China, the greatest civilization of Humanity

>>1482335
When I was reading the Discourses on Salt and Iron and I realized they had reached Early Modern-levels of civilization 2000 years ago, and again when I read it had reached an harmonious economic equilibrium 500 years ago.

To be fair it went to the dogs soon afterwards.

>>1482335
5毛 has been deposited into your account Liu.

>going for a cultural victory but dominationfags keep fucking you up

>>1482468

Kek'd cause it's actually generally true

chink chonk chank mink jonk lyonk chonk!

>>1482335

When I discovered how small the average Chinese penis was. If the Chinaman has a small dick, then that means his females haven't been sleeping with multiple men, since it's the sperm competition in the vagina that provides the evolutionary drive to have larger penises and testicles.

The demonstrable lack of such shows that the Chinese, not anyone else, have managed to curb the natural sluttishness of the female, a feat that nobody before or since has managed.

>>1482335
Eh. I pretty much feel whatever civilization I happen to be reading or thinking about at a given moment is the "most illustrious, most brilliant and most beautiful civilization of all times". But I'll give you this much: the Chinese imperial model was almost indisputably the most successful political system ever yet developed by humans.

>>1482534
>But I'll give you this much: the Chinese imperial model was almost indisputably the most successful political system ever yet developed by humans.

I am never a believer of "successful political systems" since that shit always changes. You cant say republics were more successful than kingdoms, and vice versa, given plenty of criteria.

That said, my main beef with Chink Imperial Systems is the Mandate of Heaven. Like it literally gave people easy excuses to topple dynasties. I'd rather have a shitty period rather than an era of civil war and the building of a new dynasty. Shit is destabilizing as fuck.

Better like in Europe where people just try to live under shitty kings. But then again that has its own problems as well (i.e. you never recover like fucking Hungary).

>>1482614
This is why 二王三恪. (no idea how it translates into english) is a thing. 二王三恪. is the practice of enfeoffing the deposed dynasty with a noble title (reminder, not all Chink dynasties are from the nobility) so that the surviving members can perform the filial duty of sacrificing to past Chinese emperors.

The reason for this lay on Chinese beliefs of filial piety, ancestor worship, and the continuity of the Empire. You see, Emperors are fathers of the State, and no matter how their descendants act, they, ALL OF THEM, are all important. As ancestor worship makes them literal gods over the Chinese state, the last thing you want to do is piss them off. Hence when Dynasties get deposed, the winners often do not kill the members. What they do is grant them noble titles and a place in court as mere aristocrats. That way, while they don't have the Mandate anymore, they can still placate the spirits of Chinese Emperors and ensure the image of continuity of the Empire, which to the Chinese really is an extension of larger filial obligations.

For example: when the Qing Dynasty took over, the survivors of the Zhu Clan (House that founded the Ming DYnasty) were demoted following their defeat to the title: Marquis of Extended Grace, and was given a place in court and the job of maintaining the tombs and temples of the Ming Ancestors. Almost all Chinese Imperial Families bar one (Qin, since the Nobles hated his guts) continued to exist as nobles and remind everybody of the continuity of Empire. Hell even the Yuan Mongols had a postdynasic title (Prince of Qin) even if the Ming hated their guts.

>>1482614
I would not even be willing to rank "republics" against "kingdoms", since these are basically rigid, allegedly timeless abstract sets, whose members may in fact have more in common with certain elements of the other set than each other on a case-by-case basis. That's about as different as could be from praising the successes of the Chinese imperial system, which actually was, as I see it, a unique phenomenon with it's own lifespan. Of course it changed, it was supposed to, and couldn't have been successful without doing so. That's basically like saying an individual man can't be considered successful, because he changes as his life goes on, and there may have been periods of his life where he would have been reckoned a failure instead.

I'm actually somewhat of an apologist for the Mandate of Heaven idea. Although any notion like that will be unavoidably abused for political gain, and frequently, I strongly suspect (even if political expedience combined with a sincere and perhaps non-unjustified Zhōu self-perception of superiority was its origin) that it was philosophically developed during the Eastern Zhōu period into a suitably profound idea that could almost be seen as an Iron Age take on the Hegelian Weltgeist. Even at its shallowest, it was probably less conducive to fomenting civil wars than the reverence paid to the "revolution" idea in the modern American imperial system.