Why did this happen again and again and again?
Stupid devs didn't balance the game properly so it was borderline impossible for Celestial realms to afford a standing army.
The latest version was in 1920s
Another Mohist W
the realm long united must divide, long divided must unite
>>18421016This era produced lots of kino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zongchang#Personal_life
>>18420993A better question is: China had its own military aristocracy, during periods such as the Warring States, but did away with them much earlier in their history, compared to the European context, why was this?
>reunifies the empire after launching his northern expedition>wages civil war with communists after failing to purge them completely>stalemates a united Japan with his ragtag bunch of warlords with ill equipped peasant armies, all of whom only followed him because of his immense charisma>loses civil war and is exiled to Taiwan with KMT remnants fleeing into Indochina, South East Asia and TaiwanWhat went wrong?
>>18421028obviously he didn't purge the commies completely, rookie mistake
>>18421032He was interrupted mid civil war by an Invasion from Japan. Can he really be blamed for not being able to beat back Japanese tanks and air power with armed militia? If if said militia numbered in the millions.
>>18421028The US advisors got him to waste his best units on some retarded campaign in Burma(that they led and botched) and then lobbied the US government to slowly cut support from him because "he's incompetent" to cover their ass.Also I suspect the Japanese allowed communist cells to fester along occupied China from some point on(late 1944) when they knew they'll have to pull out anyway, maybe even negotiated some sort of ceasefire with them(don't annoy us we won't fight you), but that's my own theory(what is known is that eventually they gave up on policing the communists).
>>18420993The collapse of central authority produces competing warlords/foreigner invaders/cliques who because of social and geographic reasons become embroiled in conflict with eachother until one defeats the others and consolidates a hegemony over most or all of the former territory.
>>18421041Why does central authority keep collapsing in China? You dont see this shit happening in say Denmark.
>>18421028Mao was even more of a beast. Also the KMT's governance was very bad.
>>18421042because chinese people will actually chimp out if the government is not doing what they promise to do unlike retarded goycattle that take it up the ass without a mutter grievance
>>18421042Denmark's traditional system of agriculture doesn't depend on a series of complex waterworks that need constant top down maintenance and effective management. As far as I understand.The crisis in agriculture causes a crisis in legitimacy, an already weak and unable state cannot bear the stress: central authority collapses. Alternatively the mongols invade.This doesn't even necessarily means the previous dynasty is out for good. Both Song and Ming still had loyalists long after their respective states collapsed.But this reminds me. It's only a matter of time before the spacer appears with his copypastas about rape.Enjoy the thread while it's still good.
>>18420993>Unified China was for a long time the best pre-industrial civilization you could hope to be born into >Balkanized China in a transitional era between dynasties was likely among the worst pre-industrial civilizations you could be born intoWhat caused this peculiar aspect of China?
>>18421060Balkanized China had nonstop philosophical ferment.
>>18421060best pre-industrial civilization only if you were born into non-peasant class, but I suppose that's true for everyonemalthusian pressures in preindustrial china has to be up there in powerlevel tho
>>18421052The administration didn't fuck up agricultural management basically ever. A period of droughts or whatever was possible but given that the efficiency of farming was the base from which they took their taxes they would give up everything else before they started to mismanage thatWhat actually happens in China, and that's a cycle that is documented in Ming and Qing dynasties at the very least(likely present in others), is that when a dynasty takes power the tax burden is high and peasants are properly oppressed. Time passes and they lower the tax burden because they're not willing to oppress them so much so lowering taxes becomes their only way of appeasing them. They were literally worse than Chamberlain because he at least understood eventually that Hitler had to be stopped, the Chinese Hitler of collective peasantry was just being given everything he wanted. This eventually lead to weakening of central administration which became corrupt allowing them to wrestle their own power bases by bringing oppression back to the eternal p*asant. Eventually someone on the imperial court got offended by that and such noble and administrator led rebellions started happening. Then the situation was either so bad that the rebellions overthrew the emperor in one way or another or some foreign invader used them to conquer the state.
>>18421042Denmark didn't really have a big central authority until the modern era. It was, like most of Europe, a feudal kingdom. Feudalism is defined in part by a lack of strong central authority. It works by delegating authority to vassals, the most powerful of which are essentially autonomous and even semi-sovereign in their own right. In China, emperors had a large, literate class to draw on to staff truly immense bureaucracies to administrate their empire. The agrarian economy in China was carefully managed by bureaucrats in big regional cities. This gives the emperor a lot of power, a lot of real authority, but it also means the empire is fragile. Because if that central authority is disrupted, or violently removed, it causes a cascade of bureaucratic chaos down to the regional administrators. These administrators, lacking a central authority for guidance, often started behaving as autonomous entities, which eventually led to them simply ruling in their own name instead of the emperor's name, if the crisis went on long enough.This didn't happen in Denmark because for most of Denmark's history, the land was already carved up by local administrators who essentially ruled autonomously in their own name, only paying fealty to a king who in theory ruled over them, but in practice merely collected tribute and left them alone.
>>18421072Why didnt China follow the same model
>>18421028He had a military disaster getting encircled in Manchuria when hostilities resumed which was not an inevitability.>>18421040>The US advisorsWas literally a single general-rank officer sent out because he was the only person of sufficient rank that spoke Chinese, and he personally despised Chiang and wrote incessantly in his journal about it. Almost single-handedly poisoned the well.
>>18421072From my understanding of Qing dynasty history, the promise of no new taxes that caused their rampant corruption and decline benefitted primarily the landed aristocracy, not peasants.
>>18420993>whybecause the chinese cannot communicate effectively
>>18421130The decrease of tax burden was balanced by corruption of nobles/administration who had to step in where the state has retreated, which is what led to them acquiring their own power bases. The peasant in all this is just part of a mass, mass exists to be oppressed and has no agency of its own, but the decreasing tax burden was the reason for decentralisation of power and in turn instability.Mao understood it well because he always increased the burden, no matter what. Great leap forward, aside from some insanity also included workers toiling for 16 hours a day 7 days a week for the glory of China. Insanity like the 4 pests campaign etc. was just there to find some mobilising factor for the masses, so they could build up their enthusiasm for hard work ahead of them.
