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In China, it has long been proposed that the theory of the cycle of history and the change of dynasties occur. The expression of the Chinese historical cycle concept first appeared in the "Zhou Yi", and then Confucius put forward the historical cycle concept of "one article and one quality", and explained the rise and fall of history with the "mutual change of culture and quality".
Mencius developed Confucius's concept and proposed that "the life of the world is long, and one rule is chaotic." Xunzi put forward a cyclical view of time, "The sky is gone, the worries are boundless, the thousand years old will be reversed, and the ancient is also the usual." ”
Zou Yan of the Warring States period took a unique approach and proposed to explain the change of dynasties by using the five basic elements of nature, gold, wood, water, fire, and earth, while Liu Xin of the Eastern Han Dynasty did the opposite, using the mutual generation of the five basic elements to explain the change of dynasties.
Later, Dong Zhongshu put forward the historical cycle concept of "three unifications and three positives", black unification, white unification, red unity, and three unification cycles; There are three cycles of loyalty, respect, and literature, and the two are the inside and outside of each other. Shao Yong continued to develop the theory of historical cycles and put forward a new theory of "Yuanhui Yunshi" as the historical cycle, and later Zhu Xi and Wang Chuanshan both contributed to the theory of historical cycles from their own perspectives.
At the end of the 19th century, social Darwinism was popular in the West, and Darwin, as the founder of modern biology, discovered the law of natural selection for the evolution and extinction of species, that is, "natural selection, survival of the fittest".
With Yan Fu's translation of "The Theory of Heavenly Evolution", it became the consensus of almost all the people. The Theory of Heavenly Evolution is a translation, and Evolution and Ethics was also written by the social Darwinist Spencer. Spencer's ideas are perfectly inherited in China.
Among them, Zou Yan's Five Elements Theory was more successful: the Qin Dynasty unified China and implemented the theory of the Five Virtues. It is in the northwest for the water virtue, its color is still black, for the water virtue can be. In order to legitimize its status, the Han Dynasty used Tudeke water, and its color was yellow. The later dynasties did not jump out of this strange circle: the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties too. Qing Shui Ke Open Fire, Open Fire Ke Yuan Jin, Yuan Jin Ke Song Mu, Song Mu Ke Tang Tu. The Han and Tang dynasties were all rich in soil for a while, guarding the center and entrenching in all directions for thousands of ancient emperors, and the names of dynasties were really not taken randomly. The emperor's "Fengtian carries the emperor". The so-called "carriage" is the transport of the five virtues.
Deleuze's theory of social folds can be used to better understand the cyclical theory of Chinese history. Deleuze's philosophy of history divides the evolution of human society into three stages. They are three modes of social management and three paradigms of social structure information. According to the materialist interpretation, social existence determines social consciousness, so the immobility of land, the periodicity of production, the dependence on natural conditions in the production process, the inalienability and indecomposition of land, and the non-spreadability of land have more or less affected the consciousness and thinking of people under the historical conditions at that time.
The information of the social structure that matches the land as the dominant resource of the economy must ensure that the land is not alienable, non-decomposable, and non-negotiable.
Traditional Chinese society is a typical model of ruling society, in which whoever is most comfortable with the use of violence will succeed. But the domination model really matured until the advent of its instrumental material, iron. On the one hand, iron makes the tools of farming harder, more practical, and more durable, and on the other hand, it also makes the weapons of war and the weapons of murder sharper, more convenient, and more perfect. The three-legged domination model is systematized into a tightly aligned machine; The combination of land as the dominant resource, violence as the information carrier of the social structure, and iron as the material material is the standard model of the ruling society, which has created the strongest and oldest centralized system in the world, and produced the most stable identity in the world.
The logical starting point of the cyclical view of Chinese history lies in the "unity of nature and man", that is, the cyclical time of nature is consistent with the social time view of man. There are many reasons why Chinese history is cyclical. One of the theories is the population problem: before the new dynasty, the population was sharply reduced after brutal killings and natural disasters, and there have been 15 population MJs in Chinese history, all of which occurred during the change of dynasties. At the time of the establishment of the dynasty, due to the small number of landowners, the land area per unit of population was enough to support the people, and the governance of the imperial court was not very cumbersome. With the extension of peacetime, the population increased sharply, the unit yield of land remained unchanged, there was not enough food to eat, and the number of displaced people increased.
the Rebellion of the Eight Kings of the Jin Dynasty in Chinese history; the Huangchao Rebellion in the Tang Dynasty; The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of the Qing Dynasty was actually a political movement that spontaneously exterminated the population. In the first 30 years of Qianlong, the Chinese population was 40 million, and in the next 30 years, it surged 10 times to 400 million, so in the last 30 years of Qianlong, he could not save the Qing Dynasty from defeat with all his might. (There is another important point here: the introduction of corn and sweet potatoes solved the problem of feeding the population). By the end of the dynasty, the existing land area could not support so many people, coupled with the corruption of officials, natural disasters such as wind, frost, rain and snow, reduced or poor harvests of grain, and royal disputes in the transmission of power; The rebellion of the frontier officials, all the factors combined, formed the mathematically famous sand pile effect, the height of the sand pile that can be supported by a unit area of land is a certain height, once the limit height is exceeded, the sand pile will definitely collapse.
There is also a theory that the landlord class infiltrated the state management through the imperial examination system, and completed the change of dynasties through the binding of money and power. Through the ties of clan and family, expand their network, and if there is no potential for scholars in the family, they will re-choose to train people in the family and clan to conduct the imperial examination. Therefore, in Chinese history, there will be a large number of DZ and ND, and the core of their contention is power and resources, not for the country and the people as stated in the history books. For them, the change of dynasty is insignificant as long as it does not affect their power and resources. So the ruling family can change and change, but the interest group remains the same. In ancient times, landlords could only get resources quickly with land and taxes.
Let's take the example of the Qing Dynasty: China's parliamentary democracy movement has lacked a strong impetus during the collapse of the imperial system, so what characteristics of China's agrarian elite led to this?
The existing system has completely solved the problems caused by the chaotic aristocracy that existed in the meantime, which was closely related to the land. Needless to say at what stage this great transformation took place, we need only point out that the famous imperial examination system, which helped the emperor recruit bureaucrats to better confront the aristocracy, played a major role in this. The imperial examination system began in the Tang Dynasty, and by the Song Dynasty, there were few elements of the ancient Chinese aristocracy left, which was one of them.
Second, during the period of Manchu rule or the Qing Dynasty, as Sinologists are well known, did there still exist a landed aristocracy under the cover of administrative management? At least some of the relatively wealthy landlords at that time did not own any imperial status, and some people who did not own any land. It is an indisputable fact that the mutual assistance of the two resources has become a new kind of political resource.
The mechanism that connects all of the above together is the family, more precisely the patrilineal clan. In areas where agriculture is relatively developed, especially in the south, clans encompass a wider range and are often referred to as clans. As a social mechanism, in general, the family operates in the following ways. The practice of acquiring a certain amount of wealth through government and investing that wealth in land has continued into the modern era.
People usually keep accumulating property for the benefit of their clan. Correspondingly, any family wishing to become an aristocratic ruling class to achieve this aspiration requires someone in the family to have the status of the imperial examination, or to hope to obtain it in the future, and this person will also have the full support of the family, and the motivation behind these support is more the hope that he can obtain an official position and use this position to further expand the material wealth of the whole family. Through these imperial positions, Confucian scholars were able to once again own or further expand their family wealth, ensuring the social status of the clan, which eventually formed a perfect cycle.
The rising tide of the Qing Dynasty's population would eventually break through the long-built embankment of Chinese society and completely destroy the entire system, and the imperial regime's fears about this began to manifest themselves long before the end of the fifties of the eighteenth century. On this basis, the pressure of population on the land is not simply the result of Western shocks, as some Marxists claim, or the result of the stunted progress of industrialization, the destruction of indigenous handicrafts, and the corresponding "binding" of large numbers of peasants to the land.
The Qing Dynasty had a major drawback, due to land annexation, overpopulation caused cheap labor, and frequent peasant uprisings. Too little population will lead to a decline in social production capacity, a serious shortage of production materials, and insufficient land utilization. In modern times, it is squeezed through housing, education, and medical care. Exploitation in disguise is practiced, the form is changing, but the essence has not changed.
When a perfect cycle is formed and the rising bureaucracy is blocked, there is a very serious consequence. When it is difficult to extract enough resources from the population to pay the salaries of officials, those officials are completely obedient to their superiors. In order to overcome this difficulty, the ruler had to use a variety of means, and the difference in the means he adopted could have a huge impact on the entire social structure. China's solution is to allow more or less open corruption. Corruption became a powerful measure to control the bureaucracy.