The Changing World Order: Where we are and where we're going by Ray Dalio

The Changing World Order: Where we are and where we're going by Ray Dalio

Author:Ray Dalio [Dalio, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-30T22:00:00+00:00


China’s Giant History in Brief

Anyone who wants to have a fundamental understanding of China needs to know the basics of China’s roughly 4,000-year history, the many patterns that have repeated in it, and the timeless and universal principles that the leaders of China have gained from studying these patterns—even though getting that basic understanding is quite an undertaking. China’s history is so complicated and there are so many opinions about it that I am confident that there is no single source of truth, and I am especially sure that I’m not it. Still there is a lot that knowledgeable people agree on, and I have found many scholars and practitioners, both Chinese and non-Chinese, who have valuable bits that make the exercise of trying to piece them together—along with other bits of history like statistics and written histories—very valuable as well as damned fascinating. While I can’t guarantee that my perspectives about China are the best ones to believe, I can guarantee that they have been well-triangulated with some of the most informed people in the world and are presented here in an exceptionally forthright way. Here it is in brief.

China’s civilization with its highly civilized behavior has a long and continuous history that began about 4,000 years ago. I can’t possibly recount the extensiveness of it because there are far too many dynasties from the Xia Dynasty around 2000 BC (which lasted about 400 years and was highly civilized and known for creating the Bronze Age) through over 1,000 years of various dynasties to Confucius around 500 BC (whose philosophy greatly influenced how the Chinese behave with each other to this day), to the Qin Dynasty (which united most of the area we now call China for the first time in 221 BC), then through the highly developed Han Dynasty (which developed governance systems that are still in use today) that lasted from around 200 BC to around 200 AD, and then a number of other dynasties until the Tang Dynasty in 618. While I scanned China’s history from the Xia Dynasty1 through the year 600 AD (i.e., just before the remarkable Tang Dynasty), I looked at most of the dynasties since then more carefully to see the patterns. I wrote up my study of them that I will share later. I will now focus very briefly on the post-600 AD period.

In the chart below I plotted the same overall power gauge that I showed you in the first chart but applied only to China from 600 AD until now. It conveys how powerful China was relative to other empires in the world over that time frame. While there were many more dynasties that existed in various parts of the country and various other slivers in time, I didn’t show them in this chart because that would have produced too much detail for the really big picture to come through. As you can see, for most of that time China was one of the world’s most powerful empires, with the notable exception from around 1840 until around 1950 when it went into a steep decline.



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