Why did the rise and fall of ancient chinese dynasties result in very little change in government?

Question

this question is social studies and it deals with chinese

Answer 1

Because the true goverment was not the emperor, but the highly developed (and reasonably effective) civilian bureaucracy.

Answer 2

How can one sum up more than 2000 years of east Asian mainland dynastic history in this space of this tiny answer page? You should read a half dozen important books on the subject if you have the time.

The dynastic system was generally a feudal system with the peasants doing most of the work, the tiny scholarly upper class gathering the wealth for the empire while trying to keep things orderly and the emperor counting his treasures. Every overthrow of the emperor before 1911 was nothing more than one greedy b*stard taking the reins away from another.

China was not one nation located in the general geographic area that it is today until about the 15th century when the Ming dynasty expanded westward. If you fold a modern day map of China in half, the center crease, along about Lanzhou, marks the western edge of the pre-Ming territory and, in fact, marks the western end of the "Long Wall", we call it the Great Wall. Well, I should offer the exception of the vast Mongol Empire but it ruled so loosley over half the known world that it was not much of a government. Fierce fighters, but they couldn't get many Chinese people interested in them. The Mongol Empire affected Chinese people about as much as the Roman Empire affected the British during its rule of England.

The populace of China, other than the small aristocracy, has always been very agrarian and uneducated. This does not usually spur people to write eloquent discourses about a new vision or to rise up against the feudal empire. It seems to always take a demagog such as Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin or Mao to bring about a true revolution by pointing out to the people what most of them suspected all along and that is that they are doing all the work while the fat cats, also known as Csars and emperors, sit in the lap of luxury. I'll say nothing to support the demagogs who usually have some alterior motive that includes lopping off many heads.

Another factor that kept the Chinese people from uniting in any type of class struggle was the wide range of languages spoken by the common people. Even today, there are at least 300 different "dialects" that are mutually unintelligible. How could a group from one valley gather support in the next valley if they couldn't be understood? The common people of pre-Maoist China could not share much of their aspirations since they were culturally like a hundred different countries very loosely associated.

Today, to no one's surpise, the new PRC dynasty is a group of fat cats still. Now, as there are many times the number of people with their shoulders to the grindstone, there are many times as many fat cats.

Answer 3

Tradition and the past are held in high regard in Chinese culture. I've read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and it seems that the people often refer to the past to legitamise the present. When they fromed new governments the goal was not to improve an old system, but to try to return to a previous mythically perfect system, so little changes.

Answer 4

Communism.

Answer 5

Because the Chinese people are so short.

Answer 6

Because all they changed was the person on the throne, not the bureaucracy that supported them