

April 14, 2015 The Middle East in China’s Silk Road Visions: Business as Usual? I-wei Jennifer Chang Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2013 proclamation of the Silk Road Economic Belt (“One Belt, One Road”) and Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road initiatives provided an overarching framework for understanding China’s strategic priorities over the coming decade. The land-based and sea-based Silk Roads will link Asia and Europe via the Middle East and Central Asia through a series of transcontinental railroads, pipelines, ports, airports, and other infrastructure projects.

April 21, 2015 Na Zhong: The Complex Perspective of a Patriotic Muslim Scholar Yufeng Mao When Na Zhong, Professor of Arabic at Beijing Foreign Studies University, passed away in 2008, his funeral at the headquarters of China’s Islamic Association was attended by many notable Muslims and scholars of Islam. Biographies and reminiscences characterize him as both an accomplished Muslim scholar and a Chinese patriot. Indeed, Na Zhong’s accomplishments are impressive. He was among the founders of Arabic programs at National Central University (later Nanjing University), Yunnan University, and Foreign Affairs University (which later merged with Beijing Foreign Studies University). During his lifetime, he published dozens of volumes of original and translated works on Islamic civilization, the history of the Arab world, and the Arabic language. He was also patriotic, participating in many activities seen as advancing Chinese national interests in the Islamic world.

April 28, 2015 Bringing China and Islam Closer: The First Chinese Azharites Wlodzimierz Cieciura In the 1930s, several groups of Muslim students from China arrived to study at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. They were destined to play an important role in the history of modern Chinese Islam. These 35 Chinese Azharites, all but two from the Sinophone Hui community, helped China to establish lasting links with Egypt and other Muslim countries in the Middle East. They also left a considerable cultural legacy, including translations of crucial texts from both the Islamic and Chinese traditions.

May 1, 2015 Islamic Calligraphy in China: Images and Histories Jackie Armijo   Given the prominence of calligraphy in the traditional arts of both the Islamic world and China, it is only natural that Islamic calligraphy plays an important cultural role in Chinese Muslim communities. The art form’s survival over the centuries in China, even during prolonged periods of isolation from the rest of the Islamic world, reflects the strength of Chinese Muslims’ religious traditions, as well as the critical function of the written word within these traditions.

May 6, 2015 Will China Interfere in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?    Yiyi Chen   In June 1954, the leaders of China, India, and Burma (now Myanmar) issued a joint statement affirming the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence―mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence―as the basis for conducting international relations. Since then, China has adhered strictly to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ domestic turmoil, as displayed prominently over the past several years in Beijing’s response to the Syrian civil war.

May 20, 2015 The “One Belt, One Road” Strategy and China’s Energy Policy in the Middle East    Xuming Qian The genesis of the “One Belt, One Road” strategy—also known as the Belt and Road Initiative—can be traced to three noteworthy public events that occurred in rapid succession in the latter part of 2013. On September 7, in a speech delivered at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed building the Silk Road Economic Belt. Addressing the Indonesian parliament on October 3, he recommended that China and Southeast Asian countries work together to revive the Maritime Silk Road. On October 24-25, at a work forum on “periphery diplomacy” held by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing, Xi stressed that China is committed to forging amicable and mutually beneficial relations with its neighbors, such that they will benefit from Chinese development and China will benefit from a prosperous neighborhood. In this way, the president conceptually linked the notion of the “Chinese dream” to regional development. This conference marked the official birth of China’s “Silk Road strategy.”

June 5, 2015 Chinese Soft Power and Dubai’s Confucius Institute    Mimi Kirk The Confucius Institute of the University of Dubai is housed in a building named Masaood, a tall structure found off a dusty roundabout about two miles west of the airport. On the day I visit, the UAE is observing National Day, and near the building’s entrance Emirati flags wave in wind smelling of the grilled meat being served as part of a nearby celebration. Up on the fifth floor, where the Institute is housed, signage is in both Arabic and Chinese. Students learn various levels of Mandarin in pristine classrooms.

June 8, 2015 China’s Iran Bet   Jeffrey S. Payne Iran offers a unique platform for China’s ambitions in the Middle East and so, Beijing is willing to bet that the benefits of closer ties with Tehran will outnumber the costs. This analysis examines the calculations China is making made regarding its relationship with Iran and argues that deepening bilateral ties reveal the centrality of Iran for China’s Middle East strategy.

July 15, 2015 From Nonintervention to What?: Analyzing the Change in China’s Middle East Policy   Xinhui Jiang   Though China still adheres to the principle of nonintervention, its unprecedented proactivity and break from its position to “pursue friendly, cooperative relations with all Middle Eastern countries” has already distinguished its behavior in the Syria crisis from its traditional stance.

August 5, 2015 Rising Chinese Waves in the UAE Zongyuan (Zoe) Liu The flow of oil and gas from the Persian Gulf to East Asia has rejuvenated the ancient Silk Road, refashioning new networks of collaboration. The energy trade―the backbone of Sino-Middle Eastern ties―has provided the foundation for an increasingly diversified and robust set of relationships between China and the Gulf monarchies. The multidimensional strategic partnership between China and the UAE, in particular, is illustrative of this broader pattern.

February 3, 2016 Fate of the Dragon in the Year of the Red Fire Monkey: China and the Middle East 2016 John Calabrese February 2016 marks the beginning of a new phase in the Chinese lunar calendar, drawing to a close a year marked by heightened risks and fortuitous gains in China’s efforts to secure its interests in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This essay addresses three questions: How well has China adapted to the conflict and instability that have swept the region? And as we enter the Year of the Red Fire Monkey, what are the concerns that are likely to preoccupy Chinese leaders? What, if any, policy adjustments by Beijing, can realistically be expected in light of the current circumstances and uncertain prospects for the region and for China itself?

February 8, 2016 China and Iran: An Emerging Partnership John Garver The Chinese aim to gradually grow with Iran a multi-dimensional partnership based on mutual understanding and trust, and see in Iran a potential power that could act as its partner in an Asian arena where many see China’s own rise as a threat.

February 9, 2016 Saudi Arabia and China: The Security Dimension Joseph A. Kéchichian Political and security ties between Saudi Arabia and China have developed far more slowly than have their economic relations. This essay explores the security dimension of the relationship between Saudi Arabia and China, to shed light on the question of why Sino-Saudi cooperation in the security sphere has been very limited.

February 16, 2016  The GCC and China’s Transformative Role in the Middle East   Tim Niblock China is a major economic partner of the GCC countries. This essay discusses the size and scope of this economic relationship, and considers how these ties might evolve as China's ambitious One Belt One Road (OBOR) and Maritime Silk Road (MRS) initiatives take shape.

April 6, 2016 Defying Expectations: China’s Iran Trade and Investments Emma Scott This essay examines China-Iran trade relations, as well as Chinese investments in Iran. Particularly, it asks whether the Chinese-Iranian stated ambition to increase the value of bilateral trade to $600 billion within a decade is attainable. Additionally, it identifies the factors responsible for the trade deficit in Iran’s favor, and shows that the pace of China’s foreign direct investment (F.D.I) in Iran is slowing in spite of absolute increases.

August 9, 2016 China and the Jihadi Threat Guy Burton This essay discusses China's responses to the jihadi threat. It shows that Chinese strategies have been influenced by whether the terrorist threat is perceived to be domestic or foreign. Internally, the Chinese approach has focused on protection and policing, resulting in confrontation with the Uighur minority in the far western province of Xinjiang. Externally, it has been less confrontational, with a preference for political and peace-building approaches.

August 11, 2016  The G.C.C. and China’s One Belt, One Road: Risk or Opportunity? Jeffrey S. Payne China's One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative does not provide an equal opportunity for all states, and, in the case of the Gulf, it is Iran that will likely benefit over all others. The states of the G.C.C. also factor into Beijing’s plan, just not to the same degree―and that is the problem. Yet, as this essay shows, using OBOR and existing comparative advantages will allow the states of the G.C.C. to balance Iran’s potential windfall.

November 10, 2016 Success of China’s Hui Muslims: Assimilation or Hyphenation Haiyun Ma With the increased international media attention on the plight of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, Western news magazines have started to also focus on the Hui, or Chinese-speaking Muslims. Some of these accounts attribute the Hui's success to their assimilation into Han Chinese culture and society. This essay refutes this argument by highlighting the differences between the manner in which Uyghurs and Hui were incorporated into the Chinese state.

January 19, 2017 China’s Muslim Communities: ‘Under Maintenance’? John Calabrese In incorporating Muslim minorities into the nation-state, Chinese policymakers have faced two sets of challenges: The first involves balancing ethno-religious diversity and national integration; and the second entails fostering enhanced connectivity to the outside world while at the same time consolidating CCP-state control over the public sphere. This essay examines the Chinese government's recent and current struggles to address these challenges.

August 1, 2017 The Rhetoric of “Civilization” in Chinese–Egyptian Relations Kyle Haddad-Fonda Chinese authorities have a long history of trying to highlight their historical heritage in their interactions with other countries. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in China’s relations with Egypt, another country that can claim descent from ancient heritage. Chinese and Egyptian leaders speak to each other not merely on behalf of their own governments, but also as the representatives of grand civilizations stretching millennia into the past. By tracing how Chinese and Egyptian thinkers and policymakers have discussed one another’s claims about their connections to ancient civilizations since the early twentieth century, it is possible to understand in greater detail the evolution of the rhetoric that facilitates Sino–Egyptian relations.

October 17, 2017 The G.C.C. Countries and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Curbing Their Enthusiasm? Jonathan Fulton Chinese leaders emphasize that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is focused on developing connectivity through inclusive cooperation. Yet, certain BRI projects have potential strategic outcomes that can affect regional power dynamics. Thus, States that might otherwise be inclined to cooperate with China on the BRI could perceive elements of the initiative to run counter to their interests. This essay shows that, in considering the BRI, the leaders of the Gulf Arab countries have to balance their increasingly important relationship with China against the ways this initiative empowers rivals or threatens their relations with important external powers.

October 31, 2017 Sino-Algerian Relations: On a Path to Realizing Their Full Potential? John Calabrese China’s footprint in Algeria has expanded since 2001, much as it has throughout the Middle East and the continent of Africa. In 2014, the Sino-Algerian bilateral relationship was elevated to a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership,” and since then has further developed. This essay discusses the roots, substance and scope, and limitations of the blossoming Sino-Algerian relationship.

February 20, 2018 China, Jerusalem and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Guy Burton On the surface, the Chinese reaction to the US decision to effectively recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was clear. Following President Trump’s announcement to transfer the US embassy to the Holy City on December 6, 2017. Several days later, China voted with every other member on the UN Security Council (UNSC) to uphold the international consensus and previous UN decisions on Jerusalem. By going against world opinion, the US arguably looked out of step in relation to the conflict. By contrast, China’s alignment with international public opinion gave it the aura of a potential mediator. This essay considers whether Beijing has the political will and capacity to make a significant positive impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

March 27, 2018 The Dilemma of the “Halalification” (清真乏化) of Chinese Food Hacer Z. Gonul  and  Julius Maximilian Rogenhofer This article explores Chinese eagerness to join and dominate the global Halal market via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Secondly, it examines why the state selected the Hui Muslims of Ningxia to lead Sino-Muslim world trade, rather than the larger community of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. This section introduces model minority theory to assess Chinese government policy. Third, the article assesses the potential conflict between the Chinese export strategy with growing domestic resentment toward increasingly visible Halal segregation.

April 10, 2018 Middle Eastern Students and Young Professionals in China: A Mutual Investment in the Future Roie Yellinek This article, based on personal interviews and conversations conducted in China with 14 men and women in their 20s and 30s from across the Middle East, is intended to shed light on a phenomenon that the author observed while living in China, namely the increasing number of young Middle Easterners who are relocating there in order to obtain academic and professional credentials and experience.

April 17, 2018 China and the Middle East: Growing Influence and Divergent Goals Andrea Ghiselli This essay looks back at 2017, an eventful year, to see how China’s engagement with the Middle East has evolved. In particular, the essay draws upon the work done by the ChinaMed research team on the media and academic articles published over the year by Chinese and Middle Eastern commentators and experts.

May 8, 2018 China’s Approach to Mediation in the Middle East: Between Conflict Resolution and Conflict Management Mordechai Chaziza Mediation diplomacy has emerged as one of the central pillars of China’s foreign policy objectives and practice, with Beijing deliberately positioning itself as a peacemaker in the Middle East conflicts and crises in the region (e.g., Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process). This article examines whether China's mediation diplomacy in the Middle East is a precursor of change in China’s interpretation and application of the principle of non-intervention.

May 15, 2018 Sino-Israeli Security Relations: In America’s Shadow Hiddai Segev Much has been written about the Sino-Israeli relationship, mainly regarding political and economic ties. However, the security dimension of the relationship has received comparatively less attention. This article discusses Sino-Israeli security relations in an effort to shed light on their roots, substance and prospects despite Israel’s commitment to its relations with the United States.

December 11, 2018 Middle East Public Opinion toward China Guy Burton China’s footprint in the Middle East has grown significantly over the past two decades. China’s widening and deepening relations with the region has coincided with a change in the international environment. China’s increasingly extensive diplomatic, commercial and cultural activities in the Middle East has drawn this distant and unfamiliar country into the daily lives of the people of the region to a degree that is unprecedented and likely irreversible. This, then, begs the question: What views do the people of the Middle East hold regarding this rising global power and relative “newcomer” to the region? Drawing on Zogby/University of Maryland and Pew Research Center survey data, this article offers some preliminary observations that address this question.

January 22, 2019 Arab Gulf states silent on China’s Xinjiang crackdown Giorgio Cafiero This article explores the dynamic between China and the Arab Gulf states on the issue of China’s crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang Province. Unlike other cases of repression against Muslims around the world, such as Myanmar, the Gulf monarchies have been silent about the situation in Xinjiang. The article argues that this stance is linked to growing GCC-China economic interdependence, question marks over American policy in the Trump era, and reciprocation of China’s foreign policy of “non-interference.”

March 12, 2019 The Belt and Road Initiative in the Gulf: Building “Oil Roads” to Prosperity Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat The Gulf, although not directly included in the official map of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is one of the main regions where it is being implemented. On the occasion of President Xi Jinping’s speech at the 6th Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in June 2014, he declared the regional countries as being “natural cooperative partners in jointly building the BRI.” Since then, Chinese state and private firms, banks, and financial institutions have embarked on efforts to advance the BRI in the region. This article discusses the implementation of the BRI in the Gulf energy sector.

May 21, 2019 Intersections: China and the US in the Middle East John Calabrese China’s inroads into the Gulf and wider Middle East are occurring against the backdrop of intensifying global strategic competition with the United States. Does China’s expanding footprint in the Gulf constitute an additional source of contention in an increasingly rivalrous relationship with the United States? This article, published in biweekly installments, looks briefly at three instances where Chinese activities in the Gulf intersect and potentially clash with US interests and policies. Part 1 discusses China’s role as Iran’s “limited partner” in a constrained environment. Part 2 examines China as Saudi Arabia’s next best friend.

July 9, 2019 China and Syria: In War and Reconstruction John Calabrese Traditionally, Syria has not been a strategic priority for China. Nor is it today. However, this does not mean that Beijing has been indifferent to the wide-ranging adverse effects of Syria’s disastrous civil war or to the opportunities that its postwar rebuilding might present. China’s Syria policy derives from its broader security and economic interests in the region. Accordingly, China’s two primary policy aims are 1) maintaining a constructive relationship with a government in Damascus that is stable, friendly, and capable of preventing the spread of transnational jihadist activity from its territory; and 2) developing an economic partnership that is compatible with and in furtherance of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article examines how China has pursued these aims during the eight-year Syrian conflict.

September 24, 2019 The de-Islamification of Public Space and Sinicization of Ethnic Politics in Xi’s China David S. Stroup Over the past two years, local law enforcement in Hui communities throughout China have made efforts to remove Islamic identity from public spaces. This article shows that these restrictions are part of a broader centralizing effort by the Chinese party-state to emphasize conformity with a vision of Chineseness centered on Han culture, and scrutiny of those ethnic or religious practices that might be deemed “threatening.”

October 8, 2019 China-Iraq Relations: Poised for a “Quantum Leap”? John Calabrese Upon arriving in Beijing on September 19 at the head of a 55-member delegation, Iraq Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi described the visit to China as heralding a “quantum leap” in bilateral relations. The five-day visit culminated in the signing of eight wide-ranging memoranda of understanding (MoUs), a framework credit agreement, and the announcement of plans for Iraq to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Since then, however, a wave of angry anti-government protests have swept across much of Iraq, leaving more than 100 dead and thousands wounded — a vivid reminder of the country’s ongoing struggle for stability and of the obstacles to the further consolidation of China-Iraq relations.

November 5, 2019 Transnational Shi’ism in Southern China and the Party-state’s “Hawza” Diplomacy Mohammed Turki Al-Sudairi This article seeks to transcend the Sunni-centered narratives that often inform the discussions on Islamicate interactions with China. Following a cursory historical view of Shi’ism’s influences on Chinese expressions of Islam, the article presents a rough sketch of the contemporary transnational Shi’ite communities that have emerged over the past few decades in southern China, most notably those of Guangzhou (Guangdong) and Yiwu (Zhejiang). It then considers the simultaneous and closely-linked phenomenon, dubbed “hawza diplomacy,” of the Chinese party-state’s growing engagement with the custodial authorities of the Shi’ite shrines of Iraq.

November 12, 2019 China’s Outbound Tourism as a Soft Power Tool in the Middle East Mordechai Chaziza Over the past two decades, China has gradually incorporated the use of soft power into its foreign policy. China’s efforts to ramp up its soft power in the Middle East is part of a wider offensive to bolster trade and national security. This article discusses China’s use of tourism as an instrument of soft power in the region.

January 14, 2020 China’s Green Investment in the BRI Countries: The Case of Turkey Ceren Ergenc China is engaged in the use, production, and export of green technologies. As a part of this policy, China is extending its commitment to green technologies to its Belt and Road (BRI) partners. This article looks at China’s role in Turkey’s green transformation.

January 21, 2020 China’s Economic Stabilization Efforts in Afghanistan: A New Party to the Table? Barbara Kelemen The “development is the key” argument is one of the tenets of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and underpins China’s policy in Afghanistan. The turmoil plaguing Afghanistan has both spurred and impeded Beijing’s efforts to expand its economic involvement in the country. Nevertheless, China has gradually become more active in Afghanistan economically as well as politically.

February 11, 2020 How did China Win Over the Israeli People? Roie Yellinek According to the latest poll published by the Pew Research Center, the Israeli public sees China in a favorable way. Only in Russia and Nigeria does China get a more sympathetic audience. This result seems surprising, when compared to China’s low level of favorability in other Western countries. However, the strong favorability rating registered in the Pew survey is less surprising than it seems, and in fact is a clear indication that the wide-ranging Chinese soft power efforts to appeal to the Israeli public opinion have paid off.

March 17, 2020 The Ferghana Valley Railway Should Never Be Built Péter Bucsky ,  Tristan Kenderdine A planned Kashgar to Osh railway is part of China’s Eurasian Intercontinental CR Express rail freight policy. It would require a huge amount of new construction, massive public debt for Kyrgyzstan and would provide no clear economic benefit. The proposed line would also actually be longer than the existing route from Urumqi to Tashkent via Kazakhstan.

April 28, 2020 The Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the Middle East Mordechai Chaziza The coronavirus has hit the Middle East at a time when the region is already burdened with multiple problems, including a series of long-running conflicts, sectarian tension, economic crises, and widespread political unrest. This article provides a preliminary assessment of the effects of the covid-19 virus on China’s Belt and Road partners and activities in the region.

May 19, 2020 China’s Maritime Silk Road and the Middle East: Tacking Against the Wind John Calabrese The momentum of the BRI has lately slackened due to a variety of setbacks and disruptions. Until now, China has made headway in executing BRI-related projects in the Middle East despite such problems. Plummeting oil prices coupled with the onset of the worldwide public health and economic crises triggered by the covid-19 pandemic could result in scaled back plans and delayed implementation of BRI projects in the region. But China is not about to abandon the effort to extend the Maritime Silk Road to the Middle East — nor are its most avid regional partners.

June 9, 2020 Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Challenges to China’s Silk Road Strategy in the Middle East Mordechai Chaziza Despite Beijing’s increasing engagement in the Middle East, it lacks a clear, consistent, and comprehensive strategy for the successful implementation of the new Silk Road. Although China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework for cooperation with the Middle Eastern states is marked by strategic flexibility and maximizing opportunities, that may prove insufficient. As China and the countries of the region become more integrated, they will also share risks and face near-term geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges.

July 14, 2020 The Chinese Islamic Association in the Arab World: The Use of Islamic Soft Power in Promoting Silence on Xinjiang Lucille Greer ,  Bradley Jardine This article analyzes the coverage by Arabic-language Chinese state media of the Chinese Islamic Association’s activities following three key dates during Beijing’s increased securitization in Xinjiang. The article sheds light on the three-pronged approach that the state-led Chinese Islamic Association has used to craft the Xinjiang narrative for an Arabic-speaking audience: defending the uniqueness of Chinese Islam and warning of the threat of foreign influence; engaging in “Hajj diplomacy”; and conducting exchanges with Muslim leaders and Islamic institutions.

July 21, 2020 Positioning the Provinces Along China’s Maritime Silk Road John Calabrese China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a central policy framework with decentralized initiatives. Under the BRI’s Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the Maritime Silk Road (MSR), China’s inland provinces and coastal peers have been obliged to implement the top-down national strategy while at the same time having been granted the latitude to interpret the strategy to suit their commercial interests. This article looks at how Fujian and Jiangsu provinces have sought to position themselves along the Maritime Silk Road with respect to their relations with Middle Eastern partners. 

August 18, 2020 Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Program and China Mordechai Chaziza In recent years, Saudi Arabia and China have publicly announced several joint nuclear projects in the Kingdom, including one to extract uranium from seawater, with the stated goal of helping the world’s largest oil producer develop a nuclear energy program or become a uranium exporter. This article discusses China’s reported involvement in Saudi Arabia’s nascent nuclear program.

September 15, 2020 China’s Pursuit of a “Strategic Fulcrum” in the Middle East Jesse Marks A great deal of the literature on China’s relations with the Middle East engages the subject through geopolitical analyses that are based mainly, if not exclusively on Western sources and perspectives. This article draws on the work of scholars and thinkers in China’s leading government and party-linked think tanks and foreign policy institutions to shed light on China’s interests and approach to the region — a “competition without confrontation” approach centered on the development of relationships with a select number of key Middle Eastern states that can serve as “strategic fulcrums” (战略支点) for building Chinese influence.

September 22, 2020 China and the Abraham Accords Peace Agreement Giorgio Cafiero , Daniel Wagner On September 15, President Trump presided over a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Abdullatif Al Zayani, respectively, signed a general declaration of principles, called “The Abraham Accords.” Numerous analysts have focused on the regional impact of the normalization of relations between Israel and these two Gulf Arab countries. However, this development has worldwide geopolitical implications — including for China.

October 6, 2020 Towering Ambitions: Egypt and China Building for the Future John Calabrese Over the past decade, Egypt and China — the former a traditional US partner and the latter America’s strategic competitor — have forged ever-deeper ties. During that time, Beijing has sought to leverage its relationship with Egypt to advance the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while Cairo has looked to China as a critical partner in the revitalization of the Egyptian economy. Entering 2020, Egypt was one of the fastest-growing emerging markets, and the Sino-Egyptian economic relationship was thriving. However, the fallout from the pandemic could undermine Egypt’s recent success in restoring growth and regaining investor confidence. It could also test the resilience and delay the further expansion of Sino-Egyptian economic ties. 

December 22, 2020 China’s Libya Policy and the BRI: Sights Set on the Future Mordechai Chaziza The political turmoil that has plagued the region since the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, most notably the ongoing conflict in Libya, has made it difficult for China to realize its aim of incorporating the Maghreb into the BRI framework. This article discusses China’s efforts to protect and promote its economic interests in Libya, thereby advancing its prospects for extending the BRI to the region.

January 26, 2021 “The New Algeria” and China John Calabrese Given the host of challenges that Algeria currently faces and consistent with past efforts to diversify its foreign relations, Algeria could seek to deepen its relationship with China — a rising global power with deep pockets and an expanding footprint in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and a country with which Algeria has already established a comprehensive strategic partnership. Yet, even under a scenario in which Beijing answers the call, it should not be assumed that the scale and contours of Chinese engagement will fundamentally change, will consist mainly of predatory economic activities and malign influences, or can rescue Algeria from structural problems of its own making.

May 18, 2021 China’s Maritime Silk Road and Security in the Red Sea Region David H. Shinn China’s Maritime Silk Road (MSR) is an integral part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Suez Canal, Red Sea, and Gulf of Aden are essential to the success of the MSR and, consequently, to the BRI. This largely explains why China located its first and, so far, only foreign military base at Djibouti near the narrow Bab el-Mandeb passageway between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, has invested so much in port and warehouse construction, and stepped up its economic and political engagement in countries on both sides of the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden. But increased engagement leads to higher expectations by African and Arab governments, greater leverage and exposure for China, and complications for other great powers in the Red Sea region. China is treading carefully as it accommodates this evolving situation while trying to minimize new security responsibilities.  

May 27, 2021 Transitioning to a New Approach: China’s Stance on Operation “Guardian of the Walls” Mordechai Chaziza On May 21, following eleven days of conflict — the fourth since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 — the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Israel agreed to a cease-fire. This article examines the Chinese response to the conflict between Hamas and Israel in the context of China’s expanding engagement and ambitions in the Middle East and increasing great power rivalry.  

July 20, 2021 The “Build Back Better World”: An Alternative to China’s BRI for the Middle East? Mordechai Chaziza The intensification of US-China strategic competition has potentially profound implications for the Middle East. An unbridled rivalry between Washington and Beijing is more likely to compound the challenges that Middle East countries are facing rather than help address them constructively. The Biden administration’s recently launched Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative is better suited to function as a complement to Beijing’s Belt and Road than as a zero-sum alternative to it — and, shaped in that manner, would better serve Middle East stability and prosperity.

July 27, 2021 Transatlantic Climate Action in the Gulf and Great-Power Competition John Calabrese Forging an ally-centered partnership to support nationally owned climate action initiatives in developing countries could form part of a new Transatlantic agenda. Focusing some of these initiatives on the MENA region, specifically on the Gulf — where US, European, and Chinese interests intersect — and aligning them with local priorities, though without casting them as part of a zero-sum struggle with Beijing, could contribute to a more resilient and cleaner planet, a more stable region, and a less contentious manifestation of great-power competition in a volatile part of the world.

September 21, 2021 China’s Taliban Conundrum John Calabrese During a regular press conference held just hours after Taliban forces entered Kabul, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying stated that China stands “ready to continue to develop good-neighborliness and friendly cooperation with Afghanistan and play a constructive role in Afghanistan’s peace and reconstruction.” But China may not, as some anticipate, rush to fill the vacuum left by the US withdrawal.

October 19, 2021 Sustainable Momentum? China and the Mideast Solar Market John Calabrese Although global energy demand fell in 2020 due to the pandemic, investment in energy transition increased. In April, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reported that renewable energy’s share of new generating capacity rose substantially for the second year in a row. China, which has emerged as the indisputable leader of renewable energy expansion worldwide, has begun to reorient its overseas energy investment and finance towards non-fossil fuels projects. This shift could portend a larger role for China in the MENA region’s growing renewables sector, especially in solar power production.

November 30, 2021 China’s “Pearl”: The UAE Amid Great-Power Rivalry John Calabrese As tensions between the US and China have intensified, the security implications of deepening Chinese ties with MENA countries have emerged as a source of growing concern to Washington. Of particular concern is Chinese ownership and development of port-industrial park complexes in the Gulf, which could serve as access points for what American officials regard as China’s “long-term goal of expanding its military presence to secure vital routes of energy and trade.” Chinese activities in the United Arab Emirates have recently come under close scrutiny, as Washington seeks to prevent UAE — Beijing’s “pearl” along the Maritime Silk Road — from becoming a military outpost in its “string of pearls.”

January 11, 2022 China’s Health Silk Road and the BRI Agenda in the Middle East John Calabrese During the pandemic era, China’s Health Silk Road (HSR), interlinked with the Digital Silk Road (DSR), has emerged as a vehicle for powering the nascent third phase of the BRI, which has retained its prominence as a “major platform” for international development cooperation. This development is evident in China’s involvement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

January 6, 2022 The Persistent ISKP Threat to Afghanistan: On China’s Doorstep Roshni Kapur Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP) has been emboldened by the withdrawal of foreign forces whose previous counterterrorism measures had constrained their activities in Afghanistan. China, which had benefited from the American security presence, has become increasingly concerned about the security vacuum that followed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Beijing is now compelled to find ways to protect its own security and economic interests given the changing realities on the ground.

January 20, 2022 Strategic Maneuvering: The Gulf States Amid US-China Tensions Mona Abu Shanif Arab Gulf leaders have begun to pursue policies to respond to the rise of China and the receding power and influence of the United States. It can be argued that the Arab Gulf states in general, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, regard US concerns over China’s ascent as an opportunity to bargain with Washington and realize some military and technical gains. The polarization between Washington and China gives them wide berth to maneuver and extract benefits from both sides without the Gulf states having to take drastic steps in terms of its cooperation with China.

January 26, 2022 The Strengthening Ties Between China and the Middle East Roie Yellinek In a sign of strengthening relations, a long procession of foreign ministers from MENA visited China earlier this month. In addition, two MENA nations signed MoUs involving the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global infrastructure development effort. The fact that it was foreign ministers traveling to China, rather than their counterparts with the ministries of trade or economy, suggests a shift in focus in relations from trade and economics to geopolitics. 

February 3, 2022 The “New Normal” in Saudi-UAE Relations — Tying China In John Calabrese The joint statement issued at the conclusion of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Abu Dhabi last December affirmed the two countries’ extensive and enduring friendship. Yet, the invocation of shared visions masks a complex and increasingly competitive relationship as Saudi Arabia and UAE push to diversify their economies and position themselves to profit from China’s growing capabilities and increasing involvement in the Gulf, wider Middle East, and East Africa.

March 7, 2022 Connecting Beijing’s Global Infrastructure: The PEACE Cable in the Middle East and North Africa Thomas Blaubach One of the most ambitious elements of China’s Digital Silk Road is the Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe (PEACE) fiber-optic cable. China has long expressed its ambition to connect the greater Middle East, Africa, and Europe with Chinese fiber optics in order to expand its presence in the region, and Beijing now boasts strategic infrastructure assets in geopolitical hotspots, such as the Pakistani port of Gwadar.

March 10, 2022 Defying Dystopia: Scope for US-China Collaboration in Building Middle East Resilience John Calabrese The United States and China, despite an intensifying global strategic rivalry, have a shared interest in the stability and development of Middle Eastern countries. There is both a pressing need and scope for Washington and Beijing, whether working in tandem or in parallel, to augment their support for resilience-building efforts in the Middle East and North Africa.

March 25, 2022 China’s Evolving Conflict Mediation in the Middle East Jesse Marks Since the early 2000s, China has exhibited a degree of flexibility regarding its policy of non-interference in internal affairs, exemplified through a broader series of mediatory efforts in civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. China’s approach to conflict management has evolved, as have its motivations. This paper examines this evolution through the window of China’s conflict management in Sudan, Libya, and Syria.

April 5, 2022 Putin’s “Gift,” China’s Choices, and Mideast Dilemmas John Calabrese Beijing’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine has profound implications for the US-China bilateral relationship. The choices Xi Jinping makes, notably whether to provide material assistance to Russia economically or militarily, is likely to determine whether a new Cold War can be averted. The stakes for the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) could not be higher, as until now they have sought to diversify their extra-regional partnerships rather than choose sides.

May 19, 2022 Something’s Brewing: China’s “Teapot” Refineries and Middle East Producers John Calabrese The number, size, level of sophistication and roles played by China’s independent, or so-called “teapot” refineries, are changing. Their evolution is reflected in the relationships between teapots and Middle East crude oil suppliers. In the battle to ensure their profitability and very survival, smaller Chinese teapots have adopted various measures, including sopping up steeply discounted oil from Iran. Meanwhile, Middle East suppliers, notably Saudi Aramco, are seeking to lock in Chinese crude demand while pursuing new opportunities for further investments in integrated downstream projects led by both private and state-owned companies.

June 7, 2022 China-GCC Digital Economic Cooperation in the Age of Strategic Rivalry Mordechai Chaziza The strategic rivalry between China and the US that has developed over the past decade includes a struggle for control of the global digital economy, particularly the digital infrastructure and information communications technology (ICT) markets. In recent years, China has become a global leader in some areas of the digital economy. Digital economic cooperation has emerged as an increasingly important element of China’s relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries — and a focal point of Sino-American strategic rivalry in the Middle East.

June 16, 2022 China and the Middle East: Heading into Choppy Waters James M. Dorsey China could be entering choppy Middle Eastern waters. Multiple crises and conflicts will likely shape its relations with the region’s major powers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey.

July 12, 2022 China Prioritizes Short-Term Energy Security: Implications for Sino-Middle East Relations John Calabrese This article provides an opportunity to refocus attention on the precipitating conditions and broad outlines of China’s energy security strategy, and by doing so reveals the structural underpinnings of Sino-Middle Eastern relations at a time when both sides are wrestling with the challenge of reconciling energy security and carbon neutrality.

August 23, 2022 China in a Volatile LNG Market and the Stakes for Qatar John Calabrese Last year, Chinese demand for natural gas grew at the fastest rate on record, with imports registering an increase of 19.9% year-on-year. China imported more LNG in 2021 than any other country, accounting for nearly 60% of global LNG demand growth. This year, however, with the economy struggling, Chinese authorities have focused on securing supply and containing costs. As a result, China’s LNG imports have slowed, further contributing to a global LNG market of unprecedented volatility and uncertainty. Developments in the Chinese gas market are of great significance to Qatar, which has sought to capitalize on China’s demand growth as well as its expanding overseas investment activities.

October 30, 2022 China-Middle East Engagement Amid Slow Growth John Calabrese After a strong start in early 2022, China’s economy has slowed markedly. The economic headwinds that China faces at home and abroad are a political problem for Xi Jinping, whose party’s legitimacy has been built upon rapid growth and rising incomes. The economic headwinds that China faces at home and abroad are a political problem for Xi, whose party’s legitimacy has been built upon rapid growth and rising incomes. They are also a concern for the international community, which had become accustomed to China being the global economy’s growth engine. Clearly, this is so among the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), whose engagement with China has grown exponentially in recent years.

December 15, 2022 CHIPS on the table: Escalating US-China tech war impacts the Mideast John Calabrese What began in 2019 as an effort by the Trump administration to cripple Huawei has lately expanded, as the US has introduced sweeping rules aimed at cutting China off from key chips and components for supercomputers. Washington has signaled that it will not hesitate to pursue extraterritorial measures if partners fail to fall in line with the new restrictions. Thus, the US-China battle over microchips has emerged as a proxy for geopolitical competition which Washington’s allies and partners might prefer to avoid but are nonetheless likely to be drawn into. For America’s Gulf allies and Israel, this development poses fresh challenges and difficult choices.

January 9, 2023 China and the United States in the Middle East: Policy Continuity Amid Changing Competition Andrea Ghiselli There is often the tendency to imagine the United States and China involved in a strategic back-and-forth, launching new initiatives, and implementing new approaches to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). However, as Andrea Ghiselli argues in this MAP article, the substance of the two countries’ behavior in the region and toward each other is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. It is probable that they will do more of what they are already doing: Washington will continue to focus on security issues and defense cooperation while Beijing will stick to its trade and investment-centered agenda. 

February 2, 2023 Pakistan and Egypt: China’s Distressed Assets John Calabrese Pakistan and Egypt are pivotal states in volatile regions. For this reason, the world’s major powers and multilateral financial institutions essentially regard them as ‘too big to fail.’ But the short-term outlook for both economies is grim. Islamabad and Cairo have their hopes pinned on securing IMF support and short-term refinancing and rollovers from friendly countries, notably the Gulf States. How Pakistan and Egypt manage their current crises, and whether their leaders can muster the political will to shift decisively from seeking a respite to enacting meaningful reforms are matters of some importance to China. For, as China’s capabilities and ambitions have grown, so too have its economic stakes in both Pakistan and Egypt, and in their surrounding regions.

February 21, 2023 Women’s Rights Under the Taliban in Afghanistan: The China Factor Roshni Kapur The restoration of the old order in Afghanistan — particularly the gradual erosion of women’s rights and freedoms — is not simply driven by the Taliban’s desire of returning to its fundamental roots and upholding its puritan ideology. The emergence of new regional actors and their increased activities, particularly Beijing’s increasing footprint, plays a role as well.

The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. It does not engage in advocacy and its scholars’ opinions are their own. MEI welcomes financial donations, but retains sole editorial control over its work and its publications reflect only the authors’ views. For a listing of MEI donors, please click here .

Chinese Revolution

Chinese revolution essay questions, imperial china.

1. What was the Mandate of Heaven? By the end of the 1800s, why might some Chinese have believed that the Qing had lost this mandate?

2. Describe the ethnicity and culture of the Qing dynasty, its leaders and high officials. How did these factors shape the relationship between the Qing and other Chinese people?

3. How did the teachings of Confucius shape political and social views and values in 19th century imperial China?

4. What was the status of women in 19th century China? Explain how social structures and values excluded women and prevented their independence.

5. Discuss three significant problems faced by the Qing regime as it attempted to govern China in the 1800s.

6. Explain how the Qing regime was challenged by foreign imperialism and the actions of Westerners in China during the 1800s.

7. What was the Self-Strengthening Movement? Evaluate the success of this movement and the impact it had on China’s government, economy and society?

8. Discuss the role of Japan in contributing to rising nationalism and anti-Qing sentiment during the late 19th and early 20th century.

9. Summarise and discuss the Guangxu Emperor’s attempts at reform in the 1890s. What was the emperor seeking to achieve and how successful was he?

10. Explain how Dowager Empress Cixi was able to dominate Qing government, despite her nominally inferior status as a woman and a former concubine.

The last years of Qing rule

1. Discuss and evaluate three nationalist uprisings in China between 1895 and mid-1911. Who was responsible for these uprisings, what was their objective and why did they fail?

2. Who were the Fists of Righteous Harmony? Explain the conditions and factors that motivated this group and their ultimate objectives.

3. Why did Dowager Empress Cixi decide to support the rebellious Boxers? What were the implications of this decision?

4. What was the Boxer Protocol? What impact did it have on the Qing government and the rising Chinese nationalist movement?

5. Discuss the late Qing reforms and the extent to which they were successful. Did these reforms bolster Qing rule or weaken it?

6. Describe the ideas, values and objectives of groups like the Tongmenghui. Where and how did these groups acquire and develop their ideology?

7. The New Army was formed to bolster Qing rule but instead contributed to its downfall. Why was this? Discuss the role of the New Army in the last years of the Qing.

8. Identify three conditions, factors or events that contributed to the outbreak of the Wuchang uprising in October 1911.

9. Discuss and evaluate the impact that Yuan Shikai had on the national government of China between 1898 and 1912.

10. Evaluate the political activities of Sun Yixian between 1905 and March 1912. To what extent was Sun Yixian responsible for the fall of the Qing?

Years of division: 1912-1927

1. How and why did Yuan Shikai become president of the Republic of China? What were the implications of this decision?

2. Explain how Yuan Shikai attempted to weaken and usurp the democratic national government between 1912 and 1916.

3. Sun Yixian’s mission was to reunify China and restore a republican national government. What steps did he take between 1912 and 1924 to achieve this?

4. Explain the events and factors that led to the Warlord Era of 1916-1927. Who were the warlords, what motivated them and how did they control their regions?

5. What was the Beiyang government that existed during the Warlord Era? To what extent did this constitute a ‘Chinese national government’?

6. What events or factors led to the May Fourth Movement of 1919? What ideas emerged from this movement and how did they shape future revolutionary groups?

7. How and why did the Soviet Union and Comintern support Sun Yixian and the Guomindang during the 1920s?

8. The Huangpu (or Whampoa) Military Academy was opened in 1924. Who operated the academy and why was it important for the restoration of a unified China?

9. To what extent was Jiang Jieshi the natural successor of Sun Yixian as the leader of the Guomindang? How did Jiang’s ideological position differ from Sun’s?

10. Explain how Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang reduced the influence of warlords in 1926-27, leading to the restoration of an effective national government.

War and civil war: 1927 to 1949

1. Discuss the relationship between China and Japan between 1915 and 1945. What were Japan’s intentions and how did they impact on China’s national government?

2. What happened in Shanghai in April 1927? Why did this occur and how did it shape the next two decades in China’s history?

3. Discuss the policies of the Guomindang government between 1927 and 1937. To what extent did they build a republican society and improve the lives of ordinary people?

4. Explain the causes and participants in the Central Plains War. What did this conflict reveal about the Guomindang and the leadership of Jiang Jieshi?

5. What was the New Life Movement? Was this movement intended to achieve modernisation and reform – or an attempt to reinforce traditional Chinese values?

6. Evaluate the political and military leadership of Jiang Jieshi between 1927 and 1949. Was Jiang a victim of circumstance or a victim of his own misjudgements?

7. Who were the parties involved in the Xi’an incident? How did this incident alter the political and military situation in China?

8. The Second United Front existed from early 1937 to the Japanese surrender in 1945. To what extent was it really ‘united’?

9. Using evidence and specific examples, explain why the Guomindang and Nationalist army was unable to gain support from the Chinese people.

10. Identify and discuss the three most important reasons for the CCP victory in the Chinese Civil War.

Chinese communism

1. Discuss the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Which people, groups and ideas contributed to the CCP in its early years?

2. Describe Mao Zedong’s contribution to the CCP and Chinese communism during the first ten years of the party (1921 to 1931).

3. Explain how the CCP and its members responded to the Shanghai Massacre and the collapse of the First United Front.

4. Discuss the role of the Comintern and foreign agents in shaping the ideology, tactics and direction of the CCP from 1927 onwards.

5. What steps did the CCP and its leadership take to establish a working socialist system in Jiangxi between 1931 and 1934?

6. Explain how Mao Zedong, Zhu De and others organised and trained the Red Army so that it was an important political tool as well as a military force.

7. Why is the Zunyi conference considered an important turning point in the history of the CCP?

8. Critically evaluate Mao’s strategic and military leadership during the Long March, referring to different sources or historians.

9. Why did Mao Zedong describe the Long March as “a propaganda force, a seeding machine”? How has the legacy of the Long March been exploited by the CCP?

10. According to propaganda, the Yan’an Soviet was a period of great success, unity and optimism in the CCP. To what extent is this true?

The CCP in power: 1949 to 1959

1. Evaluate power structures in the Chinese national government after October 1949. To what extent was the “People’s Republic” answerable to the people?

2. Describe the land reform policies implemented by the government after 1949. What were these policies intended to achieve?

3. What were ‘Speak Bitterness’ meetings? Why did Mao Zedong and other communist officials encourage these meetings?

4. Discuss China’s involvement in the Korean War. Why did Mao and his government risk war with the West?

5. Explain what was targeted during the ‘Three-Anti’ and ‘Five-Anti’ campaigns of the early 1950s. What methods were used during these campaigns?

6. Evaluate China’s economic growth and development – from October 1949 to the end of the First Five Year Plan.

7. Discuss Mao’s relationship with the Soviet Union and its leaders, Stalin and Khrushchev. How did this relationship evolve in the 1950s?

8. Was the Hundred Flowers Campaign an error of judgement on Mao’s behalf? Or a political device to identify and deal with critics?

9. Explain the economic objectives of the Great Leap Forward. What policies or methods were adopted to fulfil these objectives?

10. What were the outcomes and consequences of the Great Leap Forward, both for the Chinese people and for Mao Zedong?

The struggle for control: 1960 to 1976

1. Discuss Mao Zedong’s position in the Chinese Communist Party between 1960 and 1966. How did Mao restore his position in the party by 1966?

2. What were the objectives of the People’s Communes, established by Mao in the late 1950s? Did they fulfil these objectives?

3. Why were Chinese people taught to “live like Lei Feng” and “learn from the PLA”? How successful were these campaigns?

4. Explore the sources and causes of the Cultural Revolution. To what extent was it really a popular revolution?

5. Referring to three specific events, explain how the Cultural Revolution forced ordinary people into compliance, obedience and loyalty.

6. Discuss the fate of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping during the 1960s. How and why were they removed from positions of influence in the CCP?

7. What was the ‘Down to the Countryside’ movement and what was it intended to achieve? What impact did it have on its participants?

8. Evaluate the contribution of Lin Biao to the development of post-1949 China. How and why did Lin fall from grace?

9. How did China’s foreign policy evolve between 1960 and 1976, particularly with regard to Soviet Russia and the United States?

10. Who were the Gang of Four and what political, social and economic vision did they have for the People’s Republic of China?

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How chinese history restarted 100 years ago.

Peter Zarrow is a Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

On Sunday, May 4, 1919, some 3,000 students assembled at Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I.  Most were from China’s premier institution of higher education, Peking University, but some 13 colleges were represented in all.  It was a sunny spring day, and students chanted slogans, held up banners written in English, French and Chinese (some were written in the students’ blood) and handed out fliers.  They marched to the legation quarters of the foreign ambassadors, where they were allowed to leave letters but not enter the district. A group of especially radial studentsmarched on to the house of the “traitor,” cabinet minister Cao Rulin, and burned it down.  (Cao escaped, but the Beijing regime’s ambassador to Japan was severely beaten.)

The students were angry that the victorious Allies would return territory first taken by Germany to Japan instead of China.  When China declared war on Germany in 1917, it sent 140,000 workers to Britain and France to keep the Allies’ factories open and supplies moving. Japan had declared war on Germany in 1914 and occupied the German concessions in Shandong. Cao Rulin was a logical target of the students’ ire, well known for his pro-Japanese activities.  The protestors of May 4 condemned their own government, which they learned had made secret agreements with the Japanese, and pleaded for sympathy from the international community.  Above all, they claimed to represent “educational circles” that would arouse China’s “industrial and commercial sectors” to take political action.

Though initially tolerant, the police ended the day by arresting dozens of students.  The arrests naturally provoked further demonstrations, and street demonstrations and class boycotts—already called the “May Fourth movement”—spread across China.  The whole summer was marked by furious student meetings, petition drives, and even boycotts of foreign goods.  By this time the students had won considerable support from professional associations, business groups, and workers.  Many merchants enthusiastically supported the anti-Japanese boycott; others were pressured to join.  Shanghai was virtually shut down in early June when 60,000 workers went on strike. The movement inspired the patriotism of Chinese communities abroad as well.  

China’s weak government, led by military men, had little legitimacy, and it sought to appease the students by firing the “three traitorous officials” whom the students had first targeted. In the end, China’s legation to Paris refused to sign the Versailles Treaty. The Allies, however, never seriously considered returning Shandong to China.  For them, the issue was a minor blip on the way to settling the Balkans, punishing Germany, establishing the League of Nations—and using Germany’s old territories across the Pacific to buy off the Japanese, whose request for a statement acknowledging the principle of racial equality they firmly refused.

In what sense did “May Fourth” restart Chinese history?  After all, the ideals that the students were preaching were hardly new.  Belief in democracy and science, hopes for human rights and national self-determination, and criticisms of the traditions of autocracy, patriarchy, and Confucianism had stirred educated youth (and some not so youthful) for a generation or more. Nor were street actions and boycotts new—American goods were the target of a boycott campaign in 1905 that was provoked by the anti-Chinese immigration laws and policies of the US.   

Nonetheless, it was the May Fourth movement that revived Chinese politics, which had been left moribund in the wake of the 1911 Revolution.  “Politics” in this sense refers to a public realm of discourse and action created by people coming together—this was precisely how the May Fourth students pictured themselves as opposed to the closed and stagnant world of China’s military-backed bureaucrats and assemblymen.  The May Fourth movement inspired political action and made it possible.  While the vast majority of the population in rural China barelyaffected, at least immediately, China’s rapidly growing cities buzzed with new associations, journals, and social experiments such as communal living and work-study programs.  A new sense of dedication and even self-sacrifice was palpable.  Out of this ferment grew the two great disciplined, militarized, and revolutionary political parties of the twentieth century: the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  

1919 marked a paradoxical moment, combining great hopes with enormous disillusion.  The first disillusion was the fact of the Great War itself.  Up until this point, several generations of Chinese had looked to the West as a model for China’s own reforms.  They combined a hatred of the foreign incursions against China since the Opium Wars of the 1840s with growing admiration of Western civilization. By the early years of the twentieth century, thousands of Chinese had studied in and traveled through America and Europe, as well as Japan, which seemed to offer a model of Western-style modernization close at hand.  But the “Europe War” that broke out in 1914 dragged on and on.  Chinese readers kept up with the latest developments in weaponry: machine guns, airplanes, submarines, and poison gas.  All this suggested that Western civilization was morally bankrupt.  Few politically aware Chinese at this point thought that China should support either side in a contest between nations that had forced the “unequal treaties” on China.

At the same time, China was descending into a downward spiral of political breakdown and violence.  In 1915 Japan issued its “Twenty-one Demands,” insisting on greater privileges just as the European powers were unable to counter it.  President Yuan Shikai tried to make himself emperor, at which point many of his military supporters slunk away.  Yuan died in the midst of the bruhaha that he had created, and regional military commanders disowned any fealty to Beijing.  There still remained a kind of rump central government, and the economy continued to function, a working class emerged, new schools proliferated, universities grew, and at least in the foreign concessions order was maintained.  But rural banditry flourished and the “warlord era” with its endlessly indefinite battles had dawned.

No wonder Chinese considered that the 1911 Revolution had failed.  Some said that the political failure stemmed from a deeper cultural backwardness: people debated if the Chinese people needed a long period of education and how much of the past should be discarded. Meanwhile, “politics” had come to refer to the machinations of small groups of officials and military men. Into this malaise came the stirring promises of Woodrow Wilson.  

For Chinese, the ideal of “democracy” was at least as important as Wilson’s talk of “national self-determination.”  To join the war against Germany became a righteous cause. And Chinese greeted the Allied victory of 1918 joyously.  They saw a victory of light over dark, of civilization over militarism, of cosmopolitanism and open-mindedness over nationalism and racism.  Some thought that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and a coming Communist Revolution in Germany represented the logical culmination of popular democracy.  Such language was not propaganda but reflected a genuine sense that history had shifted.  Even more sober observers thought that the defeat of Germany at least represented a triumph of international law and a shot across the bow of imperialism.

Such hopes were not limited to China, and reflected a utopian moment partly rooted in the ever-wilder promises of President Wilson, and partly rooted in local conditions.  In China’s case, the old ways had been under challenge for a generation or more.  By 1919 the cosmology of Heaven and cosmic forces explicated in Confucian texts had clearly collapsed; the foundations of the emperorship had crumbled beyond repair; and many young people had concluded that their fathers’ power over their fates was intolerable.  Culture, society, and the political realm were all in enormous flux; morality had to be rethought.  This opened the way for the May Fourth generation to turn to ideals of intellectual freedom and individualism, a national vernacular and new literature, and democratic institutions to strengthen and unify the country.  

The impact of the racism and colonialism enshrined in the Versailles Treaty can thus be imagined.  The “West” could no longer serve as a model for China’s future development.  True, a few intellectuals kept their faith in moderate reform, but more turned in other directions.  The revival of Confucianism had appeal, but most of the younger generation turned toward more radical routes.  Looking at the student demonstrators of 1919, we can see a combination of heightened anti-imperialism and genuine cosmopolitanism.  From the vantage points of Beijing and Shanghai in particular, the world now offered new revolutionary hopes.  Politics had returned: an open, tumultuous politics of studies and the streets.  Students positioned themselves as devoted patriots, not seeking advantages for themselves but to simply strengthen China and awaken its mass of citizens.  At the same time, they were citizens of the world familiar with Dickens, Gogol, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Rabinadrath Tagore, and John Dewey, not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle and Alexandre Dumas. They believed in universal values—freedom, equality, justice, and socialism.  The meaning of the war, then, lay not in a vacuous Wilsonianism or the effect of the Versailles Treaty, but in the German and Russian Revolutions. With the Bolsheviks’ victory in Russia, Leninism offered an anti-colonial revolutionary alternative to Wilson’s empty promises.  The new Soviet Union offered to abandon the old Czarist claims on Chinese territory, and the re-formed Communist International prepared to send its missionaries and organizers to China. 

With allowances for Communist jargon, Mao Zedong was right when, in 1939 on May Fourth’s twentieth anniversary and in the midst of Japan’s invasion of China, he looked back from his isolated, precarious perch far to the northwest, to call the May Fourth movement “a new stage in China’s bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism.”  Mao’s formula long shaped Chinese understandings of the origins of Chinese modernity.  Historians today do not accept Mao’s tendentious equation of May Fourth with Communism, but few historians would deny that May Fourth marked a new stage of  some  kind.  It did not end warlordism, nor did it provide new standards to judge legitimacy—democratic norms had been developing from turn of 2oth century.  Nor was May Fourth a watershed in Chinese history, if only because we can now see how it was embedded in a longer set of revolutions across the twentieth century.  But it was much more than a simple reaction against the racist imperialism embodied in the Versailles Treaty.  It was a culmination of intellectual, social, and institutional changes developing in China since the 1890s, and it led to a new politics.  If it did not magically create the CCP, it did reflect the new muscle of the working class as well as student power.  And it did define the new political norms that allowed China’s first Communists to find a foothold amid the flourishing utopianisms of the day.  

The present leader of China, Xi Jinping, described “May Fourth” as a student movement based on patriotism and revolutionary fervor in his celebratory speech on April 30.  He was not wrong, but he neglected the key slogan that became associated with May Fourth: “science and democracy.”  This meant a commitment to rational, secular thinking combined with a commitment to popular sovereignty and an open society.  To this ideal, the May Fourth movement added the energies of an aroused and angry nationalism—a nationalism that for some justified violence as it remained open to progressive currents from around the world and opposed to oppression in all its forms.  Much of “May Fourth spirit,” then, is seen by China’s current leaders as a threat to their authority.  This year, as China also marks the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, some Chinese will also mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.  The political restart of May Fourth in 1919 is a direct ancestor to both these later events, and even today May Fourth still stands as a model of youth-led social movements.

Essay on China

Students are often asked to write an essay on China in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on China

Geography of china.

China, located in East Asia, is the world’s third-largest country. It has diverse landscapes, including mountains, deserts, and rivers. The highest point is Mount Everest.

Population and Culture

China has the largest population globally. Its culture is rich and diverse, with a long history that includes inventions like paper and compass.

Chinese Economy

China is a global economic powerhouse, known for manufacturing and exporting goods. It also has a growing technology industry.

Chinese Cuisine

Chinese food is popular worldwide. It varies by region, with famous dishes like Peking Duck and Dim Sum.

Chinese Festivals

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250 Words Essay on China

Introduction.

China, officially known as the People’s Republic of China, is the world’s most populous country, with a rich history that stretches back thousands of years. It has a unique blend of ancient traditions and modern innovation, shaping its global influence.

Historical Significance

China’s history is marked by dynastic rule, beginning with the semi-mythical Xia around 2100 BCE. The Great Wall, Terracotta Army, and the Forbidden City testify to the grandeur of these eras. The last dynasty, the Qing, gave way to a republic in 1912, marking a significant shift in China’s political landscape.

Modern China

Modern China is characterized by its rapid economic growth since the late 20th century. China’s economic reforms have transformed it into the world’s second-largest economy. This economic boom has brought significant changes in its socio-economic structure and global standing.

Global Influence

China’s global influence is undeniable. It’s a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a significant player in global trade. However, its rise has also sparked debates on issues such as human rights, territorial claims, and trade practices.

China’s journey from an ancient civilization to a modern powerhouse is a testament to its resilience and adaptability. Despite challenges, it continues to shape the world stage, making it a fascinating subject of study. Understanding China’s past and present is crucial for deciphering its future trajectory.

500 Words Essay on China

China, officially known as the People’s Republic of China, is a country located in East Asia. It is the world’s most populous country, boasting a population of over 1.4 billion. China’s rich history, diverse culture, and rapid economic growth have made it a global powerhouse.

Historical Overview

China’s history spans over five millennia, making it one of the world’s oldest civilizations. The country has seen the rise and fall of powerful dynasties, each leaving an indelible mark on its culture and society. China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, ended in 1911, paving the way for the Republic of China. However, civil unrest and power struggles culminated in the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1949, establishing the People’s Republic of China.

Economic Growth

China’s economic transformation in recent decades is nothing short of remarkable. The country has transitioned from a centrally planned economy to a more market-oriented one. China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown at an unprecedented rate, lifting millions out of poverty and turning China into the world’s second-largest economy. This economic boom is largely attributed to the “Reform and Opening-up” policy initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s.

Culture and Society

Chinese culture is a fusion of numerous ethnic traditions, deeply influenced by Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. The Chinese language, cuisine, martial arts, and traditional Chinese medicine are significant cultural exports. China’s societal structure has evolved over time, with the traditional emphasis on collectivism giving way to an increasing individualism, particularly among the younger generation.

Political System

China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The Chinese Communist Party holds the ultimate authority, with the President serving as the state head. The political structure has been criticized for its lack of transparency and suppression of dissent, posing challenges for human rights.

China’s Global Influence

China’s rapid growth has significantly increased its global influence, both economically and politically. It is a major player in international trade, technology, and infrastructure development. However, its assertive foreign policy, territorial disputes, and alleged human rights abuses have generated controversy and tension with other nations.

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Title: system report for ccl24-eval task 7: multi-error modeling and fluency-targeted pre-training for chinese essay evaluation.

Abstract: This system report presents our approaches and results for the Chinese Essay Fluency Evaluation (CEFE) task at CCL-2024. For Track 1, we optimized predictions for challenging fine-grained error types using binary classification models and trained coarse-grained models on the Chinese Learner 4W corpus. In Track 2, we enhanced performance by constructing a pseudo-dataset with multiple error types per sentence. For Track 3, where we achieved first place, we generated fluency-rated pseudo-data via back-translation for pre-training and used an NSP-based strategy with Symmetric Cross Entropy loss to capture context and mitigate long dependencies. Our methods effectively address key challenges in Chinese Essay Fluency Evaluation.

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The White House faces many questions about Biden’s health and medical history. Here are some answers

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre answered continued questions from reporters regarding President Biden’s health during Monday’s news briefing.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre takes questions during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, July 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

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The memorandum released by the White House from President Joe Biden’s physician Kevin C. O’Connor to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is photographed Monday, July 8, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

President Joe Biden walks across the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Sunday, July 7, 2024, after returning from a trip to Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s terrible performance at the June 27 presidential debate has raised concerns about his age, health and ability to lead the federal government.

Administration officials have blamed his confused and at times indecipherable answers at the debate with Republican Donald Trump on a head cold, jet lag and poor preparation at Camp David. But at 81, Biden has found his health to be a key issue for many voters going into November’s election. Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s physician, issued his first comment since the debate late Monday, after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre struggled to address questions about the president’s health at Monday’s news briefing.

How often does the president see a doctor?

Biden has extensive yearly physical exams, Jean-Pierre said. She added that most Americans don’t understand the extent of the medical care provided to the president, as many people are lucky if they get to see their doctors once or twice a year. By contrast, the president’s medical unit is “just steps down from the residence” at the White House. “A couple times a week,” Biden does a “verbal check-in with his doctor while he’s exercising,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that he had a check-in on Monday.

There has been confusion as to whether Biden saw his doctor about his cold after the presidential debate on June 27. The White House initially said there was no medical exam, but it later said there was a “short verbal check-in” and it was determined that no exam was needed.

Has the president seen a neurologist?

“He has seen a neurologist three times,” said Jean-Pierre. “Not more than that.”

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The White House spokesperson repeated the phrase “three times” in 17 instances during the Monday briefing. She stressed that all three meetings with a neurologist were tied to the president’s annual physical exams. But Jean-Pierre declined to say where Biden had seen the neurologist — whether the visits were at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center or elsewhere. “I don’t have anything to state as to location,” she said.

Have Biden’s physical exams found signs of Parkinson’s or other neurological diseases?

Not according to the report of the president’s most recent physical, issued in February. Jean-Pierre cited that document Monday in response to reporters’ questions.

That letter said “an extremely detailed neurologic exam was again reassuring” in that there were no findings consistent with a stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis. The letter added that no tremors or “motor weakness” were detected. Written by Biden’s physician, O’Connor, the letter added that Biden “demonstrates excellent fine motor dexterity.”

Why has a neurologist specializing in Parkinson’s visited the White House?

Visitor logs show that Dr. Kevin Cannard, a neurologist who has conducted research into Parkinson’s, went to the White House eight times between July 2023 and this past March.

Jean-Pierre declined to confirm the name of the doctor or say why he was going to the White House. She told reporters this was due to security reasons and noted that the White House medical unit treats more people than just the president. “There are thousands of military personnel who come on to this White House,” Jean-Pierre said. “Many of them get the care from the White House medical unit and so we need to be super careful.”

Jean-Pierre encouraged the public to “connect the dots.”

Later Monday, O’Connor released a letter with the permission of both Biden and Cannard and confirmed that Cannard had been the neurologist who evaluated the president at each of his three physicals since he took office.

But most of Cannard’s visits to the White House were pursuant to his role as a specialist attached to the White House Medical Unit, treating patients there for a wide array of neurological issues over a dozen years, O’Connor said.

Cannard made similar trips to the White House during the Obama administration, according to visitor logs, and during the Trump administration — which did not publish visitor logs — according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Cannard did have one visit with Biden’s personal physician this January in the White House Residence clinic, weeks before the president’s physical in February. O’Connor repeated that the findings of that physical that didn’t detect signs of any neurological disorder.

“President Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical,” O’Connor said in his letter.

Could Biden waive his rights and make his full medical records public?

At Monday’s news briefing, Jean-Pierre was asked whether Biden could choose to release his full medical records. She said the president had “shared a comprehensive medical report that is pretty detailed” and in line with what was provided by former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Sen. John McCain, in 2008, allowed reporters to review more than 1,100 pages of his medical records when he was running for president at 71, which would have made him the oldest elected president at the time.