China was ahead in 1000, but Western Europe has been ahead since at least the 1500's (in terms of GDP per capita)

If 'significantly ahead' means in arts and sciences, measures we prefer, as ever, only in hindsight.

Right on.

Colonialism signaled wealth, but in the long-term did not explain (cause) variation in wealth between nations.

China wasnt a fucking thing until it was unified.

Before it was unified, it was threatening to resemble like Medieval Europe or India: a place with multiple states consisting of people with diverse yet similar cultures.

The hundred kingdoms & principalities of the Post-Zhou period could have been actual countries and separate cultures until they were battered into shape by the Qin.

It is a pretty stupid statement to claim that X was stagnating culturally when X was just getting fucking started.

Do Chinese dynasties take their names from Warring States Kingdoms?

I see shit like "Han" "Wei" "Wu" whenever I read up on Chinese dynasty. Makes shit confusing.

>I see shit like Lombardy, Alsace-Lorraine and Castile whenever I read up on Euro dynasty. Makes shit confusing.

Literally comes with the territory

The lack of decent research into pre-modern economies outside of Europe, meaning the values we have for places like China and India are more guesswork than what we know for Italy, Holland, and England. Doubly so for calculating per capita values for those regions, and comparing them as a whole to the most industrialized zones of Western Europe rather than Europe as a whole.

Yes and No.

Yes in that some Dynasties do out of respect for the ruling classes ancestry. Usually early Dynasties. For example, in the 3 Kingdoms, the Sun Clan named their state "Wu" largely because they were on what was once the State of Wu. That, and supposedly they descended from legendary Wu general, Sun Tzu.

But not with others. The Han dynasty was named after Liu Bang's -it's founder's- fief, near the Han river. Then you have dynasty names based on qualities. The Ming Dynasty literally means "Bright" Dynasty. Qing meanwhile, means "Brilliant."

China was a civilisation before it unified, the same way the West is. And that's when all its cultural development happened. Its unification is the end, not the beginning. After that China no longer produced anything new, just lingered on under Confucianism, making the same stereotyped art, following the same political system, the same philosophy, and no longer achieving any scientific progress, only sporadic technical innovations and only for the first few centuries.

Exactly the same happened to the Hellenistic world as it was unified under Rome. And to the Near East under the Ottomans, and to India starting with the Mauryan Empire... When a civilisation unites into an empire, it has died inside.

End of the Song Dynasty, although mid Ming saw an economic resurgence it quickly died down.

On a military front it continued to modernize for quite a while.

Does lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/pdf/Broadberry/China8.pdf float your boat?

>China was a civilisation before it unified
It wasn't.

We can talk of a Huaxia civilization (and even that is a controversial term since what consists of Huaxia? The supposed original 9 Tribes that unified into the "Hua" identity according to Zhou myth?), not a Chinese one. There's a reason why Chinese history is split into Ancient, Imperial, and Modern. Prior the unified Empire, the Shang State (Theocracy) and Zhou State (Feudal) are essential to China's cultural roots, but you cant call them Chinese.

Don't meme the destruction of a hundred schools of though as the end of China's cultural development. It's overrated and its demise wasnt the result of one emperor, but the confluence of many thinkers going "you know what, one state is actually nice." since the Warring States was a shitty time.

Not to mention you also mentioned another meme: Confucianism's supposed absolute hold on Chinese thought. When Confucianism only took full hold by the T'ang Dynasty, in addition to China being bombarded by multiple religions that found their homes there. Buddhism, Islam, and Nestorian Christianity to name but a few. Lets even throw in syncretism, Taoism's survival, and the fact that Philosophical discourse also occured within the framework of Confucianism (see: neo-confucianism).

It's better, yes.

So what determines the name of the Dynasty?

Don't you see the difference between a civilisation and a nation? The West is a civilisation. France, England etc are different national identities, but all belong to the same civilisation.

Point taken, though Western E. is distinct from Eastern E, and the reason this question is even interesting is that Western E. continues to enjoy a higher standard of living to this day.

The Emperor. Period.

Emperor wants to allude to an earlier period therefore naming the dynasty based on that earlier epoch.

Emperor gets nostalgic and names it after where it all began (i.e. his home province, his original title) he names it based on that.

Emperor wants to say "this rule of my dynasty shall be the best, t.b.h" he names it after a quality.

One thing for sure is, nobody called their dynasty by the name of their family.

There was one actually
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_dynasty
Its the only Chinese dynasty named after the ruling family. It was one of the many tinpot dynasties during the Nanbeichao/Age of Fragmentation Period before the Sui destroyed it.

When it happened, it was considered the most egotistical act ever in Chinese history.

>though Western E. is distinct from Eastern E
Wouldn't that also be true for Southern China versus Northern China? Or Lowland/Coastal/Eastern China versus Highland/Inland/Western China?

Sure, but it's not like the richest provinces in China were spearheading technological innovation in the 16th-21st centuries.

>Huaxia civilization
This is why people need to read the actual text instead of quoting Wikipedia.

The Shang and Zhou were separate federations with different cultures(patrimony vs fraternal succession,legitimacy granted by ancestors vs mandate of heaven,different usage of surnames etc.) but the same language.

Huaxia is a post Han invention and with the only pre Han usage being a variation on the term Zhuxia by non Zhou culture(Chu).

Zhuxia(of the Xia) is a reference to the Zhou claims to the Xia.(Something the Shang never mentions)

Hua was a cultural identity that may be synonymous with Xia or a reference to Mount Song. Hua was popularized as an ethnonym during the Western Jin not before.

Dynastic names are traditionally toponyms. Typically what ended up happening from Han onward was that the future Emperor took successively higher titles, so he might start as Duke of some place, and then when he eventually claimed Imperial title he ended up "promoted" to Emperor "of" that place.

There were some exceptions, which eventually became the standard after the Mongol Yuan. In context the choice of "Yuan" was not the name of a place but supposed to mean "the greatest." After that both Ming and Qing emulated this "stylistic" naming rather than using a toponym.

This may mostly be coincidence, because Chen is also a toponym. Furthermore, in ancient times a lot of rulers took the names of their states/dynasties to become their surnames. Toponyms are older than surnames almost everywhere.

I don't know enough about Chen to say for sure, but it may be that the Chen surnamed founder ended up getting title over the actual Chen region.

>Toponyms
Name of their fief or they use the name of a former polity.

>Dynasties
Usually an attempt to link trace their ancestry to previous rulers.

Might be because his ancestor Chen Shi lived where the Chen state once was.

>China has been culturally stagnat for two millennia
This is basically true. China did advance technologically until roughly the Yuan/Ming Dynasty. Up until then China had been a clear technological leader for quite some time.

I don't agree that Europe was ahead of everyone else in science and tech in the 1300s. The Chinese and Arabs still rivaled them then. By the 1500s Europe was ahead, but 1300s, nah

China ceased to be a leader and simply became a copier because China didn't develop the scientific method.

However, China still was able to mostly keep up, copying foreign technologies like telescopes and arquebuses, until the industrial revolution

No. It was not.

Meme post

China had been utilizing natural gas since the 400 through bamboo tubes to produce salt. The only issue was chinas political instability like Rome. The only difference is, that no other civilization took over after the Han. Other than manchurians twice, who are chinese-ish

>Unified
>Chinese
>State

By the 1300s the West had discovered the basics of classical mechanics and calculus as well as all the principles of the scientific method. It had also invented the mechanical clock, the dry compass, spectacles, made the best cannons, and had the most advanced civil engineering (see Gothic cathedrals).

More unified than some meme German Empire in Europe, that's for sure.

You forgot the Yuan, who were Mongols.