Why did the Roman Empire stay dead after it collapsed but the Chinese Empire kept getting recreated under new...

China had the Mandate of Heaven to legitimize foreign conquerors as founders of Chinese dynasties like the Yuan and the Qing, and it helped that they tended to assimilate and effectively become Chinese themselves. In comparison the Eastern Empire refused to accept the legitimacy of barbarian emperors who seized power in the West.

But they failed in Europe, only JustinIan came anywhere near. Chinese dynasties actually succeeded.

Europeans moved on to create a new thing, chinese stayed and obsessed over old and busted and ended up getting btfo

The Mediterranean had to deal with migrations from almost every direction which brought in several different cultures who did not share the kind of close diplomacy that the various Chinese states who usually only worried about nomad incursions had.The city-states that formed the backbone of the Greek and Roman Classical world deteriorated and tribes of Germanic, Slavic, Berber, and Arab peoples came in large enough numbers to influence these urban populations towards their own cultural sphere. So Germanic Western Europe developed their diplomatic ties through the consolidation of the Franks and the Catholic Church, while Eastern Europe fell in behind Constantinople and the Orthodox, and North Africa and the Middle East followed the Caliphs, and there was no feasible way to unite all three culturally in the way Chinese warring states could through eventual conquest.

Blame the Peace of Westphalia for establishing the idea of sovereignty and the geographic barriers of Europe.

>Someone attempts to build a European Empire
>Gets destroyed by Krauts or Anglos

>Someone attempts to build an African Empire
>Gets destroyed by thallosocracies (Sea people, dutch, Portuguese, British)

>Semeone attempts to build an Indian Empire
>Gets destroyed by jealous generals, steppe peoples (Aryans, Huns, Mongols) and Southern Indians

>Someone attempts to build an American Empire
>Gets btfo by Europeans

>Semeone builds an Chinese Empire
>Dynasty gets replaced, however culture and territories stay the same
>tfw China is the only stable Empire

Non Chinese barbarians btfo

Um ever heard of Charlemagne sweetie

this The division into eastern and western Roman Empires was no meme. The western Roman empire was more "continental" shall we say and more similar to China geopolitically while the eastern Roman empire was basically all the land next to the Mediterranean and the southern Black sea.

The Germans to the Romans were like the Xiongnu to the Han. Both "northern barbarians" tried to cosplay as the empire they had invaded and there was a potential for long term reunification as the Chinese accomplished under the Tang, except the eastern Roman empire not only had to deal with northern barbarians but the Sassanians and later the Islamic invasions which brought with it a whole new paradigm to the Mediterranean.

The Holy Roman Empire was the west's China and for a short time included both France, Germany and northern Italy. The geographical barriers between Germany and France pale in comparison to the barriers between China's northern plains and southern hills, so I think the break up might be more to do with a combination of economics and the pressure from surrounding states.

China was hardly a stable place. They had to kill hundreds of thousands for that.

I can't believe only one of you niggers actually gets it. Bad form, Veeky Forums

The Yellow and Yangtze Rivers allowed for huge, interconnected provinces which could be tightly controlled by the ruling class. They were essentially a hydraulic despotism which could economically strangle rebelling provinces. Being a river-lands civilization is also why their population could grow to such massive proportions and why their culture was so enduring even in periods many decades of continuous strife and desolation.

The major river systems of Europe and the Middle East also allowed great economic control, which is how the Romans managed to reach as far as Britain and Iraq. The Seine, Rhine, and Loire all connected the lands around the English Channel, the Balkans had the Danube, Egypt had its Nile, and the Tigris and Euphrates did the same for Syria. And all of these helped connect them to the Mediterranean. And all of them helped Western Eurasia's population equal China's.

These are worth considering to explain why all these regions shifted away from unification. The incoming migrations created new aristocracies and merchant classes centered around these river systems, and Rome/Constantinople could no longer influence them all. There could be economic blockades, and there was plenty of that between the Franks/Arabs/Moors/Greeks throughout this period, but by then each of them had formed their own power bases that could do without open Mediterranean trade.

>without much change in the bureaucratic structure

Does bureaucracy even matter in a feudal society?

It did in an imperial one, which is partly why Chinese imperial hegemony was such a constant while the Mediterranean broke up into regional military aristocracies who preferred to elect one of their own to a kingship rather than give allegiance to a more distant, centralizing court. This sort of system eventually overtook the three major empires in the West which never really recovered.

>stayed dead
Well, to be fair Rome lasted till 1204

/thread

The power of arr rook same vs diversity

>Rome at its height was no more than 5 million.
"At its peak, after the Antonine Plague of the 160s CE, it had a population of about 60-70 million and a population density of about 16 persons per square kilometer."
Is google banned in China?

>Rome at its height was no more than 5 million.
What? The city itself may have had 1 million people. The whole empire easily surpassed 50 million, if not reaching up to 80+ million.

The Persians surely count, considering how many Shahdoms have ruled there over the centuries.

>The major river systems of Europe and the Middle East also allowed great economic control, which is how the Romans managed to reach as far as Britain and Iraq.
Rome was not a hydraulic despotism. It couldn't bring a usurper back into line by strangling trade on a main river route connecting the two provinces and would have had to resort to naked force.

Rebellious Chinese provinces didn't have mountain ranges and inland seas to hide behind when the government swung its monumental bulk at them.

>, Egypt had its Nile,
which is why ancient Egypt is also considered a hydraulic despotism, since their entire economy was based around a river which was controlled by a single court. This also would have been the case for the ancient Sumerians living in the fertile crescent, but not for the decentralized northern Europeans who never even formed centralized states until they were cucked hardcore by the Romans.

Unlike Rome, China is naturally isolated from steppe nomads by vast mountain ranges and deserts.

>And rebellious Chinese provinces didn't have mountain ranges and inland seas to hide behind.

But Red Cliffs was literally a battle where two large provinces either hid behind mountain passes or large rivers that may as well have been seas for how much their navy dominated it. While China's river basis is quite large, so is the Great Northern Plain of Europe.

The real reason is the bureaucratic culture. Rome maintained its empire through its citizen bureaucracy, and Imperial China had its meritocratic system. The reason these empires held together is because it was mostly run by these two classes who shared a similar education and who freely moved around the empire. Even if the rulers were barbarians and the ruled were non-Latin/Han, the bureaucrats spread Latin/Han culture and educated the next generation of barbarian rulers and ruled alike.

This system never went away in China, whereas in Rome it was taken over by the Church which by its nature was prone to theological disputes that continually severed ties between different regions of the old Roman empire. Add to that the rise of the Muslim Ulema who were yet another step removed from the Church bureaucracy and we get the tripartite division earlier anons mentioned: the Franks, the Byzantines, and the Arabs.

Rome was very much a hydraulic empire, functioning entirely on its command of the waterways to ship goods, taxes, and soldiers across the Mediterranean. During its many civil wars and triumvirates, punishing rebellious or rival regions through tax and grain blockade (especially from Egypt) was common.

the fuck are you talking about? rome has the alps
and have you forgotten the fucking mongols?

I mispoke in multiple ways. I meant the Roman empire as a whole, not just Rome. And I meant nomads in general, not just steppe nomads.

They were both vulnerable to the steppe, though China was much more open than Rome in this regard. The real problem were the forest and desert tribes all around Rome's borders who began moving in when plague and civil war decimated the population. China never really had to worry about mass migrations of Tibetans, Southeast Asians, or Koreans and Japanese for most of its long history, not in the same way Rome had to deal with Germans, Slavs, Moors, or Arabs.

Their warring states were just united eventually. Our warring states stayed divided.

>But Red Cliffs was literally a battle where two large provinces either hid behind mountain passes or large rivers that may as well have been seas for how much their navy dominated it.
small scale tactical maneuvering is a different animal. I'm talking about on a strategic level. And Red Cliffs perfectly illustrates how the government used vital waterways to crush rebellions (though it being a notable exception)

Crossing the Alps was no small feat in Roman times and hugely influenced the overall development of European nation states. Compared to China Italy is rocky, broken terrain upon which formed independent city-states rather than one giant conjoined blob of centrally planned farming communities

> the Great Northern Plain of Europe.
which doesn't even have close to the population density of China

>The real reason is the bureaucratic culture.
geography is what allowed their bureaucratic culture to cultivate in the first place, while the comparatively rocky, broken terrain of Europe influenced profoundly the "either-or/us-or-them" mentality which gave rise to classical philosophy, monotheism, and the "citizen bureaucracy" as you called it.

>Rome was very much a hydraulic empire,
It was not centralized enough to be considered a true hydraulic despotism, a government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy.

In many ways the Roman empire could be described as the city-state model of classical antiquity pushed beyond its maximum reasonable extent, because so much of Roman society revolved around a single massive urban center which is half of why unrest and rebellion was endemic for the Romans.

>tax and grain blockade (especially from Egypt) was common.
just because a country maintains a strong maritime tradition doesn't make it a hydraulic despotism.

It wasn't "china", but different Chinese states at the same time.

Easy answer is that Rome fell for the monotheistic meme. Monotheisms have periodic schisms, which can cause inescapable political struggles, iconoclasm, monotheletism, monophysites, Great Schisms, Little Schisms, Popes and Anti-Popes. Makes it hard to control Egypt et. al., and ultimately reunification is prevented out of religious bigotry.

Whereas in a pagan pantheon if the locals want to do something wierd you can just say OK fine as long as you pay taxes.

Are you retarded? Any T*rks pushed out of the Empire never reached Rome, and it was Germanic Barbarians already there that did them in.

This.

China only has "5000 years of history" in the same way modern Iraq is a continuation of ancient Sumeria or Italy is the Roman Empire. The various "dynasties" that have ruled the general geographical area of modern China had different religions, cultures, philosophies and ethnicities. If they are all the same continuous civilization then Ethiopia can claim to have an unbroken culture from Lucy the Australopithecine.

>had different religions
They were all built on Confucian patterns laid down by the Han, just with varying degrees of Buddhism and Taoism at times

>cultures
Culture evolves over time in any civilization, Byzantine culture in 1000AD would not have been the same as Roman culture in 1AD but it is still considered to be a continuation of that civilization, unlike when the totally foreign Ottoman Turks took over.

>philosophies
Again, they were all built on Confucian patterns at the base

>and ethnicities
Aside from the periods of rule by nomadic invaders (during which the invaders continued to make use of the Han bureaucracy and adopted Han customs and cultural trappings) they were by en large all Han Chinese.

What do you have to censor the word Turk for?

>Germans.
>Free will.
Only asians are more jerarquic in general, the way they follow they leaders is freightening desu.

Mandate of Heavan

New dynasty would take over the previous one while keeping the same level of government, just less corrupt

Geography had something do with it I think. Having all your port cities in the middle of your empire, causing them to try any out do eachother instead of on a single coast line.

>Why did the Roman Empire stay dead
The Roman Empire didn't just "fall", it was taken over by foreigners. In the West, it was the Germans and in the East, it was the Turks - they both carried on as if there was no real break in power or lineage and kept (for a time) the local bureaucracies. Both peoples largely adopted the local customs of the Romans and vice versa.

The biggest problem with that is that the Germans didn't really have the concept of a state down; they defined their kingdoms based on inheritance and whenever one of them died, they split everything up and that broke down government and trade - Vulgar Latin didn't break down into different languages until the 6th century, and by then the whole continent went into crisis with plague, warfare, and anarchy.

As for the East, well the Turks were muslim so that's a no-go right off the bat, and by the time the Ottomans finished off Constantinople, Europe had already grown into separate identities as individual kingdoms with their own languages and governments.

Chinese are highly intelligent humans, making them easy to control. G*rms aren't technically human at all, they need to be "managed" like wild animals... or like vermin.

t. Jared Diamond

Environmental determinism is fashionable again user

[Citation needed]

>China only has "5000 years of history" in the same way modern Iraq is a continuation of ancient Sumeria or Italy is the Roman Empire.

Please point out how many Iraqis speak Ahamaric, worship Sumerian religion, and are of non-Indo-European/non-Arab descent.

Educated Chinese scholars today can read ancient Chinese, worship the same folk religions, and have the same Confucian cultural heritage. Not to mention the bureaucratic meritocracy system.

Literally no credible historian claims what you just did

The Roman empire was a montge of many different peoples, cultures,religions, and languages. Though the empire had official standings on each, most citizens were allowed to keep their pre-conquest societies intact.
In China the people had a common language that could unite them. They had a common religion and their daily existences were, for the most part, the same throughout the empire. The caste system that existed through most of it assured that the people conformed to whomever was in charge at the time.

>wipe out literally every other dialect of ancient chinese in antiquity
>claim everyone spoke mandarin in 2000BCE four thousand years later

Chinks

>>The real reason is the bureaucratic culture. Rome maintained its empire through its citizen bureaucracy, and Imperial China had its meritocratic system. The reason these empires held together is because it was mostly run by these two classes who shared a similar education and who freely moved around the empire. Even if the rulers were barbarians and the ruled were non-Latin/Han, the bureaucrats spread Latin/Han culture and educated the next generation of barbarian rulers and ruled alike.

>>This system never went away in China, whereas in Rome it was taken over by the Church which by its nature was prone to theological disputes that continually severed ties between different regions of the old Roman empire. Add to that the rise of the Muslim Ulema who were yet another step removed from the Church bureaucracy and we get the tripartite division earlier anons mentioned: the Franks, the Byzantines, and the Arabs.

this

>>geography is what allowed their bureaucratic culture to cultivate in the first place, while the comparatively rocky, broken terrain of Europe influenced profoundly the "either-or/us-or-them" mentality which gave rise to classical philosophy, monotheism, and the "citizen bureaucracy" as you called it.
But also a bit of this too. Monotheism wasn't really inspired by much of anything though. The chinese had occasional bouts of it, but they were lucky enough to not have them take complete control of the government for the most part.

Except Classical Chinese, which dates from the end of the Spring and Autumn period and which all the old Chinese literature is in, was preserved and in use for official and formal writing purposes right through to the Republic era, and scholars can still read it.

Also, being able to read some basic Classical Chinese is still part of the normal school curriculum in China.

Wasn't the whole point of Chinese writing system so that they could understand each other WITHOUT speaking the same language? Everyone regardless of their language used the little faggy scrabbles.

what rubbish, the Yuan and Qing were only considered legitimate dynasties when they had completely crushed military resistance

If the barbarian emperors wanted the same kind of legitimacy Kublai Khan enjoyed they would have had to first take Constantinople.

There were still clear grammatical and terminology differences between languages even written using the same writing system. Classical Chinese is clearly distinct in grammar and even vocabulary from any contemporary vernacular including Mandarin, but modern readings of characters in Mandarin or Cantonese can be used to pronounce the words nevertheless. The famous poem that is made up entirely of shi1, shi2, shi3, and shi4 making it hard to understand in Mandarin would be made up of many distinct sounds in the old Classical Chinese reading, and also when read in Cantonese or Hokkien.

In a Western context, for a loose analogy, imagine official documents continue to use Latin right up until the 70s (which is when the Republic of China finally dropped it for government purposes) but it's read using bastardized modern pronunciations instead of the reconstructions of how the Romans would have spoken.

>what rubbish, the Yuan and Qing were only considered legitimate dynasties when they had completely crushed military resistance
And the crushing of military resistance was "proof" they had the mandate of heaven.
Is the taking of Constantinople is a sign that God has chosen the barbarian emperors to be the legitimate rulers of Rome?

China is the only river valley civilization that got spared from the Bronze age collapse or foreign invasion (until the Mongols) due to their geographic position.

Rome was just a city state that got really powerful and started conquering lands too late in history to fully assimilate them.

>written Chinese
>spoken dialect

Might want to DELET your post

The difference is that now with the "bastardized modern pronunciations", not only the scholars can read classical Chinese.

Despite anti-Commie claims to the contrary, simplified Chinese did help boost literacy and utilizes many simplifications Nationalist China pushed as well to increase literacy.

It's amazing how similar 1949-1957, and 1971-present Mainland China is to Nationalist China. KMT and the CCP aren't all that different. For example, the KMT and Chiang even pushed the "New Rejuvenation Movement" during the Nanjing Decade. Essentially a forced modernization of Chinese culture

Not to mention KMT forced-Sinicization.

Rome didn't really brake up into wArring states though. It wasn't Roman nobles who broke away and founded, like, the Kingdom of Gaul. Even when they had civil wars it was usually about two guys wanting to be emperor
It was all foreign, temporarily nomadic forces that took over chunks of Rome anfounded their own states when Rome was unable to defend itself. If the Germanic migration didn't happen Rome wouldn't have fallen that way.

I guess China's secret is that
1. They never got weak enough that their neighbors could individually take over their land. Or that their neighbors, lets say a single Mongol tribe was alnever powerful enough to take large masses of Chinese land. Even conquering a divided China took a union of all Mongol tribes.

2. Horse nomads were their only agressive neighbors and unlike agrarian Germans they had no intention in settling in Chinese land.

Interesting points.

Why is no one mentioning the fact China has always had a huge and culturally Han core since 220bc?

No one had more people in the region

You're fucking retarded.

The 'Han people' were sparsely populated on the Yangtze river during 220bc. The modern day 'Han people' are an amalgamation of the rape babies of the other peoples in China, ethnicity has little to do with this and more so the fact China is able to produce a double edged super-bureaucracy whenever its needed

Nobody has more people in Eastern Europe than the Slavs, but we have the word "balkanized" for a reason

>more so the fact China is able to produce a double edged super-bureaucracy whenever its needed
Lots of empires in history had powerful and organized bureaucracies, but not all of them managed to collate everyone under them into identifying as a single culture.

Various kinds of slavs have as much in common with one another as various kind of germanics.

The "Han" classification was less about ethnicity and more about separating the civilized people from the barbarians.

The inhabitants of the Han dynasty, especially the Eastern Han, referred to themselves literally as "Hanren" (people of Han) to differentiate themselves from the invading nomadic tribes.

>slavs
>han

Two very separate groups.

Macedonians to Russians is about as close as Russians to the Franks.

Yes and that "them versus us" mentality is literally ethnogenesis.

It's strange, China got invaded more times than the romans, and were conpletely conquered many times as well. Every victorious opponent would simply create a new chinese dynasty and keep china united afterwards. So it's more like there was only one roman empire, buy china today is actually like the 10th china.

It seems to be a repeated trope in Chinese history that the northern plains get conquered by some force which then stalls at the more mountainous and defensible south. Creating situations like the Northern and Southern Dynasties.

There wasn't even a "China" as we would understand the term back then, there was only the ruling dynasty and "all under heaven".

This can be attributed to three things:
1. Rome was a large number of poorly assimilated cultures, so there was not really a unified group of "Romans" even during the Late Empire, and regionalism came to dominate Roman political struggles, combined with an inability to assimilate new groups of people into the Empire. China on the other hand, had a wonderfully efficient method of cultural assimilation, therefore there was a unique idea of being "Chinese" fairly early.

2. China has this idea called "The Mandate of Heaven", wherein a dynasty can be deposed through not doing their jobs effectively by smaller warlords. Also the term "Chinese Empire" is confusing because each and every dynasty (with the exceptions of the Yuan and Qing dynasties) were inherently Chinese and always filled roughly the same borders. Rome was very unique as far as the Mediterranean was concerned. Even looking at this map, you can see there is a lot more easily governed and traveled territory in China at this time, and many of the farther western portions are client kingdoms, not full prefectures. Which brings me to my third point...

3.China better unified a core of itself and was never a victim of the Volkerswandrung, so there weren't suddenly huge masses of non-Chinese cultures inundating the empire simultaneously. Rome constantly dealt with invasions, with the later Empire being unable to repulse, and instead having to accommodate these new Germanic people. However, the Germanic people did make huge leeway in Romanizing themselves during the final century of the Western Roman Empire, which also meant each tribe inherited "the Roman Legacy" which was the idea it was their divine right to rule over the peoples of Europe. Religious, cultural and geographic distances had become too big a barrier, and the rapidly shrinking economy of the West, it no longer had the economy of scale to maintain the empire, which is why it dissolved into smaller kingdoms while the East remained.

Confucianism is a powerful tool
Christianity wasn't directly responsible for the collapse of the empire but it promoted a very different mode of thought where the good of the "state" wasn't really as important as your family and friends living good moral lives.

>Despite anti-Commie claims to the contrary, simplified Chinese did help boost literacy

Or perhaps it was the improved education system that accomplished this, or are Taiwan and Hong Kong illiterate backwaters?

I had wondered why if both the Germanic barbarians Romanized themselves and the Inner Asian horse barbarians Sinicized themselves, why did the Asian barbarians found new united dynasties (like the Yuan and the Qing) while the Germanic barbarians just carved up the empire into smaller kingdoms, was it a question of aforementioned religious and cultural differences making it harder to govern a united Western Europe than a united China?

Why does the Chinese territory have that weird tail out west with a narrow corridor leading to a wider area?

Germans are more inclined to individualism for one.

Look at it this way: Both the Roman Empire and Han China had roughly the same population: about 60 million people.

The difference is that only about 4 to 5 million people lived in Italy proper, and the rest were spread out throughout the realm.
Compare that to Han China where about 90% of its population lived in "inner China" and the rest was sparsely populated.

Westerners had to contend with broken terrain that lent themselves to natural borders (Italy being a perfect example, surrounded by the Mediterranean on three sides and the Alps on the remaining) and therefore encouraged the rise of autonomous city-states and later self-supporting regional powers which had to be conquered and reconquered by naked force.

China was a gigantic melting pot where every province was economically interconnected and power was thoroughly centralized by the ruling bureaucracy which could throttle rebellious provinces by choking them economically and turning their neighbors against them.

When China fragmented the emerging dynasty could more readily stitch the realm back together thanks to its extensive river network which facilitated travel, verses in the West where Germanic tribes might be separated by seas or mountain ranges and did not possess the wealth or logistic capacity to reunited the broken land under a single ruling clan.

Terrain. Look at a map with geographical features.

>China on the other hand, had a wonderfully efficient method of cultural assimilation
What method was that? IIRC Romans did have some sense of the idea of citizenship and belief in the institutions of Rome being the common identity of all Romans, hence why the Eastern Roman Empire continued to identify as Roman after Rome was no longer part of the empire. And this started to fail as barbarians were brought in faster than they could be instilled with Roman values and identity. How did the Chinese manage to be the Borg in this regard where Rome failed?

Educate yourself

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_China

>he fell for the 5000 years of continuous history meme

>Or perhaps it was the improved education system that accomplished this, or are Taiwan and Hong Kong illiterate backwaters?
1. Perhaps. But historical evidence disputes that claim. Taiwan and HK Chinese extensively utilize simplifications of traditional Chinese in government, work, and society. Good luck separating the effect from the cause.
2. That's not an argument. Modern education and tech could explain it, but it doesn't explain Mainland China.

>ironic shitposting is an argument

The idea of a united Europe was dead long before the Peace of Westphalia. The last chance Europe had of unification was Charlemagne

it didn't, after its collapse from visogothic invasion follwoing years of political and cultural decadence, Rome effectively migrated towards constantinople and became the byzantine empire.
Of course some would argue that although the byzantine empire could be considered the successor of Rome, its true rebirth would be founded in the Holy Roman Empire.
Regardless Rome never truly fell it simply shifted and adapted in accordance to the ever changing global climate.

The Yangzi river had regional identities/topolects that were named after with the former polities of Chu,Wu and Yue.

Han did not apply to southerners until the Ming dynasty.

>Han during the Han dynasty
Han was a geopolitcal identity during dynasty,elites preferred the term "Hua"(illustrious) as an cultural identity.

The Xianbei were the first to apply it an ethnic sense to refer to their Sinitic speaking subjects(replacing regional identities such as Zhao or Yan).

Then what is Congo-Brazzaville continuing

Sea people's, plague and retarded Hittites

>Roman Empire stay dead

Byzantines, Charlemagne, HRE, Napoleon, Nazi Germany, Romanov Russia, USA....

philip ii had a chance. had the armada been successful would have led to the conquest of the england and the netherlands probably. catholic ireland would have followed suit and highland scotland was catholic and the lowlands are quite easy to conquer. following this philip would have an ideal spring board to conquer france from north and south

also remember france was in civil war so it could have been easy for the pickings