I think the better question is, why didnt a successor state successfully conquer the former lands of the Roman empire? Because when "China" reunifies, its not like its the exact same state each time. It's different provinces and peoples claiming the legacy of China, its institutions, its legitimacy, and culture (however you define that). Europe, the Middle East, and even North Africa had plenty of states/peoples claiming to adhere to the Roman legacy. If one had managed to conquer its former territories, we might view it the same way we view China--the capital simply moving from Rome to somewhere else.
I think it calls into question if we can even define whether a successor state is a "real" successor or not. The modern EU doesn't claim to be the Roman Empire, and it functions differently, but it is a political entity that controls or at least has a large degree of control over much of the same territory. The USA uses much of the same symbolism of the Romans, and by some is considered an empire, but doesn't control European territory directly. If the Germans had conquered all of Europe, they could have claimed to be the new Rome, but could a Roman empire be based on Germanic cultural identity? It seems hard to pin down.
@@Tom_Quixote The EU does not control the same area than Imperial Rome. It's contains only the Northern Coast of the Roman imperial territory, but it includes vast territories that never or only for short time periods were under Roman control, like Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltics. Yes, there is some overlap. But that's all there is.
It's both more complex and simple in it's sensibility. It's not so much the *'Legacy of China',* most Western cultures inherited some Roman Legacy. Rather identity of China, of Han Chinese is invested cultural traditions and people. Even the Mongols and Manchus end up integrating most of the cultural traditions into their own. Because you can't hope to effectively rule these many people without taking in them as a part of you. *Roman is the reverse.* The identity is tied to Rome, when in Rome as they say. Everything is about Rome, not the rest of the empire. Most of the empire wasn't even consider citizen, an 'exclusive' status. Most of the empire have no real attachment to Rome or the Empire.
Speaking of Chinese history, I recommend anyone seeing this comment to dive into Chinese history. Every dynasty has something interesting and unique aspects to offer. I love Roman history too, but I personally don’t think anything comes even close to Chinese history when it comes to how interesting it can be.
@rob6927 Roman empire was too dependent on slaves and taxes of conquered lands which wanted independence. Roman citizenship tends to be exclusive while Chinese citizenship tends to be inclusive. G7 is an exclusive and limited membership organization and will likely decline while the BRICS has an inclusive membership and welcome others to join and will likely rise. This difference explains why Roman fell and China survive.
I recently listened to a podcast called "China Talk" where they interviewed Yasheng Huang, an econ professor fro MIT regarding his book "The Rise and Fall of the East" where he made a point that the imperial exam system established during the Sui Dynasty contributed a lot to the unification of multiple Chinese Dynasties in funneling competent people into an intellegenica class that was directly under the imperial system. It was a really interesting listen. I would highly recommended it.
Smart fraction theory, which creates some big differences near the tail especially when your population has an average iq 4-5 points above the European average.
If you count the persians too, is not that much the exam system, but the effective bureaucracy, even before persia there always a strong state in that region coming from the sumerian times, and every conqueror simply conquer but maintain the bureacracy of the region, that happens to china and the sinicization of the foreign rulers, that happen to persia and the persification of the arab rulers on the rise of Islam. But rome was never know to have a effective bureacracy, and even as germanic rulers try to claim the legacy of rome they never try to become romans. Maybe because of the Church taking roles on part of bureacracy and imposing divine rule (so the leader already had the right to rule), maybe because of the system rome had never impose on the ruler the need to adapt to roman costumes.
It may have had benefits, but it led to inflexible ossification of Chinese institutions. Take Zheng He's voyages during the Ming Dynasty. This was just prior to the age of European exploration. If the Mandarins hadn't been so against these voyages China might have discovered the America's
@@Mullet-ZubazPants if you got the time to read the supposed reason to the withdrawal of this policy, is much more related to fight for power in the court than being the ossification of institution, in fact, just the fact that they happened is a counter argument for that. in fact, their success (and the power that they gave to eunuchs) and the dead of the emperor was more the reason they stopped.
IMO, the non-military Chinese cultural elite has very much to do with it. When the nomads conquer China, the non-military elites are kept live and become servants or advisors of the nomad rulers. Due to culture influence (art and luxury), the nomads slowly become more Chinese.
As a Chinese person I would say it's because we have, at our core, a contiguous landmass of nearly culturally and ethnolinguistically identical peoples, the natural state of which is unification. Every time China was divided it was simply political, not along regional cultural or ethnolinguistic lines. The Mediterranean does not have same culture all over it, was only united cause conquest, and Rome lived on as some sort of cultural heritage for parts of Europe.
@ then why did sinkiang and the ma states even exist? They were literally Uyghur Muslim states which were very different than the han chinese kuomintang for example
China has various ethnicities, OP isn't talking about Han Chinese, Han Chinese is like the default term i.e.Americans calling themselves Americans even though their ancestors are German, Irish, Swedish etc, meanwhile the Roman empire was mainly through conquest, the former empires really didn't wanna be part of Rome, while majority of China does, except for a few and that's been the norm for thousands of years, a more apt comparison would be to compare the Roman empire to the Majapahit empire (Javanese), Indonesia is home to the most ethnicity and languages in the world but are able to reunify.
This is my take on the subject. Just a hobbyist. So take it with a grain of salt. As another commenter mentioned under this video, "Rome was always kind of on the frontier." Prior to Rome, the only great regional power that could project its socio-economic might was Greece and Rome defeated them. Greece still wasn't fully unified and prior to their final defeat, had also been fighting in the middle east. Macedon was the strongest of the Greek states and other Greek states helped Rome to fight them. Much of Western Europe and the northern Mediterranean was tribal or small city states which was easy for Rome to conquer. Carthage was another major power but they were separated by the Mediterranean so Rome could expand in the north more or less unimpeded until it could challenge Carthage. Carthage was pretty close at conquering Rome, so it is kinda a coin toss on who became the final unifier of the basin. Now compare this to medieval period. Italy was like classical Greece and divided into many smaller city states. The larger states like the France and the Holy Roman Empire were farther up north where they had to compete with each other before ever trying to reconquer the Mediterranean. And new powers like the Scandinavian states also pulled attention away from that region. Unlike Rome, there were half a dozen roughly equal powers competing in Europe. They were no longer fighting small tribes and city states. And even if Italy, Europe, and Greece was reconquered, in North Africa and the Middle East; there were bunch of different caliphates and empires to fight through. No single European country could do that when they were so fractured and concerned about wars at home. Lastly, Unlike Rome, basically all European states had lost significant state capacity to raise and support a large army. Armies shrunk and battles shrunk. Unlike Rome, the central government was weak. Feudal societies just cannot hold up against proper empires with centralized states. The resources the medieval kingdoms could draw upon paled in comparison to Rome and to the Islamic states that dominated much of the ex-Roman territories. Even when they all unified for the crusades, the European powers did pretty poorly. The hodge podge of otherwise hostile nations led to poor coordination, communication and cooperation. Everyone did whatever they wanted and without a unified central state; there was also no unity of effort. In fact the Crusaders doomed the one thing that was holding back the Islamic powers from Europe; Byzantine. Byzantine could do as well as it did because it was LESS FUEDAL than the Rest of Europe and had much greater state power funded by its strategic location earning it lots of trade revenue. But by the time Constantinople finally fell, most of Europe had started to centralize and regained a lot of its state capacity enough that Europe slowly became the dominate global power. But Europe being fractured means they could never unify the Mediterranean as they still competed with each other internally. This parallels with China as described in the video. For China, the "Rome" or unifying power was in the steppe region. Southern China are all the smaller states that gets too focused on internal(regional) competition. This stayed largely consistent for much of its history. Unlike Europe, there wasn't a Byzantine(or the fact there's a large body of water) holding back the flood gates.
By having Naval and Land superiority at the same time. This is why Rome was never reunited again, no other successor kingdoms/empires could achieve both at the same time within the Mediterranean.
By brutality, instead of education and helping in order to solve local people problems. This is opposite to what the Chinese governments (dynasties if you like) have been doing. "If one is kind to others, others will be kind in return". So, when a Chinese government started to ignore people's problem, it would eventually dissolve. And a new one will take the place. That's as simple as that.
After Franks conquered Gaul, the local Roman people quickly became assimilated as Franks. This pattern holds for the Arabs conquests in Middle East and North Africa, Slavic conquest of the Balkans, the Turkic conquest of Anatolia, the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain etc. Even in Italy, the Lombards created a lasting legacy in the form of Lombardy. Meanwhile the rulers of former Roman lands were eager to identify their legacies as Roman, such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Sultana of Rum. It seems that Rome did not leave behind strong cultural identity for common people to hold on to, so only the aristocracy and powerful are interested in a Roman revival.
Anglo-Saxon is a bad example since it wasn't (just) elites germanizing romano-british people at all. Gritzi ger et al (2022) have shown that the inhabitants in most of England were driven out by the germanic newcomers so that up to the 10th century the English were of about 75-80% Germanic stock. The modern English, while the same people, are only about half Germanic. The Franks on the other hand became romanized if one wills while the Romano-Gauls became Germanized (mainly culturally). So here it actually was mainly an elite taking over and only in certain areas, mainly in the northwest of France, Franks formed the majority or the plurality of the people
Less assimilation but more ethnic replacement. Balkans became slavic not because the people there started seeing themselves as slavs, but because slavs came in and killed or otherwise replaced 70 % of the population
except for Greek speakers which continued to call themselves Romans till the early 1900s, and in some places (mostly in arab states) still call themselves Romans.
Grain produced in North Africa used to be the reason for its being conquered by Rome. After that production stopped, it seems that half of the empire was no longer worth warring over.
By that point the Western half was largely lost, so you aren't even talking about half any more. There were big manpower issues at the time too, that is the biggest obstacle. Now having a front to the north of the Balkans, to the East with whoever is in Persia, plus a front to the South East in Arabia is just too much.
@@winstonzhou4595 Yes, there was a lot of infighting. It wasn't just the open rebellions, but also local nobles trying to assert their own power to the detriment of the empire.
It crosses my mind that the city of Rome was always kind of "on the frontier" of classical age Mediterranean civilization... besides Carthage there was no other real large city until Rome created its colonies in the west... the core of Mediteranian Civilization was the east... so essentially when Rome and Carthage fell to the Barbarians the core of the civilization did survive until 1453...
Here in China the core civilisation started in Zhongyuan (Central Plains) but it spread to the South so now both Zhongyuan and South China make up core civilisation. Although historically there's been plenty of divides between the two. Han lands do go quite a bit beyond those two but those are sort of the center. Xibei and Taiwan are kinda just the edge, and then you have Beijiang, Dongbei and the like which are not part of China Proper but still integral Han territory.
@@sanneoi6323 Wait, am I as a westerner understanding you correctly? For the Chinese there is a difference in concept between "classical China's lands" and "lands that are integral Han territory"?
@@alconomic476 well we have 汉地 for classical Han lands basically equivalent of the western concept for China Proper but I say integral Han lands to refer to literally what it sounds like lmao. Integral territories inseparable from the rest of the Han nationality's domain.
Short answer: because the Turks, Germans, the Slavs, and the Arabs didn't allow it to happen. Long Answer: Rome was destroyed by the Huns and conquered by the Germanic tribes. After this, the idea of unifying Rome became impossible because no one actually wanted to unify it, but they just used it as a justification for conquering former Roman territory.
Moreover, Roman was entirely a citizenry idea while China and Chinese is a cultural and ethnic one, unified China was also founded on the combination of many Chinese states, these people share similar culture and language. Rome is much more diverse demographically.
That's not quite true. Charlemagne, a Frank, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor (Imperator Romanorum, "Charles, most serene Augustus, crowned by God, great peaceful emperor governing the Roman empire, and who is by the mercy of God king of the Franks and the Lombards") by the Pope on the 25th of December 800, which also had the consequence of souring relations with the Eastern Roman Empire and led to the schism between the catholic and orthodox chuches. The posterior dismemberment and then legacy of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire is a different debate, as its influence over Italy waned over the centuries with constant conflicts with the Pope. Part of it early on was of course the differences between the tribal duchies and the frankish inheritance laws that had resulted in the split of Charlemagne's realm into West Frankia (France) East Frankia (Germany) and Lotharingia (Low Countries, Burgundy, Italy).
@strangesignal9757 you literally proved my point. Charlemagne used the title of Roman Emperor to justify his conquest of former Roman territory. If he truly wanted to form Rome, then why did he establish his empire as a monarchy and not as a republic, dictatorship, or as an empire? We both know that the Romans hated monarchy, so he isn't helping himself by establishing a monarchy.
I'd say a full Mediterranean empire can only hold together when the capital is in the west, but that inevitably the capital will move to the east because that is where the wealth and greatest danger was. The geography of the huge internal sea made it very hard to unify all shores of it and it could only really be done if you started in the west. Once the North European Plain became civilised and wealthy it was even harder to unify the Med due to too many nearby competing powers.
Maybe that internal sea is the big difference. In antiquity the Mediterranean was what allowed phoenician and greek settlers to rapidly spread while still retaining some cultural unity. For the Romans too it allowed armies and food shipments to move where they we needed and maintain some degree of cultural unity across the empire. But through the late Roman period into the early Medieval period land routes seem to have become more important and the Roman empire's georgraphy wasn't well set up for that.
Rome was in neither west nor east. It was in the centre, which allowed it to go either side at different times. A very important factor in their expansion is also the fact they could defeat big polities like Carthage and the Seleukid empire who already controlled vast Mediterranean territories and just gobble them up.
The Caliphates basically destroyed any hope for a Roman reunification and therefore hegemonic legitimacy was derived from being able to defeat them and hold back the tide of Islam (The Franks, The Byzantines). The non-Roman, and indeed anti-Roman, Caliphates fluctuated dynastically and fractured but Muslim powers still hold on to the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Coasts to this day. "Mare Nostrum" helped the Romans expand and maintain their power but Muslim piracy and near-annual caliphal naval sieges of Constantinople changed the name of the game.
Too many fronts and while a hollow core of a sea allows for fast transportation, it also doesn't provide a population base. So you have a large number of Germanic tribes in Western/Central Europe. Slavs to the north of the Balkans. The Persians to the east and the Arabs to the South East. There are long frontages on each side, large armies there, and the population of each has grown. When Rome expanded, they had more population density than most their neighbors. By 600 AD, that wasn't true. Entire tribes in the 100k's were moving. Then the Muslim expansion - it was just too many to fight against. Every time the Byzantines lost territory, they lost food production and a source of soldiers. Add to that the infighting and treachery and the ability to take territory to a defensible border is lost.
I don't know if i got you correctly, but the Umayyad Caliphate conquered most of the Med while being ruled from the East (Damascus), and 1000 years later, the Ottomans ruled from the East (Constantinople) over lands stretching from Algeria to Iran and from Yemen to Hungary.
Geography plays a major role in retaining a succession chain of a civilization. The Mediterranean basin is far more complex and challenging than the conditions the various Chinese states and dynasties had to go through. Most of Europe is cross rigged with mountain ranges and protruding peninsulas, in fact the total shoreline of Europe is twice as long as that of Africa alone. All this doesn't make for an easy accommodation to any unifying force. The fact that Rome managed to hold the Mediterranean Sea as its own for so long is a historical aberration, worthy of respect. The first and the only state to achieve this so far.
That's probably it. It's the formidable Chinese rivers that require resources of a huge empire to mitigate their strength. That's why Chinese wars are about unifying the empire again. As you point out, Europe with its geography is more suited for smaller regional states to have defensible borders and manage themselves. That's why European wars are about resisting a potential hegemon and ganging up on him. Also worth noting that the Mediterranean wasn't Roman "Mare nostrum" for the whole duration of the empire...
No, geography only plays a minor role. I have read through many comments. People always try to find reason in exterior factors, but nobody tries to find the answer within oneself. What if the reason is mainly cultural? Or even deeper? Inside the genes? By that, I mean genetic. Maybe Chinese are born to prefer unification and more social life while others are born to prefer individualism? No need to blame Mediterranean geography. It is innocent. There are mountain chains in China as well. And many people are isolated in those area. But yet, that does not reduce their affinity to have a unified country and patriotism.
Honestly I just think it's because of the huge wide inland sea and vast outside areas where it's easy to invade with little strategic depth in land in comparison to tall China. China has layers of defenses, while Rome has sparse wide areas of defense with less depth that once one is broken, it's easy to conquer wide areas, but in China it's just a single valley like the Wei river valley that's easy to contain unlike in Europe. I recommend Gates of Kilikien for good videos on this.
East of China, the largest ocean on earth. West of China, the biggest mountain range on earth. South of China, forests, mountains and jungle. North of China, dry steppes barely inhabited. China is like an inland island, hard to get there from the outside, so the people inside end up always reconquering it all.
@ZxZ239 The proximity was a double edged sword. It meant that very rarely did steppe hordes grow too huge without fighting China or come from the west. The Historian's Craft has great videos on the steppe for this topic that when combined with my points show how they were too fractured and weak when near China, yet when they did get strong enough they fought China who had those extra advantages and either eventually collapsed or did conquer China then assimilated. Nothing about that contradicts anything I said.
@@deiansalazar140This is also the geographical defect of China's expansionism. After China completely entered the Iron Age, the world is still in the transition period of bronze and iron, and the population is far less than that of China! The Han Empire almost destroyed all the countries around China! In Han Dynasty-Song Dynasty, China led the world in science, technology, economy and population.
I think an impirtant factor is that the Roman Empire was based around a giant sea. This means that any power that wants to reunite it must have naval superiority over the entire Mediterranean. And the Romans were the only ones to be so dominant over both land and sea at the same time. Furthermore, the invaders in China were a uniting force, whereas for Rome the Germanic invasions would only further disintegrate the Empire, but this could be considered an extension of the steppe conquerer hypothesis. But I think the possibility of reunification died after the muslim conquest of north Africa and the Middle-East. The Arabs were semi-nomadic, but in contrast with the Manchus ir Mongols, they would assimilate conquered territories into their culture instead of being assimilated themselves. But again, due to the geographical position of being centered on a sea, the Arabs could not easilly conquer north of the Pyrenees. Combined with their dominant culture this created a strong disparity between core territories of the former empire. They now had very different languages and conflicting religions that could not coexist within one empire. If these cores were to reunite, they would at least have had to be converted to the same religion. But as no power was able to reach naval dominance like the Romans had before 1000 AD, they grew culturally so far apart that they themselves probably lost interest in conquering they other cores. China on the other hand stayed much more linguistically, religiously and culturally similar after the cores broke up, which allowed for outside powers to unite them. The Roman territories lacked this presence of steppe neighbours of sufficient strength (although the Huns and Bulgars did attack the Byzantines), but even if they had such a neighbour, maybe if the Sahara was steppe instead of desert, the conquerers would struggle to cross the seas into the northern half and if they would eventually conquer all of the former Roman empire, they would not be able to hold it together for long due to the strong cultural and religious differences that had grown between the different places.
China wasn't and didn't stay linguistically similar, at least in any way that suggests it originated from one monolithic linguistic branch. The writing system is the only thing in common for many of the dialects, and that is how scholars of different regions could communicate.
The thing about China is that even the non-Han Chinese rulers such as the Mongols and the Manchu, their goal was to unify China. And all of the nomadic rulers of China had had forced their people to assimilate into the Han-Chinese culture at the beginning of their rule. The Han Chinese rulers had never forced other ethnic groups to assimilate into Han Chinese culture, rather you believe whatever you want as long as you obey my rules. The Mongols adopted this philosophy.
@Haijwsyz51846 I can consider them related and (mutually) influenced, but it's not like everything written in the latin alphabet is the same language either. I'm sure you also don't consider languages like Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese as being in the same language family as Chinese, even though they have borrowed a lot through for example bureaucracy and scholars, and use traditional Chinese characters.
@@XGD5layer thing is, cultures and laguages are only part of what composed China the way it is throughout history; the other were perhaps conquests, politics and cultural dominance/influence/assimilation no one can deny the regional cultural differences between Chinese provinces, but for certain *other* reasons they all became Chinese heartland, and for these exact *other* reasons it showed how past Chinese empires differed from the Roman empire
If you think about the Mediterranean is by nature a dividing factore, especially the north is divided between mountainous peninsulars (iberia, italy, balkans, anatolia) and historically only the roman empire was able to conqure them all despite numberous other attempts by others. So shouldnt the question be how rome, as a historically exception, was even able to unite this massive geographical region in the first place rather than why noone else was able to?
The difference between land and sea. Seas are not population or political units. One of the typical factors in periods of contraction of Roman and East Roman power was neglect of the fleets.
@@alexzero3736 - i think the worst example is the end of the Macedonian rennaissance, when a long period of success gave a feeling of security and safety so the government scrapped the fleet as unnecessary with disastrous consequences not long after
@@overworlderThe fleet wasn’t scrapped after the Macedonians we have sources confirming its use up to and during Alexios’s reign with success. The Byzantine fleet is why Byzantium was able to resist the Normans in Italy till 1071. No it was downsized by Alexios do to the cost in favor of an alliance with Venice. John kept it small but then Manuel Expanded it. It was downsized and damaged permanently during the reign of the Angeloi.
The Chinese proverb goes 'The empire, once divided, must unite. The empire, once united, must divide.' Have you read your Romance of the Three Kingdoms?
The issue here is in translation: the actual Chinese word in the quote translated as 'empire' in English is 天下 ('tianxia' or All Under Heaven). Tianxia is not 'empire'. Its exact meaning is hard to pin down, but its more a term of political legitimacy, rather than denoting a single empire that somehow resurrects itself after periods of fragmentation. Speaking of Three Kingdoms, the Han empire did not revive, despite attempts by the rump state of Shu Han. The Sima Jin empire that arose later was a successor of Cao Wei, not Shu Han. These are different Chinese countries, and it is perhaps better not to think of 中国 as a politically continuous entity, but as a culturally contiguous one.
@@rabbit-munch-carrots "Tianxia" just means the "world", its similar to how Romans say they "conquered the world". So it should be translated as "the world long divided must unite".
That the Roman Republic ever unified the Mediterranean was the anomaly, and it probably had to do with a period of tranquility throughout Eurasia. Because once the forces of migration pushed the Goths, Franks, and Vandals onto the Rhine-Danube frontier, then it became almost impossible for one emperor in Rome to defend that frontier, leading to the East-West split.
I really appreciate the nuanced caveats that front load this interesting topic and analysis. Very refreshing to hear that humility and makes the analysis very easy to take for what it is. Personally, I find the suppositions taken to be convincing and useful, as one lense to apply, to the comparison of the evolution of civilizations in the East and West. Not that it makes me an authority by any means, but, I was fortunate to have lived in China briefly in the early 2000s. I find the contrast and similarities both fascinating. The history that my contemporary experiences are built on, will always be both fascinating and informative in the present.
Any Mediterranean power always has to contend with proximity to Persia, which is much more similar to China in its enduring nature. The more fragmented geography, contrary to China, made it far more difficult for a Roman “core” to continuously exert dominance over the Mediterranean. I would even argue that if not for the continuous rivalry with Persia, Rome would have probably been able to handle barbarian incursions with ease and probably only have to deal with it’s own constant civil wars lol
Eh, no identifiable Persian state existed from the fall of the Sassanians to the Ilkhanate which wasn't much of a Persian successor either. It wasn't until the Safavids, and their assertion of Shia Islam as something to distinguish their territory from other Islamic states that we see something like a Persian state separate from being just the dominant high culture of Islam again. That's well over 800 years where there was just a Persian cultural sphere no different than the post roman cultural sphere where all educated men communicated in Latin.
china's geography is pretty diverse too tho, i think its more that roman successor states were simply unable to overpower one another to the point they could fully be seen as rome. The closest that came are HRE and ottomans imo
@@shangrilainxanadufor the purposes of "persians threatening Rome/the mediterranean" the Abbasids and the Turks work perfectly fine. The byzanines didn't care about the language of the eastern threat.
I've been thinking about this question from time to time ever since reading Viktor Lieberman's "Strange Parallels", and what I keep coming back to is the territorial aspect of the Mandate of Heaven. Since the mandate appointed control of the “Tianxia” to a single emperor, it was not only legitimate but also legitimizing to try and reconquer a broken apart empire. Simply put, if you manage to do it, that’s proof that you’ve got the right to rule. Since no radically different justification of rule was introduced until modern times (rulers from the steppe often found it more convenient to adopt the Chinese one), we keep seeing people trying to rebuild China. In contrast, the rulers of successor states of the Roman empire justified their rule mostly on the basis of being good Christians or Muslims, and were not bothered to specifically recreate the empire’s territory. Hence why the realm of Charlemagne, the HRE and later Russia are all claimed to be new Roman Empires despite being progressively further away from the territory of the original. The only ones who seem to place importance in the territorial aspect are the Byzantines, but after the Caliphate takes their lands in Africa they are never again able to even get close to reconquering the whole thing. Obviously we can’t point to a singular cause for such a broad question, but since I don’t see a very strong geographical reason why reconquering China should be easier than reconquering the Roman empire, I place a lot of importance on the ideologies of those doing the reconquering. And if in one region that ideology comes with a strong territorial aspect, while in the other that is lacking, it doesn’t surprise me that we see only one of those empires reconstituted time and again.
It was not lack of trying to reclaim Roman Empire, it was the lack of succeeding in doing in. HRE pretended that it did it. But it’s not Roman nor an empire.
@@Tonyx.yt. homogeneous is the effect of constant centralization and rebuild of the Empire not the cause. It wasn't very homogeneous back then. Especially the before the Sui. The southern Region (today's Canton's and Yunnan) was always a frontier region and populated by other ethnicity. Yunnan wasn't considered "core" region until Yuan.
@@fromfareast3070you are very much correct in your overall assertion, but i would like to point out Yunnan was merely conquered by the Yuan dynasty, it didn't actually become majority Han and part of "core China" until the end of Ming. And a place like Machuria only attained its present Han Chinese demographic in 19th century and was considered separate from core China until 20th! Ancient China was definitely by no means homogenous!
@@userwsyz Yesn't. As the oc said, most of the empires that did claim to be romes successor like the HRE, like Russia the Ottomans, Francia and for some time France simply claimed roman emperorship without really trying to conquer the whole thing. At most these states tried to conquer italy, or constantinople, but for the most part, they simply relied on the church for legitimizing their claim. As the other guy said, only byzantium and maybe the ottomans tried to conquer the whole thing
I think one of the main infouences would also be that Rome and China are only similar in the political sense that both are empires which dominated a large region for a long time, but the similarities breakdown after that. It's like the assumption that sweet potatoes must be related to potatoes, because both are high-calorie tubers. However, they're just superficially similar. The geography, culture, and historical context of Rome and the Han dynasty are just fundamentally different. It'd be easier to identify all of the similarities between the two than the differences.
Why did Zoroastrianism decline to the point of near extinction, but Hinduism is still one of the largest religions today despite both Persia and India being conquered by Islam?
zoroastrianism was already declining heavily by the time of mohammed’s death , there’s a book called “last empire of iran” by micheal bonner that goes into it
@@ksanbahlyngwa1998 I think it had to do more with the decentralized nature of India and the more centralized nature of Iran. In iran, it was the conquest of one state while in india it was a bunch of kingdoms which ironically made it harder to conquer. +hinduism was highly entrenched and the whole of indian society was centered around hinduism, so even when the muslim states DID invade, they NEEDED to govern through concession or risk large-scale revolts and unrest.
But what about the Ming? The Ming is one of the few southern chinese dynasties, and expell the Yuan, a mongol central asian dynasty, this doesnt debunk this theory?
Qin Shi Huang unified China and established the first feudal monarchy in China. Although this dynasty only existed for 15 years before splitting, his greatest contribution was to create a concept for various ethnic groups and regions in later China that China must be unified and inherit the mandate of the previous dynasty
Because China was mostly centralized around a flat land (north Chinese plain). This allowed it to easily unify, unlike Rome which had many mountains and rivers that divided its territory. Additionally Chinese people had a unified social structure, and related languages. The only “Latin” parts of the empire were France, Spain, and Italy, and these weren’t united because of mountain ranges. Most people in the Roman Empire had no desire to be a part it, a German living in Gaul and a Jew living in philistine had no cultural or historic connection to each other. Most people outside of Italy weren’t even citizens, one can make a good argument that Rome itself was really just Italy and a bunch of territory controlled by Italy. If you look at it through that lense, then Rome did unify, it just didn’t take back its controlled territory and client states.
Agree that it's about the geography, but the Chinese languages are not intelligible in spoken form. It's the characters that hold the language together. 6:18 situation in Chinese empire was the same as Roman empire - quite disparate peoples incorporated into the empire and gradually assimilated. The Vietnamese and the tribes of what is today Xinjiang may have even less in common than the Jews and Germanics... And what you say about most of the people not being citizens and not wanting to be part of the empire mostly applies to the times of the republic. Later, almost everyone became a citizen.
No, geography is not the main reason. Many comments are speaking about language, geography, etc. No need to blame geography. The flat land in China today was NOT part of it when Chinese civilization started 5000 years ago around the Yellow River valley. The flatland was included a lot later. But yet, the unification spirit has always been in Chinese culture. About unified language, that is not true either. Chinese have been speaking different accents (that Westerners have used the wrong word "dialect" to describe it. Indeed, that's accent, not dialect) over thousands of years. Chinese characters were different long before unification under the 1st Emperor. (Measurements were not unified either before, but that's another story). So, all in all, that means both are not the main factors explaining why China unifies but not Roma. Instead of blaming external factors, in my opinion, the reason might be cultural or even deeper -- in the genes. Maybe Chinese are born with more social bounding tendency while the Europeans are born to be more individualist.
The pattern of Chinese history is that of a abroudly Chinese heartland with shifting borderlands. The Roman heartland, the Mediterranean, became divided primarily after the muslim conquest. Without the Mare nostrum, the centre of power collapsed and remained divided between local power centres. The Byzantine Empire shifted to the mountains of Anatolia, the muslims kept Egypt and Syria, while power in Europe shifted from Italy to the north of the alps.
Language is likely a factor here, if not the most important one. The Chinese language, however the pronuonciation might change, remain the same written form and same characters. Whereas for Indo-european alphabetical language, the spelling changes alone with the pronuonciation shifts, and thereby quicklt splits into many languages in over a couple of generations, creating many "ethinc groups" out of natural evolution of language and regional dialogues. There are many many european languages whose difference is minor comparing with the differences between Cantonese and Mandrian, but the written form of the two is still the same. In fact, you can write chinese to communicate with a Japanese because of the partially shared written Kanji
Roman was entirely a citizenry idea while China and Chinese is a cultural and ethnic one, unified China was also founded on the combination of many Chinese states, these people share similar culture and language. Rome is much more diverse demographically.
Simply put, Han Chinese identity is invested in the people and the cultural identity. Dynasties comes and goes, Chinese people have always understood that, even non-han rulers have to inte. Roman identity is invested in Rome, not the rest of the Empire, everything is about Rome. Most of the empire are not even citizens, and have no real attachment to Rome or the Empire. So when it falls apart, no one is really that attached. How can you be attached to a city you have never seen in your life. Take the Holy Roman Empire, they claim the inheritors of Roman but Rome isn't even in their Territory.
I found this video to be a bit unfinished. Shadow empires? And why exactly was the steppe so important for China's centre of power? It's like the video should have been 4 minutes longer where you wrapped up the loose ends.
Not really. He controlled Gaul, Germania and most of Italy. I would say that for an empire to be a reunification of Rome it would need to control most of the Mediterranean coast
Yes. This is one of the best questions. One of the biggest differences is in China, the is a very obvious division between the agricultural land and nomadic land, about where the Great Wall is built. So Chinese empires were all based on agriculture. It’s always inherited the agricultural civilization. No matter where the rulers were from or what they did for living, once they conquered China, they would become Chinese and followed the same system. In the west, The Roman empire was based on trading power around the Mediterranean Sea. So was the Arabic empire trading between the west and the east. So with in the territory, ways of living was a lot more diverse . So when the central power is weaker, it is harder to reunite.
One obvious reason: Classical China since 221BC uses a unified written system which records the meaning of the language rather than its pronunciations. Over time different parts in China may have their spoken language evolving independently but they all corresponds to the same writing symbols. Therefore in a sense they all use the same language and thus are the "same people". Roman uses multiple languages and these languages continue to evolve and split, hence different regions in Europe soon have "different people".
That is regarded as one of the factors why the Chinese are able to rebuild their empires several times while Rome never do so. Chinese writing system is a logographic writing system which each character represents a word and the purpose is to convey the meanings instead of the pronunciations of the written words. Chinese people speak various related languages that are often mutual unintelligible but are able to communicate through the written language. One Chinese spoken word may have different pronunciation with another, but the written form uses the same character. As a result it bypasses linguistic barrier. It is analogous to modern numeral system where it is understood regardless of languages. Most written languages use alphabetical writing systems due to much easier usage and application. However alphabetical writing systems convey the pronunciation of written words instead of the meanings. The Roman Empire spoke many languages. The official language may be Latin but the common language is Koine Greek. Native languages are still spoken in local regions of the empire. When the Roman Empire fell, the regional dialects of Latin diverged further from each other and become separate languages. Because of the nature of Latin alphabets, communication is also impossible in the written form. As a result, the once unified Romans became separate linguistic based ethnic groups.
The geography of the Mediterranean basin doesn’t lend itself to political unity in the way the core of China does, is something that has to be taken into account. The North China Plain and Yangtze Delta are extremely flat, and MASSIVE. For one of the most habitable and populous regions on earth to have that much of pull towards unity, it’s difficult to see how it would not be a large, centralised power most of the time. It’s simultaneously flat, lush, and easily defined in its boundaries. There is no comparable feature in Europe. Perhaps if there were a significant north-south mountain range somewhere east of the Rhine, France could be a decent analogue, but as it is, France has always been squabbling over its eastern border with German states. Honestly the best IRL analogue to China’s situation might be Britain, especially the south-east (which has, incidentally, been fairly continuously unified), but Britain’s core does not logically lead to Mediterranean-centric expansion. The best comparatives on the Mediterranean are the Po Valley, the Nile Delta, Tunisia, the south-western valleys of the Iberian peninsula, and the Thracian plains - all of which have formed the core regions of separate powers, and none of which are more than a tenth the size of China’s core. Rome pulled off something semi-miraculous which, realistically, has probably been been unachievable since. Europe is a mess of peninsulas, mountains, and valleys that could only be conquered in totality through overwhelming advantages in numbers, sociocultural tech, and military/political organisation. It probably couldn’t have been done before Rome, and there’s probably never been a point since Rome when it could have been done again.
There are 3 kinds of civilizations. Sea merchants, farmers, and herdsman. If you look at Rome, it's sea merchants. Put it more harshly, pirates. You wage war and take loots as a mean to enrich the country. To keep the empire growing, it must expands outwards. China builds on farmers, you work the land and development infrastructures, dams, bridges, roads. It doesn't need to expand outwards, thus more stable to run for long time.
The Europe and North Africa empires seem to flip between empires of roads and empires of boats. You can't hold the shores of the med if you don't control the sea. And you can't trade efficiently if you can't secure the shipping. You can have a road empire of Northern Europe or Eurasia, but not of the Mediterranean.
I feel like the simplest explanation is just ethnic groups and the power they wielded, along with the disunity of the core ethnic groups as well. Italians are, demonstrably from history at least, a bag of cats that only seem to get along when somebody is threatening them, or one of the cats is big enough to krump the others in line. Virtually as soon as Roman domination collapsed in the West, the Italic mountain tribes just buzz off to be independents paying lip service as most to lowlander power. The North, center, and south relatively split into their own areas, and some fragment even further into fiercely sovereign republics/petty kingdoms. It takes nearly a thousand years to cobble Italy back into a somewhat integral border, and further time than that to wholly reunify it. And this is without the further issues of Germans being incredibly distinct from Italic peoples, Germans internally being incredibly independent, France being a demographic mess for centuries and taking forever to restore its OWN integrity after the collapse of the Merovingian and Carolingian state (which possibly in a sense is a new 'roman dynasty' in the sense of being another large geographic area unifying lots of territory under the same faith no less while comparing things to ancient and medieval China). Meanwhile, from at least my more limited comprehension of Chinese history, every Chinese dynasty is either the Yellow River using its immense agricultural, and thus industrial output to suppress and rule everything in its surroundings - or a steppe group which manages to usurp this power in addition to northernly domination by their respective host. Also also more musing, but Europe has huge population clusters around rivers or coasts scattered all over the place, along with the 'center' of the Roman Empire truly being an ocean which acted as a highway. Meanwhile the Chinese are locked in place by mountains and deserts which are semi impassable by large forces. It's a continental empire with continuous land borders rather than an oceanic empire with discontinuous borders.
The official country names, languages, scripts and systems of all dynasties in China belong to the Han people!😏There is no empire ruled by nomadic tribes!It can only be said that two emperors were foreigners, but China had already skipped slavery and feudalism! There is no government that does not accept foreigners, and there is no government that bypasses the system to promote foreigners!😏
There are also nomadic tribes that have Terror rule the 1000-year reign of the Han people (the main sacrifice of the Shang-Zhou human sacrifice system)And 1000 years of high-pressure colonization (Han-Tang Dynasty)There is also a 1000-year period of mutual rule (Song-Qing Dynasty).
Oh, yeah, the Roman Empire coexisted with the Chinese Han Empire at the same time, one in the east and one in the west. And the Chinese knew about the Roman Empire.
I think it's more complicated than it's mostly down to proximity to Eurasian steppe. First, Europe was kind of united many times. Besides the examples already mentioned, Holy Roman Empire, Habsburg dynasty, Napoleon, Hitler, Soviet Union, they all had sizes similar to Rome. And currently, European Union. But most importantly, geography. Europe as way too many defensible places: lots of large islands, peninsulas, continental seas, mountains and big rivers. Its why Europe had so many small but powerful nations, because worst come pass, they can barricade behind.
The Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon and Hitler all saw themselves as restoring the Roman Empire in some ways. But it's a bit of a stretch to include Soviet Union in this equation. There is basically zero overlap between Soviet and Roman territory. Nor did the Soviet Union ever seriously tried to take back core Roman territory - it was just too far, and the USSR wasn't interested in such a reunification project.
Thanks. This is a fascinating topic, and I hope that you return to it in more detail at some point in the future. As you note, it also relates to the important subject of 'the great divergence' with the political fragmentation of the European peninsular, and the competition which that engendered being regularly cited as a factor in the 'rise of the west'.
What the main difference between Europe and China? Why Empire was holding together under Odoacer and Theodoric? And Justinian reconqured it. Because there was local support for empire, for Rome. Belisarius told his troops that locals are citizens of Rome just like them. And local people helped to reconquer Northern Africa and Italy, they rised against Goths and participate in repairs of Rome walls. But after that, European mentality chaged to seeking self-determination and individual liberties. Italy became land of city-states and republics. They resisted French and Spanish (Aragon) influence... ( see Italian wars). Republic of Venice or the Pope alwas stepped in if someone breaked balance in Italy, to put that country down.
It is something about the Northern invaders of China getting assimilated in to China. They took over and ruled instead of creating new political and cultural entities. Yes in West Rome the Germanic Kingdoms adopted local dialects of Latin and part of their culture but it was completely new nations with different economies, military organization, way of rule and administration etc. Rome was replaced by something new. Germanic peoples, Slavic Peoples, Arabs and Turkic Peoples didn't just take over the rule of Rome, they created new nations with new cultures. Rome was gone for good, there was no Rome left to reunite.
I would argue against this viewpoint, pretty vehemently. China has a cultural unifying force, the Tang, Song, and Ming all followed the Sui and stand in very stark contrast to his argument.
It's Islam, specifically the Umayyad failure to take Constantinople and substitute the eastern romans. If they had succeeded Islam would be the next step in western eurasian civilization, just christianity or the conquest of the greek world by the romans. Instead it became it's own civilization because the previous one survived and, by the time Islam destroyed Rome centuries later, it had already taken an identity in opposition to the romans. Mehmed II being a romanophile was the exception, turks and muslims in general equated romans with christians and therefore with "the other". But the original arab conquerors were very integrated in the eastern roman ethos and, had they triumphed in Constantinople and Tours (optional) you would have an arabized and islamicized post-roman world very similar to umayyad al-andalus. Instead we got a situation more similar to the relationship between almohad/almoravid al-andalus and the christian realms. Ie islam not as a new thing that comes to dominate a new era of western eurasian civilization, but as a foreign other established as different and often an adversary.
Throughout Chinese history, there have been many instances of ethnic integration and wars, but the concept of the "Central Plains" (Zhongyuan) has never changed. Our ancestors believed that the concept of the nation is subordinate to culture and ethnicity.
Completely misses Translatio Imperii. The Goths started seeing themselves as Romans, The Franks and Germans saw themselves as the successors to Rome, Germans and Austrians saw themselves as the successors to the Holy Roman Empire etc. And now with the EU we have another "Rome"
it was more of an institutional legitimacy claiming, without much territory overlap with the actual Mediterranean-spreading Roman empire that centralized its power in Rome (& later Constantinople, to a degree)
I think one of the key factors is the Chinese writing system is not a spelling system, which made it possible to spread and maintain a similar culture and beliefs across time and space. That makes the Chinese civilisation unique.
Also from a different viewpoint of why Rome didn’t reunify, or any other major all/largely-encompassing European entity was created to be semipermanent is mainly (in my opinion) due to the success of Charlemagne’s empire, and their practice of splitting the land among the sons,instead of keeping a unified state.
You could say that the transition from elite desire to participate in power-sharing via bureaucratic institutions to the decentralization of executive power amongst them is what really did Roman system in long-term. What kept Rome going at the top was everyone agreeing that the system was serving everyone's best interest and provided a fair platform for competition and cooperation, but once the barbarian kings post-Theodoric dispensed with such notions there was nothing pushing for Roman institutions and thus they withered into dust.
Mediterranean if we look at it was never unified.. Even during the hey day of the Roman Empire it was basically Latin speaking west mean while Greek speaking East.. Later on by medieval era it got divided into three parts with Latin Speaking West, Greek Speaking East and Arabic speaking South and South East.. Compared to that Ancient China was always culturally and linguistically united in some way...
I disagree. The linguistic and cultural difference existed in China too. Even during the beginning of the Han dynasty parts of the country still stick with their warring state culture and languages. I mean just look at how many dialects the Chinese have. If we were to really point at one thing that glued China together so many time, Confucianism is probably up there.
The argument I have read from Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was that the ultimate factor was geography. Europe is more segregated by mountain ranges and dense forests, with a large sea (the Mediterranean) making political integration of Europe and North Africa trickier. Rivers, being vital conduits of trade in previous eras, were (and are) smaller in Europe than in China. By contrast, eastern Eurasia east of the Tibetan Plateau and Taklamakan Desert, south of the Gobi Desert and Siberian taiga forests, and north of the dense Indochinese jungles are smooth, flat plains encompassing a giant area, with two huge rivers that could connect multiple large population centers. This made it (relatively) easy to conquer, and hold, the whole region under political control if other factors were favorable, too. The fact that the ancient Romans were able to conquer as much land as they did may have been a sheer historic fluke, then, that was never again replicated due to the odds against even that level of accomplishment.
What I was taught in the past is that various groups would rise to conquer China. But once they did, they saw there were systems in place that were so good at controlling the population and government, and for generating wealth, that they would adopt these systems. And effectively become "Chinese" in culture and language, even if they weren't ethnically. Rome did the same thing for a long time. They just did it in reverse, conquering the territory themselves and then instituting Roman systems in that conquered territory. If this is correct, it would explain why reunification and adoption stopped in the late Empire period. Because the empire itself was contracting. So the lands they lost or never conquered didn't have Roman political or cultural systems. And a lot of the states that rose up in this way didn't want to emulate the empire that was either their brutal oppressors of the past and/or seen as a dying empire. But most everyone in East Asia seemed to want a connection to Chinese culture in some way. Even if they didn't want to be a part of them politically (Korea, Japan, Khmer, Siam, etc).
I'm struggling to think of many institutions that an external conqueror would want to adopt in Roman lands. There's the law code, and maybe the church?
@@Septimus_ii Early on they might have wanted to emulate their systems of law, military, architecture and senate which seemed to be making them quite efficient and strong. But after the Republic era? Yeah, I can't think of anything either. Even the church was adopted from outside Rome.
It was the same in Mesopotamia before the Persians.Nomadic tribes settled,assumed the core population religion,culture and government. Sumerians>Akkadians>Amorites (Assyrians and Babylobians)>Arameans>Chaldeans
I think the geography is crucial here. Northern China is much flatter and easier to unify than the rugged south. This is especially true for mobile cavalry based armies. Any force that is able to control the North China plain (The traditional center of power in china) has the resources and centralization of power to conquer the rest of china, even if it takes decades. Before the Southern Song, the north had all the economic advantages (Silk Road, Grand Canal, The Yellow River, Population, Production, etc.). The periods of division can be seen as result of the mountainous and jungle terrain of the south delaying full unification even against overwhelming odds.
there's also the importance of written language. in china, there was only ever one written language, chinese, which everyone used: to be literate meant to write in classical chinese. meanwhile, over in rome, there was latin, greek, egyptian, and aramaic in use in writing for centuries already, with latin just being the newest of many. this allowed everyone to keep their ethnic identity intact, and their descendants have preserved it to this day. after the collapse of rome, this didn't end, with armenian, german, arabic, and more arising as additional widely-used identity-preserving literary languages. contrast this with china, where every conquered ethnicity, lacking a written language (until MUCH later), was basically doomed to have their language (and therefore their identity) erased, with this process ongoing today (take the hmong peoples as an example). the hieroglyphic system chinese uses also prevents the literary language from splitting into many pieces, unlike what ultimately happened to latin after rome failed to reunite after 1000 years (and what's currently happening to arabic).
I'm chinese and I think it's because of landscape, many times we collapse and devided into many nations they're mostly in the large plain area so the reunion was inevitable seems everyone seeked larger territory and power, plus our cultural identification has always been strong until now, while roman's territory was highly seperated by landscape
Steppe tried to reunify Rome, but new trade routes prevented it. The last steppe people to arrive at Europe were Ottomans. Ottomans could reach an economic power to dominate Mediterranean in the beginning of 16th century when they took full control of termination ports of trade routes at Syria and Egypt. However, new trade routes caused collapse of Silk Road and Spice route, ie. Ottomans never had the wealth they could have a few centuries before that. In parallel direct trade with Asia (and later colonization of Asia) together with wealth flowing from America made western Europe extremely rich.
An empire thats bacically a coast around a sea has a massive perimeter to defend for its land area. There are the iberia-magreb regions, celtic region, greco- balkan-italian region, levantine arab region and the African Egyptian region. There's like 4 main separate groups brought together by the med
I have mixed feelings about this topic. The Qing, which ruled China from the 1600s to 1911, were not Han people. So that's quite a long amount of time where China isn't quite you know, the China of the Tang or the Ming. When China threw off the Qing in 1911, the country still was not reunited at all, but continued as a concept, and the country was stuck in the War Lords era and Civil War Era. Always left out of the conversation for some reason, is that the Americans and the Soviets saved China and helped bring it into being in modern times. A unified China wouldn't exist without America and the Soviet Union, despite the differences each of those sides had about what the future of China should look like, politically. In summary: China isn't an inevitable concept. There are a lot of times in the modern period (1600-onwards) where it looked like China might have disappeared.
The Qing were sinicized just like the Mongols became with the Yuan, there’s still a sense of continuity. Think of a stronger HRE that stayed more true to Roman traditions and political frameworks. China was disunited for centuries after the Jin Dynasty until the Sui, the argument here isn’t whether China inevitably unifies, it’s why it does at the end. You can also argue China isn’t unified today with the ROC and Taiwan away from the Mainland which is comparable to the Qing conquering the Mainland and Ming loyalists setting up a rump state in Taiwan, in a strikingly similar fashion to the todays situation with Taiwan todayz
@@stevens1041 to quote Deng Xiaoping “a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat”. Jin Yong used that quote to point out that a Manchu like Kangxi is an all time great emperor. He initiated the High Qing era with stability, general prosperity for the common people. Good rulers don’t need to be Han. Even the ethnicity of Han is problematic due to millennia of intermixing with various ethnic groups. DNA tests show divergence between northern Han and southern Han. Northern Han typically have nomadic steppe people mixed in their DNA, while the southern Han can carry Thai, Vietnamese or austronesian DNA.
That’s like saying England is not English because it’s been ruled by Normans since AD 1066. At least the Han overthrew Mongols and Manchus eventually who even adopted Chinese dynastic names. England is stuck with Norman rule even today with the English class system, the Chinese don’t suffer from that.
And why is China unified because of Americans and Soviets? Have you never heard of a dude named Mao Zedong, the Communist Party of China and the People’s Liberation Army???
@@martytu20 Well, my point was that I don't think China is an inevitable concept. But, of course, China is a concept that exists today. Is this good or is this bad? That is the real good question. Large, diverse empires (am I allowed to call China that?), are difficult to manage. Some people lament the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, although most places that lived under such a system did not enjoy it much. I strongly believe, long before I saw this video, that the Western Roman Empire going away was probably a good thing, in the long run. Smaller polities are more responsive to their constituents, generally speaking. Having different kingdoms gives people nearby alternatives to flee too, if one ruler gets too many stupid ideas. China, for all its growth the last 40 years, still ranks very low on the income/person list. The reasons for this are probably extremely difficult to get at, but look--China spends more than its entire defense budget on internal security and policing. Same as all Empires in the past had to do. Is this a benefit to the average person or a drain on the living standards of Chinese? These are open ended questions.
I was finally able to pin down to one thing in the vast amount of features of the Chinese bureaucratic machinery that were different from Roman governmental bureaucracy at that time: the census. Don't get me wrong, the Roman Empire did eventually conducted its census. However, the Qin dynasty was actually founded on the strength of her ability to conduct full-scale population census which included creating family registries and thus the need to have proper names. A name gives people an identity. This turn of historical events was masterfully captured in the manga Kingdom (especially chapters 800-807).
@@alexhu5491 Are you talking about modern China or historical China? Because historical China was much smaller than modern China The issue is not related to the surface only, but to the way it is distributed. Historical China had its entire surface united into one bloc, while the Roman Empire had its surface distributed over large distances separated by the Mediterranean Sea.China was also more culturally and linguistically unified than the Roman Empire, and this is again because China is united into one bloc, unlike the Roman Empire In fact, the Romans' ability to keep their empire united for centuries is a remarkable achievement
@@akramkarim3780 Roman Empire and Han Empire exist in the same period, Roman Empire 5 million km, Han Empire 6 million km, each Chinese region have different geographical aspect. Don't you know in ancient times sea and river are better way of communication, trade?
@@alexhu5491 The Han Empire, which had half its area in the deserts of western China? You are talking about trade, while I am talking about the movement of peoples and armies over great distances and across the seas, which is very difficult You're mixing everything together and arguing while my point is clear, the Roman Empire extended over greater distances than historical China and was divided by many seas, making it difficult to maintain or reunify simple, clear, easy
@@akramkarim3780 The Romans conquered Carthage thanks to the Roman navy, Caesar conquered Egypt thanks to the Roman navy, Lucius Cornelius Sulla conquered Greece thanks to the Roman navy, the Mediterranean Sea is the Romans' backyard
Very interesting video. An analogy that comes to my mind is the East Slavic People, who are also adjacent to the Eurasian Steppe. The original Kievan Rus state disintegrated into numerous rival princedoms before being predominantly conquered by the Mongols. The Slavic principalities then gradually severed ties with the Mongol rulers and re-assembled themselves into a larger East Slavic state spearheaded by The Grand Duchy of Moscow, later rebranded The Tsardom of Russia. When the Russian Empire finally collapsed it was rapidly reconquered by the Bolsheviks who in turn collapsed in 1991. This is of course a massive oversimplification but I think it fits into the discussion of how states adjacent to the Eurasian Steppe seem to collapse and reassemble themselves time and time again.
I think the most important issue is still population and language. During 五胡乱华(Upheaval of the Five Barbarians) it was pretty much a disastrous barbarian invasion and immigration, but their rulers eventually chose to speak Chinese and follow Confucianism. After that, Yuan and Qing both came as warlords, still using Chinese bureaucrats, and the majority of the population was still Chinese. Qing almost worked like Spartans, they divided their own Manchurians from the Chinese and disallowed interracial marriage. In late 19th century, they didn't introduce any degree of democracy because the Manchurian would surely get outvoted in that case. There was nothing like Jizya to encrouage conversion either. 华北平原(North China Plain) also contains most of the people, even today. Any state that controlled it almost meant absolute dominance at then, preventing separatist states. So imagine the Franks and Goths were all Roman wannabes, and reconquesting Italy means Justinian almost automatically regained control of the entire Mediterranean. Bulgarians all chose to speak Greek. There was no old enemy like Persia either. And the Seljuk and Ottomans were a group of warlords only, either converted to Orthodox or didn't bother converting churches into mosques. And by the end of WW1 there were tens of millions of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, with only a few thousand Turks living in a separate zone in Constantinople. Yeah, that's easy Megali Idea for sure. Maybe Persia would be a better example...
The assumption of sinification isn't entirely true. The Yuan also called themselves the Yeke Mongyol Ulus ('Great Mongolian Empire'), and also claimed themselves the successor of the fragmented Mongol empire. It is more a Mongolian empire over Chinese lands, rather than an uncomplicated Chinese empire. The Yuan in any case de-sinicized when they were displaced by the Ming in 1368 back to the steppes. The Qing did not disallow interracial marriage - the historians Peter Perdue and Pamela Kyle Crossley pointed out that the Manchu emperors often promoted intermarriages between Manchu and Mongol nobilities at the exclusion of the Chinese, up to as late as the early 19th century.
@@rabbit-munch-carrots Kublai Khan did have some great ambitions but de facto he was pretty much just a Chinese emperor with some extended territory like Tang or Qing. Most Mongolians didn't like the idea but he did sinicize a lot. Chinese bureaucrats, laws, emperor title, and moved to Beijing. He was trying to be recognized as a Chinese emperor. While Great Yuan was only the formal name in Chinese, its formal name did change from 大蒙古国 to 大元大蒙古国. That could be Great Yuan Great Mongolian Empire, Great Mongolian Empire of Great Yuan, or Great Yuan-Great Mongolian Empire. Still something important. It was pretty much a Chinese empire except it treated Chinese like living stocks systematically. But honestly, that's basically what every Chinese empire does, even today. (Ming wasn't better anyway) Northern Yuan at first still controlled a few Chinese provinces, and even after that, the systems and titles were still pretty Chinese. For the interracial marriage part, sorry. Didn't think much about it, was only trying to discuss Chinese-Manchurian relations there. And yeah there were Manchurian-Mongolian marriages.
The simplest answer is geography. Europe has tons of natural barriers, preventing an offensive force from crossing and making easy the formation of seperate identities. China in comparison doesn't. So China tends toward unification, and Europe towards the opposite.
But Rome reunified many times. China was reunified multiple times by different people groups, with different languages and traditions. The same could be applied for Rome: the HRE and Costantinople both considered themselves Rome. A better question would be why no successor of Rome successfully conquered all the former territiories. P.S. other honorable mentions, all the kingdoms of Italy ( the one of the ostrogoths, the one of the lombards, and so on) all claimed to be Rome. The Holy roman emperor was "roman" because he took also the crown of Italy.
The Roman state went through great changes and upheavals, but ultimately lasted much longer, in one form or another, than any particular dynasty in China. Though some dynasties might be seen more as continuation of the same state than others were. But it seems to me that in the long term that China was much more effectively unified/assimilated in an ethnic sense. Geographically as well, the core regions of China seem much more easy to repeatedly conquer and hold together as a cohesive whole. In the case of either empire, the territorial extent between different 'versions' was never exactly the same, but certainly the 'core' regions of China were more consistent, even if there was perhaps somewhat a similar split between north and south as there was between the Roman west and east.
I think this is the wrong question in many ways: (1) The Western Roman Empire fell, but the Eastern Roman Empire remained. It is only in the modern era it is recognised as the "Byzantine" Empire. To everyone during its existence, Byzantine was Rome. And it did wax and wane during the last 1,000 years of its existence until the Ottomans ended it. (2) People did try to unify Western Rome too. Take Charlemagne, for example, who ruled over an Empire comprising most of modern day France, Germany, the Benelux, and most of northern Italy. (3) The difference between China and Rome is, I think, one mostly of geography. China is a contiguous landmass, whereas Rome spanned the periphery of the Mediterranean. It is far easier to unify China and assimilate it into a single culture than for Rome to do the same. Indeed, China had Qin Shihuang who standardised laws, language, weights, etc. I don't think any Roman Emperor ever wielded the kind of power Qin Shihuang did over China.
The answer is simple. When China is disunited, patriotic heroes arise to unite it again or free it from foreign domination. From the Duke of Zhou to Confucius to the First Emperor and of course The Three Kingdoms Period, it was an Age of Heroes with Patriots swearing oaths of Brotherhood in Peach Orchards 🍑 to preserve Chinese civilization and China itself. These tales inspired the founders of T’ang, Song and Ming dynasties as well as Mao Zedong and the warriors of the People’s Liberation Army today. Rome, Greece and Western civilization has always lacked heroes of the caliber of Guan Yu and his sworn brothers or a cultural Hero like Confucius. The West lacked Heroes and Patriots sworn to uphold and cleanse the sacred soil of their civilization unlike China. The West never developed the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, never developed the concept of the sacredness of a civilization and nation and heritage like China.
What nonsense. You are espousing the ideology of Han chauvinism that did not exist until the modern era and sought to lazily paint the downfalls of Chinese dynasties as the results of foreign malice rather looking inward to its deficiencies. To borrow a quote from Durant: "A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within". Duke of Zhou was impactful in consolidating the Zhou dynasty during an era of INTERNECINE strife. These were proto-state stage of history when the Han/China identity have not even stabilized yet. Confucius did more to damage and impeded the progress of Chinese civilization's early start by entrenching social class rigidity and fostering a culture of subservience to those in power. His teaching found favor with despotic rulers as it supported their consolidation of power while extinguishing the parallel development of legalism in governance, relying only on governors behaving in a "moral" fashion as way to ensure good governance. Qin was a state on the periphery of Chinese civilization that spend its entire time slaughtering hundreds of thousands in neighboring states to impose their own hegemonic domination. People of this era identified more as being Zhao, Wei, Qi or Chu, rather than being Chinese despite your 1500-years-too early anachronistic portrayal. Viewed from another perspective, it is the first Emperor that was the foreign invader that wiped out multitudes of culture, language and imposed their way of life upon the rest of China. Three kingdom was a civil war stemming from the downfall of the Han due to internal political instability and strife. Han did more to tear the state apart than any borderland foreign power could hope to achieve seeing that the Xiongnu has already suffered extermination under Han Wu Di. You ought to read less fictionalized romance portrayal and more actual history. Liu Bei was a warlord that opportunistically took advantage of political fragmentation and carved out a state for himself. He and his "brothers" utterly failed in unifying China but instead prolonged its fragmentation, weakened the whole of the civilization and depopulated the Northern plains. The Jin may have briefly restored unity but they were short-lived and Northern China subsequently experienced a chaotic 280 years of nomadic tribal groups dominating dynastic politics. I would hardly call Liu Bei a "patriots" given the consequences of his action. Sui's founding emperor was from a northern military aristocracy family that had intermarried with Xianbei clans for generations and served as generals under the Xianbei's Northern Zhou state. Emperor Wen even had a Xianbei name: 普六茹堅. Seems to me he sought to re-conquer rest of China more for his own personal ambition and strive for power rather than for, again anachronistic, ideals of patriotism. Espousing Han dominion was only a tool to consolidate his control over the majority Han populace. Tang dynasty's Li family share similar origin, they are also northern military aristocracy with deep hereditary ties to the Xianbei elites that they subsequently concealed. During the Sui collapse they were local governor of Taiyuan and seized the opportunity to raise rebellion and seized power from the Sui...who are nominally self-identified as ethnic Han. Song Emperor Taizu came to power by usurping the throne of the ethnic Han Later Zhou dynasty and they didn't even fully reunify China. Northern Chinese lived just fine under the Tangut-led Western Xia and Khitan-led Liao for better part of 200 years. Subsequent mongol conquest under the Yuan was propelled with ample assistance from Northern Han. Yeah...real "patriotic" heroes as you claimed. The Chinese civilization is what has endured for millennia, but not as a contiguous state. And Chinese culture is not as homogeneous as you portray, the writing maybe the same but I cannot converse with a southern canton speaker with my Henan accent. Mandarin is modern development propelled into common use and regional cultural practices contain multitude of variations. The simplest explanation for ability to reunify on multiple occasions is geography. China is bound by the sea to the south and east. high mountain ranges to the southwest, desert to the west and barren tundra to the north east. Only a sliver of land corridor along the northwest form path of invasion for nomadic tribes. The central plains is a wide expanse with no barriers while two primary rivers traverse east-west with multitudes of smaller tributaries connecting the north and south. These factors molded the concentration of combat power to the northwestern frontier that granted military ascendancy over the economically-focused southern region. By controlling only a few critical river junctures, namely Xuzhou and Xiangyang, most historical dynasties originating from the north with access to more population and calories due to arable land can impose domination over the rest of China. But history marches on. Over the centuries, Northern China is losing economic relevance to the southern neighbors with the coastal regional gaining far more prosperity than the agriculturally focused heartlands like Shaanxi and Henan. Let us see how much longer the Northern China can continue to assert domination.
@@syjiang ‘Han Chauvinism’ is the force that will dictate the destiny of the planet Earth, the ‘-ism’ more influential than any other, … greater than liberalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, Islamism, etc.
@@chillin5703 like who? What Roman patriots stepped forward to defend the Realm? What Roman hero measured up to Guam Yu? What was the Roman equivalent to the Peach Orchard Brotherhood?
I would say that 1) Rome was ended "slowly" by outer threats. It's western parts were conquered by multiple factions. "Bysantium empire" was largest successor nation, which never really managed to re-conquer things or have new rise, but more likely slower descension. Later Ottoman empire holded pretty much what was Byzantium, adopted even their symbols (crescent moon, etc). While China collapsed almost always by inner instability, not by conquerors from outside (Mongol invasion is only exception I know, and they became new version of China). There was no similar fragmentation like Rome had. 2) When China been fragmented, there been strong feeling of insecurity among population, thoughts that life was better when empire ruled, and now things are more stressful. And that build will to reunite the lands, and support for those who want to reunite the nation. But I do not be aware of descension of Rome having similar phenomenon. People had more acceptance for life without empire, feeling that empire is not needed really. And therefore there were no strong will to reunite empire, nor support for people who attempt to do so. This might be because conquerors had power structure and way to organise society which replaced the Roman one, and was good enough for people to not have too much nostalgia for empire. Or, maybe Rome was quite horrible power for most of it's people, and majority of it's people did not wanted it back? Or both of these reasons - or something else. All in all, I see that main reason is, that people from the regions supported idea to recreate empire in China, but not in Rome. For recreating Rome or similar been maybe in dreams of some amount of people, and been supported by some amount of people, but also been opposed by well enough people to make it not happening.
>Why Didn't Rome Reunify, When China Did? I haven't even watched the video yet, but this one's easy: Rome wasn't as ethnically and culturally homogenous as china.
I’d say it was also that China had a reasonably large core area that an Empire could base itself around. While Europe has multiple areas with a decent amount of geographic boundaries between them.
Your provided argument of empires rising from peripheral states makes a lot of sense. The way I see it, Rome was the only one able to do that with Gaul (modern day France and northern Italy), as the region would become the heartland of strong empires thereafter. They were also able to take advantage of a very similar cycle of empires taking place in the Levant and Anatolia, which is how they got the other half of their empires. Plenty of empires before and since formed the cycle in the Middle East, Rome just so happened to be the only one with sufficient forces and interest westwards to take over the western Mediterranean as well. Meanwhile, in China (and India to a similar degree), it's all rich open territory over which culture and political strength diffused fairly thoroughly. Also, it's interesting you bring up the Pannonian basin, as one reason the nascent Hungarian kingdom wasn't nearly as powerful as it could've been was because of the Mongols significantly weakening them. A similar story goes for Poland, and there are absolutely other factors.
I kinda disagree with the end of the video. The Europeans were divided, fight among themselves, and quite possibly, hindering their society. While China was united, they invented gunpowder, silk making, porcelain crafts, compass, block printing (maybe Koreans), efficient paper making and more. Only when the Mongols re-established the Silk Road, the Persian, Ottoman, and later the European learned about these technology. Mind you that all these technologies are invented by many unified dynasty, not under a single rule, and yet, they persist. Do remember also that European powers become very wealthy after they conquered many lands, either from tribes, weakened kingdoms, and of course, treachery within a dying empires like Qing and Mughal. Not because they're disunited.
European powers starts become very wealthy after 30 years war, with peace of Westphalia. It's the peace the weaning of Church's influence that makes merchant more powerful and that brings in the wealth. The main problem is the Catholic Church that is preventing the innovation and draining out all the wealth to build astonishing beautiful Cathedrals.
@fromfareast3070 Kinda agree with you. 30 years war was quite brutal, and it reduces the power of the church a lot. However, I shall make it clear that the advancement of science and technology is actually being sponsored by the church during the Medieval Europe (because they have all the wealth). It's just that everything must be approved by them first, hence it's not readily available to the masses, they keep the knowledge for themselves.
Good points, but single rule can also be dangerous. In Emperor Hongxi ordered Zheng He's treasure fleet to be burned in 1424, and you could argue that that was a set back for Chinese development.
@@anotherelvis Given the circumstances at the time, the burning of the treasure fleet made sense given that the Ming is having some financial issues due to building the Great Wall and crop failures. The Empire simply doesn't have the resources to keep a massive fleet operating around. And besides, if you look at it at a Chinese perspective, it wasn't really necessary to keep such a fleet around. As far as the Chinese are concerned, everyone else living outside the core Chinese territory are barbarians. They see no worth going around and finding new lands - China even at the time, has plenty of lands. Even if the Chinese fleets managed to arrive in Alaska or California, they would just look at it, see nobody lives there and go back home and report to the capital that these lands are worthless and worse than the land occupied by barbarians (since again, nobody lives there). The Chinese people dont have the problem the Europeans are facing back then. Afterall, the main reason why colonialism started was not because of the sake of getting new lands but to have something to trade with China. It could be silver, gold, sugar or anything that would be of value for the Chinese, which are not that many kinds of items to begin with. In fact, the discovery of the new world was driven by the motivation of the Europeans to find a way to China that would bypass the Ottoman-controlled silk road. For China, well, they are China. They think they have everything.
As a Chinese person I think it has some geopolitical factors. The strongest edge faction who conquered central plain firstly can easily swept all other local factions easily. Except later Tang in Five Dynasties due to their own defects.
technically speaking, china was not unified under one emperor Unlike other dynasties before and after Song, Khitan Liao and Song were "more or less" equal diplomatically. There were now two suns in the sky😂
Because China was not only unified via hard power, soft power also unified it with more lasting effects thanks to contiguous topography and early governmental standardizations.
The institutions and values created in Rome rule the world. Latin in its Portuguese, French and Spanish versions is present in every continent. China is today a popular republic, those are both latin terms. I don't know, maybe we should ask ourselves instead why Rome survived and the Chinese Empire did not.
Chinese system are too complex and isn't suitable to be applied to other cultures with different historical context. Even traditional Sinosphere countries like Japan, Vietnam, and Korea Didn't completely adopt Chinese values, Alter some of them to fit their own cultures (Japanese Zen Buddhism and the kana script), Or even just straight up abandoned it the moment they saw some aspects of Chinese culture as impractical (Korea and Vietnam ditching Chinese characters for other writing systems)
"demographics are key" China with a legit massive Han ethnic core always had the manpower to overwhelm and influence it's region and does to this day via Sinicization policies. Rome on the other hand had no proper ethnic basis nor awareness and population to deal with the multiple ethno-linguistic groups (Germanians, Turks, Slavs, Arabs,...) taking over their territories
i think another thing thats an important consideration is that the chinese language specifically through its written system has maintained cultural continuity over the millennia in a way that greek or latin struggled to do. even when latin remained the liturgical language which the upper classes of europe regardless of their vernacular likely knew after rome's fall, the long-term trend of the roman language speakers being mixed and ruled by speakers of germanic and slavic languages is different to that of china where the vernacular dialects if not intelligible still remained part of the same fundamental family from my understanding not accounting for periods such as the mongol or other conquest periods which were later overturned. for sinic-derived language hegemony
China had free man called Peasants. They aren't slaves or serfs. They had family names. Also Chinese peasants can became Rulers. Merit vs born/given position.
The reign of the 5 good emperors were a series of adopted heirs that were competent. Much like how Roman families have powerful lineage, China also has powerful clans that dominated the bureaucracies until the Tang-Song period. The Sima clan managed to usurp the throne from the Cao by weakening the Cao family.
China was not a bastion of meritocracy though in theory it was. The truth of the matter though is that the exams peasants took to enter the Chinese bureaucratic elite were exceedingly difficult by design. Furthermore, over the centuries the entrenched bureaucratic elites and the state as a whole made it more difficult for new blood to enter the bureaucratic elite. Such was done by the Chinese State, and by extension the entity we know as “China” for the purposes of keeping power in the state, discouraging any and all change and progress to keep the elites and the state in power, and to ensure full control and domination of the societies and their civilizations of which China by its very existence restrained, oppressed, and exploited.
In reality, literacy in China is very expensive, because of how involved reading and writing is in Chinese culture. This same phenomenon was also present in Japan and Viet Nam (when Viet Nam used Chu Nom writing system).
i also really love this question! however the counterquestion that i always come back to is that if we make the simple answer that "rome" is merely one mediterranean empire of many and that the character of sea empires and keeping them united over centuries is a fundamentally different problem than that of china, why not the north european plain? in the same way that in the east the eurasian steppe gradually narrows and enters the fertile chinese plain, on its western part it also similarly narrows past the carpathians to the fertile plains of germany and france. is it merely climactic reasons that prevent a similar series of state formations in northern europe that we see in the yellow river and later yangtze? why didnt the large unifications of charlemagne, attila, napoleon. or hitler give rise to any real unification in the large european plain in a way that we see in china?
I would argue its because Rome had multiple rivals on its borders, had a great deal of internal division, as well as great ambition from both inside and outside the empire that were to its expense. Its also worth noting the Roman state was never as powerful as the Chinese state nor was it as domineering over and inhospitable towards civilization as the Chinese state and the idea of a “China” is. I would also argue the collaspe of Rome was ultimately a good thing for the entire world as the removal of such a monolithic and monopolist state drove progress through competition.
Gosh! there is a very simple answer to this question. China is built on the 2 long rivers: Yellow and Yangzi. The need to control the flooding, particularly the Yellow river, demanded unification. Rome is build on a sea. By nature, it was a miracle that Rome empire even existed.
It’s way simpler than that. The military power after Sui didn’t “come from the steppe”. Tang, Song and Ming were all Han. China just had ultra low taxes compared to every other country before 1911. Whenever the empire collapse life got much worse, and when it got back together, life got better. The opposite was true of Rome as taxes increased endlessly and ruined the people. Life got better everywhere but Britain when the empire collapsed, so there was no desire from the common people to see it reunify.
I think the better question is, why didnt a successor state successfully conquer the former lands of the Roman empire? Because when "China" reunifies, its not like its the exact same state each time. It's different provinces and peoples claiming the legacy of China, its institutions, its legitimacy, and culture (however you define that). Europe, the Middle East, and even North Africa had plenty of states/peoples claiming to adhere to the Roman legacy. If one had managed to conquer its former territories, we might view it the same way we view China--the capital simply moving from Rome to somewhere else.
I think it calls into question if we can even define whether a successor state is a "real" successor or not. The modern EU doesn't claim to be the Roman Empire, and it functions differently, but it is a political entity that controls or at least has a large degree of control over much of the same territory. The USA uses much of the same symbolism of the Romans, and by some is considered an empire, but doesn't control European territory directly. If the Germans had conquered all of Europe, they could have claimed to be the new Rome, but could a Roman empire be based on Germanic cultural identity? It seems hard to pin down.
Many states tried. Many claimed to be successor to Rome. No one managed.
@@Tom_Quixote The EU does not control the same area than Imperial Rome. It's contains only the Northern Coast of the Roman imperial territory, but it includes vast territories that never or only for short time periods were under Roman control, like Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltics. Yes, there is some overlap. But that's all there is.
Even America copied the Roman republic system. It lives on.
It's both more complex and simple in it's sensibility. It's not so much the *'Legacy of China',* most Western cultures inherited some Roman Legacy. Rather identity of China, of Han Chinese is invested cultural traditions and people. Even the Mongols and Manchus end up integrating most of the cultural traditions into their own. Because you can't hope to effectively rule these many people without taking in them as a part of you. *Roman is the reverse.* The identity is tied to Rome, when in Rome as they say. Everything is about Rome, not the rest of the empire. Most of the empire wasn't even consider citizen, an 'exclusive' status. Most of the empire have no real attachment to Rome or the Empire.
Speaking of Chinese history, I recommend anyone seeing this comment to dive into Chinese history. Every dynasty has something interesting and unique aspects to offer. I love Roman history too, but I personally don’t think anything comes even close to Chinese history when it comes to how interesting it can be.
Both are great civilizations and it's fascinating how they are almost like the opposite of each other on many things.
@rob6927 Roman empire was too dependent on slaves and taxes of conquered lands which wanted independence. Roman citizenship tends to be exclusive while Chinese citizenship tends to be inclusive. G7 is an exclusive and limited membership organization and will likely decline while the BRICS has an inclusive membership and welcome others to join and will likely rise. This difference explains why Roman fell and China survive.
I recently listened to a podcast called "China Talk" where they interviewed Yasheng Huang, an econ professor fro MIT regarding his book "The Rise and Fall of the East" where he made a point that the imperial exam system established during the Sui Dynasty contributed a lot to the unification of multiple Chinese Dynasties in funneling competent people into an intellegenica class that was directly under the imperial system. It was a really interesting listen. I would highly recommended it.
Smart fraction theory, which creates some big differences near the tail especially when your population has an average iq 4-5 points above the European average.
If you count the persians too, is not that much the exam system, but the effective bureaucracy, even before persia there always a strong state in that region coming from the sumerian times, and every conqueror simply conquer but maintain the bureacracy of the region, that happens to china and the sinicization of the foreign rulers, that happen to persia and the persification of the arab rulers on the rise of Islam.
But rome was never know to have a effective bureacracy, and even as germanic rulers try to claim the legacy of rome they never try to become romans. Maybe because of the Church taking roles on part of bureacracy and imposing divine rule (so the leader already had the right to rule), maybe because of the system rome had never impose on the ruler the need to adapt to roman costumes.
It may have had benefits, but it led to inflexible ossification of Chinese institutions. Take Zheng He's voyages during the Ming Dynasty. This was just prior to the age of European exploration. If the Mandarins hadn't been so against these voyages China might have discovered the America's
@@Mullet-ZubazPants if you got the time to read the supposed reason to the withdrawal of this policy, is much more related to fight for power in the court than being the ossification of institution, in fact, just the fact that they happened is a counter argument for that.
in fact, their success (and the power that they gave to eunuchs) and the dead of the emperor was more the reason they stopped.
IMO, the non-military Chinese cultural elite has very much to do with it. When the nomads conquer China, the non-military elites are kept live and become servants or advisors of the nomad rulers. Due to culture influence (art and luxury), the nomads slowly become more Chinese.
As a Chinese person I would say it's because we have, at our core, a contiguous landmass of nearly culturally and ethnolinguistically identical peoples, the natural state of which is unification. Every time China was divided it was simply political, not along regional cultural or ethnolinguistic lines. The Mediterranean does not have same culture all over it, was only united cause conquest, and Rome lived on as some sort of cultural heritage for parts of Europe.
yes
The warlord era in the 1920s was along ethnic and cultural lines
No it was political as always
@ then why did sinkiang and the ma states even exist? They were literally Uyghur Muslim states which were very different than the han chinese kuomintang for example
China has various ethnicities, OP isn't talking about Han Chinese, Han Chinese is like the default term i.e.Americans calling themselves Americans even though their ancestors are German, Irish, Swedish etc, meanwhile the Roman empire was mainly through conquest, the former empires really didn't wanna be part of Rome, while majority of China does, except for a few and that's been the norm for thousands of years, a more apt comparison would be to compare the Roman empire to the Majapahit empire (Javanese), Indonesia is home to the most ethnicity and languages in the world but are able to reunify.
Maybe the real question we should be asking is, 'how did Rome manage to unify the Mediterranean basin at all?'
This is my take on the subject. Just a hobbyist. So take it with a grain of salt.
As another commenter mentioned under this video, "Rome was always kind of on the frontier." Prior to Rome, the only great regional power that could project its socio-economic might was Greece and Rome defeated them. Greece still wasn't fully unified and prior to their final defeat, had also been fighting in the middle east. Macedon was the strongest of the Greek states and other Greek states helped Rome to fight them. Much of Western Europe and the northern Mediterranean was tribal or small city states which was easy for Rome to conquer. Carthage was another major power but they were separated by the Mediterranean so Rome could expand in the north more or less unimpeded until it could challenge Carthage. Carthage was pretty close at conquering Rome, so it is kinda a coin toss on who became the final unifier of the basin.
Now compare this to medieval period. Italy was like classical Greece and divided into many smaller city states. The larger states like the France and the Holy Roman Empire were farther up north where they had to compete with each other before ever trying to reconquer the Mediterranean. And new powers like the Scandinavian states also pulled attention away from that region. Unlike Rome, there were half a dozen roughly equal powers competing in Europe. They were no longer fighting small tribes and city states. And even if Italy, Europe, and Greece was reconquered, in North Africa and the Middle East; there were bunch of different caliphates and empires to fight through. No single European country could do that when they were so fractured and concerned about wars at home.
Lastly, Unlike Rome, basically all European states had lost significant state capacity to raise and support a large army. Armies shrunk and battles shrunk. Unlike Rome, the central government was weak. Feudal societies just cannot hold up against proper empires with centralized states. The resources the medieval kingdoms could draw upon paled in comparison to Rome and to the Islamic states that dominated much of the ex-Roman territories. Even when they all unified for the crusades, the European powers did pretty poorly. The hodge podge of otherwise hostile nations led to poor coordination, communication and cooperation. Everyone did whatever they wanted and without a unified central state; there was also no unity of effort. In fact the Crusaders doomed the one thing that was holding back the Islamic powers from Europe; Byzantine. Byzantine could do as well as it did because it was LESS FUEDAL than the Rest of Europe and had much greater state power funded by its strategic location earning it lots of trade revenue. But by the time Constantinople finally fell, most of Europe had started to centralize and regained a lot of its state capacity enough that Europe slowly became the dominate global power. But Europe being fractured means they could never unify the Mediterranean as they still competed with each other internally.
This parallels with China as described in the video. For China, the "Rome" or unifying power was in the steppe region. Southern China are all the smaller states that gets too focused on internal(regional) competition. This stayed largely consistent for much of its history. Unlike Europe, there wasn't a Byzantine(or the fact there's a large body of water) holding back the flood gates.
@@neurofiedyamato8763No, it is in Northern China and not part of the steppe.
By having Naval and Land superiority at the same time. This is why Rome was never reunited again, no other successor kingdoms/empires could achieve both at the same time within the Mediterranean.
By brutality, instead of education and helping in order to solve local people problems.
This is opposite to what the Chinese governments (dynasties if you like) have been doing.
"If one is kind to others, others will be kind in return".
So, when a Chinese government started to ignore people's problem, it would eventually dissolve. And a new one will take the place.
That's as simple as that.
@@neurofiedyamato8763 By the steppe region of China, do you mean the more north half, like Beijing?
After Franks conquered Gaul, the local Roman people quickly became assimilated as Franks. This pattern holds for the Arabs conquests in Middle East and North Africa, Slavic conquest of the Balkans, the Turkic conquest of Anatolia, the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain etc. Even in Italy, the Lombards created a lasting legacy in the form of Lombardy.
Meanwhile the rulers of former Roman lands were eager to identify their legacies as Roman, such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Sultana of Rum. It seems that Rome did not leave behind strong cultural identity for common people to hold on to, so only the aristocracy and powerful are interested in a Roman revival.
Anglo-Saxon is a bad example since it wasn't (just) elites germanizing romano-british people at all. Gritzi ger et al (2022) have shown that the inhabitants in most of England were driven out by the germanic newcomers so that up to the 10th century the English were of about 75-80% Germanic stock. The modern English, while the same people, are only about half Germanic. The Franks on the other hand became romanized if one wills while the Romano-Gauls became Germanized (mainly culturally). So here it actually was mainly an elite taking over and only in certain areas, mainly in the northwest of France, Franks formed the majority or the plurality of the people
and even the aristocracy was mostly interested in the legitimation by it rather than roman culture & identity
Less assimilation but more ethnic replacement. Balkans became slavic not because the people there started seeing themselves as slavs, but because slavs came in and killed or otherwise replaced 70 % of the population
Laughs in Spanish and reconquista 😂
except for Greek speakers which continued to call themselves Romans till the early 1900s, and in some places (mostly in arab states) still call themselves Romans.
Grain produced in North Africa used to be the reason for its being conquered by Rome. After that production stopped, it seems that half of the empire was no longer worth warring over.
Yeh eastern roman conquer have northern part of africa until muslim rise and north africa fully islamice the region
By that point the Western half was largely lost, so you aren't even talking about half any more.
There were big manpower issues at the time too, that is the biggest obstacle. Now having a front to the north of the Balkans, to the East with whoever is in Persia, plus a front to the South East in Arabia is just too much.
@@recoil53 And don't forget, every General was just proclaiming themselves emperor every chance they get.
@@winstonzhou4595 Yes, there was a lot of infighting. It wasn't just the open rebellions, but also local nobles trying to assert their own power to the detriment of the empire.
Why did production stop?
It crosses my mind that the city of Rome was always kind of "on the frontier" of classical age Mediterranean civilization... besides Carthage there was no other real large city until Rome created its colonies in the west... the core of Mediteranian Civilization was the east... so essentially when Rome and Carthage fell to the Barbarians the core of the civilization did survive until 1453...
Here in China the core civilisation started in Zhongyuan (Central Plains) but it spread to the South so now both Zhongyuan and South China make up core civilisation. Although historically there's been plenty of divides between the two. Han lands do go quite a bit beyond those two but those are sort of the center. Xibei and Taiwan are kinda just the edge, and then you have Beijiang, Dongbei and the like which are not part of China Proper but still integral Han territory.
@@sanneoi6323 Wait, am I as a westerner understanding you correctly? For the Chinese there is a difference in concept between "classical China's lands" and "lands that are integral Han territory"?
@@alconomic476 The East Coast is "classically American" but nobody disputes that Oregon is American
@@nicholasd5536 Aaah, good comparison, thanks.
@@alconomic476 well we have 汉地 for classical Han lands basically equivalent of the western concept for China Proper but I say integral Han lands to refer to literally what it sounds like lmao. Integral territories inseparable from the rest of the Han nationality's domain.
Short answer: because the Turks, Germans, the Slavs, and the Arabs didn't allow it to happen. Long Answer: Rome was destroyed by the Huns and conquered by the Germanic tribes. After this, the idea of unifying Rome became impossible because no one actually wanted to unify it, but they just used it as a justification for conquering former Roman territory.
Moreover, Roman was entirely a citizenry idea while China and Chinese is a cultural and ethnic one, unified China was also founded on the combination of many Chinese states, these people share similar culture and language. Rome is much more diverse demographically.
That's not quite true. Charlemagne, a Frank, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor (Imperator Romanorum, "Charles, most serene Augustus, crowned by God, great peaceful emperor governing the Roman empire, and who is by the mercy of God king of the Franks and the Lombards") by the Pope on the 25th of December 800, which also had the consequence of souring relations with the Eastern Roman Empire and led to the schism between the catholic and orthodox chuches.
The posterior dismemberment and then legacy of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire is a different debate, as its influence over Italy waned over the centuries with constant conflicts with the Pope. Part of it early on was of course the differences between the tribal duchies and the frankish inheritance laws that had resulted in the split of Charlemagne's realm into West Frankia (France) East Frankia (Germany) and Lotharingia (Low Countries, Burgundy, Italy).
@strangesignal9757 you literally proved my point. Charlemagne used the title of Roman Emperor to justify his conquest of former Roman territory. If he truly wanted to form Rome, then why did he establish his empire as a monarchy and not as a republic, dictatorship, or as an empire? We both know that the Romans hated monarchy, so he isn't helping himself by establishing a monarchy.
@@TurkishDebater Because Rome was a Republic in name alone. Even further east Rome still had a Senate and everything
@elseggs6504 That's why we call it the Eastern Roman empire. The Frankish empire isn't called Roman for obvious reasons.
I'd say a full Mediterranean empire can only hold together when the capital is in the west, but that inevitably the capital will move to the east because that is where the wealth and greatest danger was. The geography of the huge internal sea made it very hard to unify all shores of it and it could only really be done if you started in the west.
Once the North European Plain became civilised and wealthy it was even harder to unify the Med due to too many nearby competing powers.
Maybe that internal sea is the big difference. In antiquity the Mediterranean was what allowed phoenician and greek settlers to rapidly spread while still retaining some cultural unity. For the Romans too it allowed armies and food shipments to move where they we needed and maintain some degree of cultural unity across the empire. But through the late Roman period into the early Medieval period land routes seem to have become more important and the Roman empire's georgraphy wasn't well set up for that.
Rome was in neither west nor east. It was in the centre, which allowed it to go either side at different times. A very important factor in their expansion is also the fact they could defeat big polities like Carthage and the Seleukid empire who already controlled vast Mediterranean territories and just gobble them up.
The Caliphates basically destroyed any hope for a Roman reunification and therefore hegemonic legitimacy was derived from being able to defeat them and hold back the tide of Islam (The Franks, The Byzantines). The non-Roman, and indeed anti-Roman, Caliphates fluctuated dynastically and fractured but Muslim powers still hold on to the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean Coasts to this day. "Mare Nostrum" helped the Romans expand and maintain their power but Muslim piracy and near-annual caliphal naval sieges of Constantinople changed the name of the game.
Too many fronts and while a hollow core of a sea allows for fast transportation, it also doesn't provide a population base.
So you have a large number of Germanic tribes in Western/Central Europe. Slavs to the north of the Balkans. The Persians to the east and the Arabs to the South East.
There are long frontages on each side, large armies there, and the population of each has grown.
When Rome expanded, they had more population density than most their neighbors. By 600 AD, that wasn't true. Entire tribes in the 100k's were moving. Then the Muslim expansion - it was just too many to fight against.
Every time the Byzantines lost territory, they lost food production and a source of soldiers. Add to that the infighting and treachery and the ability to take territory to a defensible border is lost.
I don't know if i got you correctly, but the Umayyad Caliphate conquered most of the Med while being ruled from the East (Damascus), and 1000 years later, the Ottomans ruled from the East (Constantinople) over lands stretching from Algeria to Iran and from Yemen to Hungary.
Because it's extremely difficult to (re-)conquer some places across the sea... Even the existence of the Roman Empire was a miracle...
Geography plays a major role in retaining a succession chain of a civilization. The Mediterranean basin is far more complex and challenging than the conditions the various Chinese states and dynasties had to go through. Most of Europe is cross rigged with mountain ranges and protruding peninsulas, in fact the total shoreline of Europe is twice as long as that of Africa alone. All this doesn't make for an easy accommodation to any unifying force. The fact that Rome managed to hold the Mediterranean Sea as its own for so long is a historical aberration, worthy of respect. The first and the only state to achieve this so far.
That's probably it. It's the formidable Chinese rivers that require resources of a huge empire to mitigate their strength. That's why Chinese wars are about unifying the empire again.
As you point out, Europe with its geography is more suited for smaller regional states to have defensible borders and manage themselves. That's why European wars are about resisting a potential hegemon and ganging up on him. Also worth noting that the Mediterranean wasn't Roman "Mare nostrum" for the whole duration of the empire...
No, geography only plays a minor role. I have read through many comments. People always try to find reason in exterior factors, but nobody tries to find the answer within oneself. What if the reason is mainly cultural? Or even deeper? Inside the genes? By that, I mean genetic. Maybe Chinese are born to prefer unification and more social life while others are born to prefer individualism?
No need to blame Mediterranean geography. It is innocent. There are mountain chains in China as well. And many people are isolated in those area. But yet, that does not reduce their affinity to have a unified country and patriotism.
@@Horinius There are plentiful examples of mass migrations in Chinese history that make this an impossible argument.
Honestly I just think it's because of the huge wide inland sea and vast outside areas where it's easy to invade with little strategic depth in land in comparison to tall China. China has layers of defenses, while Rome has sparse wide areas of defense with less depth that once one is broken, it's easy to conquer wide areas, but in China it's just a single valley like the Wei river valley that's easy to contain unlike in Europe. I recommend Gates of Kilikien for good videos on this.
East of China, the largest ocean on earth. West of China, the biggest mountain range on earth. South of China, forests, mountains and jungle. North of China, dry steppes barely inhabited.
China is like an inland island, hard to get there from the outside, so the people inside end up always reconquering it all.
@lxdnd exactly.
are you serious? China had to delt with horse riders from Mongolia all the time, they were far greater than anything Rome had to face.
@ZxZ239 The proximity was a double edged sword. It meant that very rarely did steppe hordes grow too huge without fighting China or come from the west. The Historian's Craft has great videos on the steppe for this topic that when combined with my points show how they were too fractured and weak when near China, yet when they did get strong enough they fought China who had those extra advantages and either eventually collapsed or did conquer China then assimilated. Nothing about that contradicts anything I said.
@@deiansalazar140This is also the geographical defect of China's expansionism. After China completely entered the Iron Age, the world is still in the transition period of bronze and iron, and the population is far less than that of China! The Han Empire almost destroyed all the countries around China! In Han Dynasty-Song Dynasty, China led the world in science, technology, economy and population.
I think an impirtant factor is that the Roman Empire was based around a giant sea. This means that any power that wants to reunite it must have naval superiority over the entire Mediterranean. And the Romans were the only ones to be so dominant over both land and sea at the same time. Furthermore, the invaders in China were a uniting force, whereas for Rome the Germanic invasions would only further disintegrate the Empire, but this could be considered an extension of the steppe conquerer hypothesis. But I think the possibility of reunification died after the muslim conquest of north Africa and the Middle-East. The Arabs were semi-nomadic, but in contrast with the Manchus ir Mongols, they would assimilate conquered territories into their culture instead of being assimilated themselves. But again, due to the geographical position of being centered on a sea, the Arabs could not easilly conquer north of the Pyrenees. Combined with their dominant culture this created a strong disparity between core territories of the former empire. They now had very different languages and conflicting religions that could not coexist within one empire. If these cores were to reunite, they would at least have had to be converted to the same religion. But as no power was able to reach naval dominance like the Romans had before 1000 AD, they grew culturally so far apart that they themselves probably lost interest in conquering they other cores. China on the other hand stayed much more linguistically, religiously and culturally similar after the cores broke up, which allowed for outside powers to unite them. The Roman territories lacked this presence of steppe neighbours of sufficient strength (although the Huns and Bulgars did attack the Byzantines), but even if they had such a neighbour, maybe if the Sahara was steppe instead of desert, the conquerers would struggle to cross the seas into the northern half and if they would eventually conquer all of the former Roman empire, they would not be able to hold it together for long due to the strong cultural and religious differences that had grown between the different places.
China wasn't and didn't stay linguistically similar, at least in any way that suggests it originated from one monolithic linguistic branch. The writing system is the only thing in common for many of the dialects, and that is how scholars of different regions could communicate.
The thing about China is that even the non-Han Chinese rulers such as the Mongols and the Manchu, their goal was to unify China. And all of the nomadic rulers of China had had forced their people to assimilate into the Han-Chinese culture at the beginning of their rule. The Han Chinese rulers had never forced other ethnic groups to assimilate into Han Chinese culture, rather you believe whatever you want as long as you obey my rules. The Mongols adopted this philosophy.
@@XGD5layerDude, having the same written language is having the same linguistics. The different dialects are different in phonetics.
@Haijwsyz51846 I can consider them related and (mutually) influenced, but it's not like everything written in the latin alphabet is the same language either. I'm sure you also don't consider languages like Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese as being in the same language family as Chinese, even though they have borrowed a lot through for example bureaucracy and scholars, and use traditional Chinese characters.
@@XGD5layer thing is, cultures and laguages are only part of what composed China the way it is throughout history; the other were perhaps conquests, politics and cultural dominance/influence/assimilation
no one can deny the regional cultural differences between Chinese provinces, but for certain *other* reasons they all became Chinese heartland, and for these exact *other* reasons it showed how past Chinese empires differed from the Roman empire
If you think about the Mediterranean is by nature a dividing factore, especially the north is divided between mountainous peninsulars (iberia, italy, balkans, anatolia) and historically only the roman empire was able to conqure them all despite numberous other attempts by others. So shouldnt the question be how rome, as a historically exception, was even able to unite this massive geographical region in the first place rather than why noone else was able to?
The difference between land and sea. Seas are not population or political units.
One of the typical factors in periods of contraction of Roman and East Roman power was neglect of the fleets.
Yeh they more enemy in land than sea
Majorian literally failed to reconquer Tunisia because of burned fleet.
@@alexzero3736 - i think the worst example is the end of the Macedonian rennaissance, when a long period of success gave a feeling of security and safety so the government scrapped the fleet as unnecessary with disastrous consequences not long after
@@overworlderThe fleet wasn’t scrapped after the Macedonians we have sources confirming its use up to and during Alexios’s reign with success. The Byzantine fleet is why Byzantium was able to resist the Normans in Italy till 1071.
No it was downsized by Alexios do to the cost in favor of an alliance with Venice. John kept it small but then Manuel Expanded it. It was downsized and damaged permanently during the reign of the Angeloi.
@@tylerellis9097 - sure, thanks for the detail. I only had a vague recollection . . .
The Chinese proverb goes 'The empire, once divided, must unite. The empire, once united, must divide.' Have you read your Romance of the Three Kingdoms?
The issue here is in translation: the actual Chinese word in the quote translated as 'empire' in English is 天下 ('tianxia' or All Under Heaven). Tianxia is not 'empire'. Its exact meaning is hard to pin down, but its more a term of political legitimacy, rather than denoting a single empire that somehow resurrects itself after periods of fragmentation. Speaking of Three Kingdoms, the Han empire did not revive, despite attempts by the rump state of Shu Han. The Sima Jin empire that arose later was a successor of Cao Wei, not Shu Han. These are different Chinese countries, and it is perhaps better not to think of 中国 as a politically continuous entity, but as a culturally contiguous one.
The quote held true for the Roman Empire too
Romance of the Three Kingdoms was made during Ming dynasty. It's 1522 by then the concept of China was very matured.
@@rabbit-munch-carrots "Tianxia" just means the "world", its similar to how Romans say they "conquered the world".
So it should be translated as "the world long divided must unite".
@@fromfareast3070 Tianxia was coined during the Zhou dynasty, over 1000 years before the Ming.
That the Roman Republic ever unified the Mediterranean was the anomaly, and it probably had to do with a period of tranquility throughout Eurasia. Because once the forces of migration pushed the Goths, Franks, and Vandals onto the Rhine-Danube frontier, then it became almost impossible for one emperor in Rome to defend that frontier, leading to the East-West split.
I really appreciate the nuanced caveats that front load this interesting topic and analysis. Very refreshing to hear that humility and makes the analysis very easy to take for what it is. Personally, I find the suppositions taken to be convincing and useful, as one lense to apply, to the comparison of the evolution of civilizations in the East and West.
Not that it makes me an authority by any means, but, I was fortunate to have lived in China briefly in the early 2000s. I find the contrast and similarities both fascinating. The history that my contemporary experiences are built on, will always be both fascinating and informative in the present.
Any Mediterranean power always has to contend with proximity to Persia, which is much more similar to China in its enduring nature.
The more fragmented geography, contrary to China, made it far more difficult for a Roman “core” to continuously exert dominance over the Mediterranean.
I would even argue that if not for the continuous rivalry with Persia, Rome would have probably been able to handle barbarian incursions with ease and probably only have to deal with it’s own constant civil wars lol
Eh, no identifiable Persian state existed from the fall of the Sassanians to the Ilkhanate which wasn't much of a Persian successor either. It wasn't until the Safavids, and their assertion of Shia Islam as something to distinguish their territory from other Islamic states that we see something like a Persian state separate from being just the dominant high culture of Islam again. That's well over 800 years where there was just a Persian cultural sphere no different than the post roman cultural sphere where all educated men communicated in Latin.
@@shangrilainxanaduthis man read about the Intermezzo and went too far in his understandings.
china's geography is pretty diverse too tho, i think its more that roman successor states were simply unable to overpower one another to the point they could fully be seen as rome. The closest that came are HRE and ottomans imo
@@MethaneHorizoneven during the iranian intermezzo it was still largely divided , the khwarezmians were probably not even persians too
@@shangrilainxanadufor the purposes of "persians threatening Rome/the mediterranean" the Abbasids and the Turks work perfectly fine. The byzanines didn't care about the language of the eastern threat.
the empire, long divided, must unite
Long united, must divide
thus it has ever been
Is this a moth☆fucking romance of the three kingdoms reference?
@@markus-ks9sfhell yeah😂
Cao Mengde best 3K general
I've been thinking about this question from time to time ever since reading Viktor Lieberman's "Strange Parallels", and what I keep coming back to is the territorial aspect of the Mandate of Heaven. Since the mandate appointed control of the “Tianxia” to a single emperor, it was not only legitimate but also legitimizing to try and reconquer a broken apart empire. Simply put, if you manage to do it, that’s proof that you’ve got the right to rule. Since no radically different justification of rule was introduced until modern times (rulers from the steppe often found it more convenient to adopt the Chinese one), we keep seeing people trying to rebuild China.
In contrast, the rulers of successor states of the Roman empire justified their rule mostly on the basis of being good Christians or Muslims, and were not bothered to specifically recreate the empire’s territory. Hence why the realm of Charlemagne, the HRE and later Russia are all claimed to be new Roman Empires despite being progressively further away from the territory of the original. The only ones who seem to place importance in the territorial aspect are the Byzantines, but after the Caliphate takes their lands in Africa they are never again able to even get close to reconquering the whole thing.
Obviously we can’t point to a singular cause for such a broad question, but since I don’t see a very strong geographical reason why reconquering China should be easier than reconquering the Roman empire, I place a lot of importance on the ideologies of those doing the reconquering. And if in one region that ideology comes with a strong territorial aspect, while in the other that is lacking, it doesn’t surprise me that we see only one of those empires reconstituted time and again.
I would say china was much more homogenous and easy to centraline than the Roman Empire, they spawn across 3 continets
It was not lack of trying to reclaim Roman Empire, it was the lack of succeeding in doing in. HRE pretended that it did it. But it’s not Roman nor an empire.
@@Tonyx.yt. homogeneous is the effect of constant centralization and rebuild of the Empire not the cause. It wasn't very homogeneous back then. Especially the before the Sui. The southern Region (today's Canton's and Yunnan) was always a frontier region and populated by other ethnicity. Yunnan wasn't considered "core" region until Yuan.
@@fromfareast3070you are very much correct in your overall assertion, but i would like to point out Yunnan was merely conquered by the Yuan dynasty, it didn't actually become majority Han and part of "core China" until the end of Ming. And a place like Machuria only attained its present Han Chinese demographic in 19th century and was considered separate from core China until 20th!
Ancient China was definitely by no means homogenous!
@@userwsyz Yesn't. As the oc said, most of the empires that did claim to be romes successor like the HRE, like Russia the Ottomans, Francia and for some time France simply claimed roman emperorship without really trying to conquer the whole thing. At most these states tried to conquer italy, or constantinople, but for the most part, they simply relied on the church for legitimizing their claim. As the other guy said, only byzantium and maybe the ottomans tried to conquer the whole thing
I think one of the main infouences would also be that Rome and China are only similar in the political sense that both are empires which dominated a large region for a long time, but the similarities breakdown after that. It's like the assumption that sweet potatoes must be related to potatoes, because both are high-calorie tubers. However, they're just superficially similar.
The geography, culture, and historical context of Rome and the Han dynasty are just fundamentally different. It'd be easier to identify all of the similarities between the two than the differences.
Why did Zoroastrianism decline to the point of near extinction, but Hinduism is still one of the largest religions today despite both Persia and India being conquered by Islam?
zoroastrianism was already declining heavily by the time of mohammed’s death , there’s a book called “last empire of iran” by micheal bonner that goes into it
I guess Hinduism is a more resilient religion with a larger population.
@@ksanbahlyngwa1998 I think it had to do more with the decentralized nature of India and the more centralized nature of Iran. In iran, it was the conquest of one state while in india it was a bunch of kingdoms which ironically made it harder to conquer.
+hinduism was highly entrenched and the whole of indian society was centered around hinduism, so even when the muslim states DID invade, they NEEDED to govern through concession or risk large-scale revolts and unrest.
Zoroastrians sure played the long game, though. They gave us Freddie Mercury.
@DarDarBinks1986 really sweet from their part.
But what about the Ming? The Ming is one of the few southern chinese dynasties, and expell the Yuan, a mongol central asian dynasty, this doesnt debunk this theory?
The Tang dynasty stands in complete and utter contrast to this theory as well
No, the Yuan's Han troops simply joined the rebellion, including those in the north.
@@TempAcct-e6k Tang imperial family were descended from Xianbei military class.
@@lolasdm6959 The Tang imperial family were descended from the Li family, a Han Chinese family from the Longxi Commandery.
@@TempAcct-e6k Yeah and who is Taizong's mother? Have you check that out too?
Qin Shi Huang unified China and established the first feudal monarchy in China. Although this dynasty only existed for 15 years before splitting, his greatest contribution was to create a concept for various ethnic groups and regions in later China that China must be unified and inherit the mandate of the previous dynasty
Because China was mostly centralized around a flat land (north Chinese plain). This allowed it to easily unify, unlike Rome which had many mountains and rivers that divided its territory. Additionally Chinese people had a unified social structure, and related languages. The only “Latin” parts of the empire were France, Spain, and Italy, and these weren’t united because of mountain ranges. Most people in the Roman Empire had no desire to be a part it, a German living in Gaul and a Jew living in philistine had no cultural or historic connection to each other. Most people outside of Italy weren’t even citizens, one can make a good argument that Rome itself was really just Italy and a bunch of territory controlled by Italy. If you look at it through that lense, then Rome did unify, it just didn’t take back its controlled territory and client states.
Agree that it's about the geography, but the Chinese languages are not intelligible in spoken form. It's the characters that hold the language together. 6:18 situation in Chinese empire was the same as Roman empire - quite disparate peoples incorporated into the empire and gradually assimilated. The Vietnamese and the tribes of what is today Xinjiang may have even less in common than the Jews and Germanics...
And what you say about most of the people not being citizens and not wanting to be part of the empire mostly applies to the times of the republic. Later, almost everyone became a citizen.
No, geography is not the main reason. Many comments are speaking about language, geography, etc. No need to blame geography. The flat land in China today was NOT part of it when Chinese civilization started 5000 years ago around the Yellow River valley. The flatland was included a lot later. But yet, the unification spirit has always been in Chinese culture.
About unified language, that is not true either. Chinese have been speaking different accents (that Westerners have used the wrong word "dialect" to describe it. Indeed, that's accent, not dialect) over thousands of years. Chinese characters were different long before unification under the 1st Emperor. (Measurements were not unified either before, but that's another story).
So, all in all, that means both are not the main factors explaining why China unifies but not Roma. Instead of blaming external factors, in my opinion, the reason might be cultural or even deeper -- in the genes. Maybe Chinese are born with more social bounding tendency while the Europeans are born to be more individualist.
The pattern of Chinese history is that of a abroudly Chinese heartland with shifting borderlands. The Roman heartland, the Mediterranean, became divided primarily after the muslim conquest. Without the Mare nostrum, the centre of power collapsed and remained divided between local power centres. The Byzantine Empire shifted to the mountains of Anatolia, the muslims kept Egypt and Syria, while power in Europe shifted from Italy to the north of the alps.
Language is likely a factor here, if not the most important one. The Chinese language, however the pronuonciation might change, remain the same written form and same characters. Whereas for Indo-european alphabetical language, the spelling changes alone with the pronuonciation shifts, and thereby quicklt splits into many languages in over a couple of generations, creating many "ethinc groups" out of natural evolution of language and regional dialogues. There are many many european languages whose difference is minor comparing with the differences between Cantonese and Mandrian, but the written form of the two is still the same. In fact, you can write chinese to communicate with a Japanese because of the partially shared written Kanji
Roman was entirely a citizenry idea while China and Chinese is a cultural and ethnic one, unified China was also founded on the combination of many Chinese states, these people share similar culture and language. Rome is much more diverse demographically.
Simply put, Han Chinese identity is invested in the people and the cultural identity. Dynasties comes and goes, Chinese people have always understood that, even non-han rulers have to inte. Roman identity is invested in Rome, not the rest of the Empire, everything is about Rome. Most of the empire are not even citizens, and have no real attachment to Rome or the Empire. So when it falls apart, no one is really that attached. How can you be attached to a city you have never seen in your life. Take the Holy Roman Empire, they claim the inheritors of Roman but Rome isn't even in their Territory.
I found this video to be a bit unfinished. Shadow empires? And why exactly was the steppe so important for China's centre of power? It's like the video should have been 4 minutes longer where you wrapped up the loose ends.
Charlemagne did his best.
Not really. He controlled Gaul, Germania and most of Italy. I would say that for an empire to be a reunification of Rome it would need to control most of the Mediterranean coast
@@Septimus_ii "did his best"=/=succeed
WHY DID HE DIVIDE HIS EMPIRE EVENLY AMONG HIS SONS REEEEEEEEEE
Arbitrary dividing of the empire 🫠
Charlemagne rather split the empire into three for his sons, than to let his sons fight a civil war to control the empire
Simply put, there was just too much equal competition in Europe for it to reunify.
Yes.
This is one of the best questions.
One of the biggest differences is in China, the is a very obvious division between the agricultural land and nomadic land, about where the Great Wall is built. So Chinese empires were all based on agriculture. It’s always inherited the agricultural civilization. No matter where the rulers were from or what they did for living, once they conquered China, they would become Chinese and followed the same system.
In the west, The Roman empire was based on trading power around the Mediterranean Sea. So was the Arabic empire trading between the west and the east. So with in the territory, ways of living was a lot more diverse . So when the central power is weaker, it is harder to reunite.
This is a question i have never thought of but need answered now. I suppose part of the answer will be geography.
One obvious reason: Classical China since 221BC uses a unified written system which records the meaning of the language rather than its pronunciations. Over time different parts in China may have their spoken language evolving independently but they all corresponds to the same writing symbols. Therefore in a sense they all use the same language and thus are the "same people". Roman uses multiple languages and these languages continue to evolve and split, hence different regions in Europe soon have "different people".
That is regarded as one of the factors why the Chinese are able to rebuild their empires several times while Rome never do so. Chinese writing system is a logographic writing system which each character represents a word and the purpose is to convey the meanings instead of the pronunciations of the written words. Chinese people speak various related languages that are often mutual unintelligible but are able to communicate through the written language. One Chinese spoken word may have different pronunciation with another, but the written form uses the same character. As a result it bypasses linguistic barrier. It is analogous to modern numeral system where it is understood regardless of languages. Most written languages use alphabetical writing systems due to much easier usage and application. However alphabetical writing systems convey the pronunciation of written words instead of the meanings. The Roman Empire spoke many languages. The official language may be Latin but the common language is Koine Greek. Native languages are still spoken in local regions of the empire. When the Roman Empire fell, the regional dialects of Latin diverged further from each other and become separate languages. Because of the nature of Latin alphabets, communication is also impossible in the written form. As a result, the once unified Romans became separate linguistic based ethnic groups.
The geography of the Mediterranean basin doesn’t lend itself to political unity in the way the core of China does, is something that has to be taken into account.
The North China Plain and Yangtze Delta are extremely flat, and MASSIVE. For one of the most habitable and populous regions on earth to have that much of pull towards unity, it’s difficult to see how it would not be a large, centralised power most of the time. It’s simultaneously flat, lush, and easily defined in its boundaries.
There is no comparable feature in Europe. Perhaps if there were a significant north-south mountain range somewhere east of the Rhine, France could be a decent analogue, but as it is, France has always been squabbling over its eastern border with German states. Honestly the best IRL analogue to China’s situation might be Britain, especially the south-east (which has, incidentally, been fairly continuously unified), but Britain’s core does not logically lead to Mediterranean-centric expansion. The best comparatives on the Mediterranean are the Po Valley, the Nile Delta, Tunisia, the south-western valleys of the Iberian peninsula, and the Thracian plains - all of which have formed the core regions of separate powers, and none of which are more than a tenth the size of China’s core.
Rome pulled off something semi-miraculous which, realistically, has probably been been unachievable since. Europe is a mess of peninsulas, mountains, and valleys that could only be conquered in totality through overwhelming advantages in numbers, sociocultural tech, and military/political organisation. It probably couldn’t have been done before Rome, and there’s probably never been a point since Rome when it could have been done again.
There are 3 kinds of civilizations. Sea merchants, farmers, and herdsman.
If you look at Rome, it's sea merchants. Put it more harshly, pirates. You wage war and take loots as a mean to enrich the country. To keep the empire growing, it must expands outwards.
China builds on farmers, you work the land and development infrastructures, dams, bridges, roads. It doesn't need to expand outwards, thus more stable to run for long time.
The Europe and North Africa empires seem to flip between empires of roads and empires of boats. You can't hold the shores of the med if you don't control the sea. And you can't trade efficiently if you can't secure the shipping. You can have a road empire of Northern Europe or Eurasia, but not of the Mediterranean.
I feel like the simplest explanation is just ethnic groups and the power they wielded, along with the disunity of the core ethnic groups as well. Italians are, demonstrably from history at least, a bag of cats that only seem to get along when somebody is threatening them, or one of the cats is big enough to krump the others in line. Virtually as soon as Roman domination collapsed in the West, the Italic mountain tribes just buzz off to be independents paying lip service as most to lowlander power. The North, center, and south relatively split into their own areas, and some fragment even further into fiercely sovereign republics/petty kingdoms. It takes nearly a thousand years to cobble Italy back into a somewhat integral border, and further time than that to wholly reunify it.
And this is without the further issues of Germans being incredibly distinct from Italic peoples, Germans internally being incredibly independent, France being a demographic mess for centuries and taking forever to restore its OWN integrity after the collapse of the Merovingian and Carolingian state (which possibly in a sense is a new 'roman dynasty' in the sense of being another large geographic area unifying lots of territory under the same faith no less while comparing things to ancient and medieval China).
Meanwhile, from at least my more limited comprehension of Chinese history, every Chinese dynasty is either the Yellow River using its immense agricultural, and thus industrial output to suppress and rule everything in its surroundings - or a steppe group which manages to usurp this power in addition to northernly domination by their respective host.
Also also more musing, but Europe has huge population clusters around rivers or coasts scattered all over the place, along with the 'center' of the Roman Empire truly being an ocean which acted as a highway. Meanwhile the Chinese are locked in place by mountains and deserts which are semi impassable by large forces. It's a continental empire with continuous land borders rather than an oceanic empire with discontinuous borders.
The official country names, languages, scripts and systems of all dynasties in China belong to the Han people!😏There is no empire ruled by nomadic tribes!It can only be said that two emperors were foreigners, but China had already skipped slavery and feudalism! There is no government that does not accept foreigners, and there is no government that bypasses the system to promote foreigners!😏
There are also nomadic tribes that have Terror rule the 1000-year reign of the Han people (the main sacrifice of the Shang-Zhou human sacrifice system)And 1000 years of high-pressure colonization (Han-Tang Dynasty)There is also a 1000-year period of mutual rule (Song-Qing Dynasty).
That's a very long way of saying Europe has a less centralizing geography, which is bloody obvious to any historian.
这就是唯一的真相。
nice vid; I never even really considered the comparison of the roman and chinese empires! 🤔😲
Oh, yeah, the Roman Empire coexisted with the Chinese Han Empire at the same time, one in the east and one in the west. And the Chinese knew about the Roman Empire.
I think it's more complicated than it's mostly down to proximity to Eurasian steppe.
First, Europe was kind of united many times. Besides the examples already mentioned, Holy Roman Empire, Habsburg dynasty, Napoleon, Hitler, Soviet Union, they all had sizes similar to Rome. And currently, European Union.
But most importantly, geography. Europe as way too many defensible places: lots of large islands, peninsulas, continental seas, mountains and big rivers. Its why Europe had so many small but powerful nations, because worst come pass, they can barricade behind.
The Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon and Hitler all saw themselves as restoring the Roman Empire in some ways. But it's a bit of a stretch to include Soviet Union in this equation. There is basically zero overlap between Soviet and Roman territory. Nor did the Soviet Union ever seriously tried to take back core Roman territory - it was just too far, and the USSR wasn't interested in such a reunification project.
Thanks. This is a fascinating topic, and I hope that you return to it in more detail at some point in the future. As you note, it also relates to the important subject of 'the great divergence' with the political fragmentation of the European peninsular, and the competition which that engendered being regularly cited as a factor in the 'rise of the west'.
What the main difference between Europe and China?
Why Empire was holding together under Odoacer and Theodoric? And Justinian reconqured it. Because there was local support for empire, for Rome. Belisarius told his troops that locals are citizens of Rome just like them. And local people helped to reconquer Northern Africa and Italy, they rised against Goths and participate in repairs of Rome walls.
But after that, European mentality chaged to seeking self-determination and individual liberties. Italy became land of city-states and republics. They resisted French and Spanish (Aragon) influence... ( see Italian wars). Republic of Venice or the Pope alwas stepped in if someone breaked balance in Italy, to put that country down.
I hadn’t thought about the geographic aspects of it, that adds to the picture. Not all dynastic changes were initiated by step people
It is something about the Northern invaders of China getting assimilated in to China. They took over and ruled instead of creating new political and cultural entities. Yes in West Rome the Germanic Kingdoms adopted local dialects of Latin and part of their culture but it was completely new nations with different economies, military organization, way of rule and administration etc. Rome was replaced by something new. Germanic peoples, Slavic Peoples, Arabs and Turkic Peoples didn't just take over the rule of Rome, they created new nations with new cultures. Rome was gone for good, there was no Rome left to reunite.
I would argue against this viewpoint, pretty vehemently. China has a cultural unifying force, the Tang, Song, and Ming all followed the Sui and stand in very stark contrast to his argument.
It's Islam, specifically the Umayyad failure to take Constantinople and substitute the eastern romans. If they had succeeded Islam would be the next step in western eurasian civilization, just christianity or the conquest of the greek world by the romans. Instead it became it's own civilization because the previous one survived and, by the time Islam destroyed Rome centuries later, it had already taken an identity in opposition to the romans. Mehmed II being a romanophile was the exception, turks and muslims in general equated romans with christians and therefore with "the other". But the original arab conquerors were very integrated in the eastern roman ethos and, had they triumphed in Constantinople and Tours (optional) you would have an arabized and islamicized post-roman world very similar to umayyad al-andalus. Instead we got a situation more similar to the relationship between almohad/almoravid al-andalus and the christian realms. Ie islam not as a new thing that comes to dominate a new era of western eurasian civilization, but as a foreign other established as different and often an adversary.
Throughout Chinese history, there have been many instances of ethnic integration and wars, but the concept of the "Central Plains" (Zhongyuan) has never changed. Our ancestors believed that the concept of the nation is subordinate to culture and ethnicity.
Completely misses Translatio Imperii. The Goths started seeing themselves as Romans, The Franks and Germans saw themselves as the successors to Rome, Germans and Austrians saw themselves as the successors to the Holy Roman Empire etc. And now with the EU we have another "Rome"
good joke, Africans are also Roman
Translatio Imperii was how non-Romans claiming the Roman Empire without the approval of the real-existing Romans.
it was more of an institutional legitimacy claiming, without much territory overlap with the actual Mediterranean-spreading Roman empire that centralized its power in Rome (& later Constantinople, to a degree)
@@Bamboo-fk5dm Are these "Real-Existing Romans" with us in this room right now?
@@LittleMushroomGuy Who are Romans is hardly a question for Romans.
I think one of the key factors is the Chinese writing system is not a spelling system, which made it possible to spread and maintain a similar culture and beliefs across time and space. That makes the Chinese civilisation unique.
4:26 Macedonia during Alexander the great?
Edit: oh... well now i feel dumb for writing this
Also from a different viewpoint of why Rome didn’t reunify, or any other major all/largely-encompassing European entity was created to be semipermanent is mainly (in my opinion) due to the success of Charlemagne’s empire, and their practice of splitting the land among the sons,instead of keeping a unified state.
You could say that the transition from elite desire to participate in power-sharing via bureaucratic institutions to the decentralization of executive power amongst them is what really did Roman system in long-term. What kept Rome going at the top was everyone agreeing that the system was serving everyone's best interest and provided a fair platform for competition and cooperation, but once the barbarian kings post-Theodoric dispensed with such notions there was nothing pushing for Roman institutions and thus they withered into dust.
Do you have sources or suggestions for further reading?
As Prof. Mary Beard of Cambridge said citing another scholar:
"We should be amazed that Rome held it together for so long
in the first place"
A curious question, do you think the pre-classical egytpian concept of Ma'at is similar to the Chinese "mandate of heaven"?
Mediterranean if we look at it was never unified.. Even during the hey day of the Roman Empire it was basically Latin speaking west mean while Greek speaking East.. Later on by medieval era it got divided into three parts with Latin Speaking West, Greek Speaking East and Arabic speaking South and South East.. Compared to that Ancient China was always culturally and linguistically united in some way...
I disagree. The linguistic and cultural difference existed in China too. Even during the beginning of the Han dynasty parts of the country still stick with their warring state culture and languages. I mean just look at how many dialects the Chinese have.
If we were to really point at one thing that glued China together so many time, Confucianism is probably up there.
The argument I have read from Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was that the ultimate factor was geography. Europe is more segregated by mountain ranges and dense forests, with a large sea (the Mediterranean) making political integration of Europe and North Africa trickier. Rivers, being vital conduits of trade in previous eras, were (and are) smaller in Europe than in China. By contrast, eastern Eurasia east of the Tibetan Plateau and Taklamakan Desert, south of the Gobi Desert and Siberian taiga forests, and north of the dense Indochinese jungles are smooth, flat plains encompassing a giant area, with two huge rivers that could connect multiple large population centers. This made it (relatively) easy to conquer, and hold, the whole region under political control if other factors were favorable, too. The fact that the ancient Romans were able to conquer as much land as they did may have been a sheer historic fluke, then, that was never again replicated due to the odds against even that level of accomplishment.
What I was taught in the past is that various groups would rise to conquer China. But once they did, they saw there were systems in place that were so good at controlling the population and government, and for generating wealth, that they would adopt these systems. And effectively become "Chinese" in culture and language, even if they weren't ethnically. Rome did the same thing for a long time. They just did it in reverse, conquering the territory themselves and then instituting Roman systems in that conquered territory. If this is correct, it would explain why reunification and adoption stopped in the late Empire period. Because the empire itself was contracting. So the lands they lost or never conquered didn't have Roman political or cultural systems. And a lot of the states that rose up in this way didn't want to emulate the empire that was either their brutal oppressors of the past and/or seen as a dying empire. But most everyone in East Asia seemed to want a connection to Chinese culture in some way. Even if they didn't want to be a part of them politically (Korea, Japan, Khmer, Siam, etc).
I'm struggling to think of many institutions that an external conqueror would want to adopt in Roman lands. There's the law code, and maybe the church?
@@Septimus_ii Early on they might have wanted to emulate their systems of law, military, architecture and senate which seemed to be making them quite efficient and strong. But after the Republic era? Yeah, I can't think of anything either. Even the church was adopted from outside Rome.
@@maxis2kThe visigoths adopted many Roman institutions.
Taking bits of Chinese culture
It was the same in Mesopotamia before the Persians.Nomadic tribes settled,assumed the core population religion,culture and government.
Sumerians>Akkadians>Amorites (Assyrians and Babylobians)>Arameans>Chaldeans
I think the geography is crucial here. Northern China is much flatter and easier to unify than the rugged south. This is especially true for mobile cavalry based armies. Any force that is able to control the North China plain (The traditional center of power in china) has the resources and centralization of power to conquer the rest of china, even if it takes decades. Before the Southern Song, the north had all the economic advantages (Silk Road, Grand Canal, The Yellow River, Population, Production, etc.). The periods of division can be seen as result of the mountainous and jungle terrain of the south delaying full unification even against overwhelming odds.
there's also the importance of written language. in china, there was only ever one written language, chinese, which everyone used: to be literate meant to write in classical chinese. meanwhile, over in rome, there was latin, greek, egyptian, and aramaic in use in writing for centuries already, with latin just being the newest of many. this allowed everyone to keep their ethnic identity intact, and their descendants have preserved it to this day. after the collapse of rome, this didn't end, with armenian, german, arabic, and more arising as additional widely-used identity-preserving literary languages.
contrast this with china, where every conquered ethnicity, lacking a written language (until MUCH later), was basically doomed to have their language (and therefore their identity) erased, with this process ongoing today (take the hmong peoples as an example). the hieroglyphic system chinese uses also prevents the literary language from splitting into many pieces, unlike what ultimately happened to latin after rome failed to reunite after 1000 years (and what's currently happening to arabic).
I'm chinese and I think it's because of landscape, many times we collapse and devided into many nations they're mostly in the large plain area so the reunion was inevitable seems everyone seeked larger territory and power, plus our cultural identification has always been strong until now, while roman's territory was highly seperated by landscape
Mountains, Rivers, Jesus
Despite all the comments, the video is actually very insightful
Rome didn't invest enough in Horse Archers.
Case closed.
JK.
Steppe tried to reunify Rome, but new trade routes prevented it.
The last steppe people to arrive at Europe were Ottomans. Ottomans could reach an economic power to dominate Mediterranean in the beginning of 16th century when they took full control of termination ports of trade routes at Syria and Egypt.
However, new trade routes caused collapse of Silk Road and Spice route, ie. Ottomans never had the wealth they could have a few centuries before that. In parallel direct trade with Asia (and later colonization of Asia) together with wealth flowing from America made western Europe extremely rich.
China was based around two rivers and could be controlled relatively easily, Rome was based around a sea
An empire thats bacically a coast around a sea has a massive perimeter to defend for its land area. There are the iberia-magreb regions, celtic region, greco- balkan-italian region, levantine arab region and the African Egyptian region. There's like 4 main separate groups brought together by the med
I have mixed feelings about this topic. The Qing, which ruled China from the 1600s to 1911, were not Han people. So that's quite a long amount of time where China isn't quite you know, the China of the Tang or the Ming. When China threw off the Qing in 1911, the country still was not reunited at all, but continued as a concept, and the country was stuck in the War Lords era and Civil War Era. Always left out of the conversation for some reason, is that the Americans and the Soviets saved China and helped bring it into being in modern times. A unified China wouldn't exist without America and the Soviet Union, despite the differences each of those sides had about what the future of China should look like, politically. In summary: China isn't an inevitable concept. There are a lot of times in the modern period (1600-onwards) where it looked like China might have disappeared.
The Qing were sinicized just like the Mongols became with the Yuan, there’s still a sense of continuity. Think of a stronger HRE that stayed more true to Roman traditions and political frameworks. China was disunited for centuries after the Jin Dynasty until the Sui, the argument here isn’t whether China inevitably unifies, it’s why it does at the end. You can also argue China isn’t unified today with the ROC and Taiwan away from the Mainland which is comparable to the Qing conquering the Mainland and Ming loyalists setting up a rump state in Taiwan, in a strikingly similar fashion to the todays situation with Taiwan todayz
@@stevens1041 to quote Deng Xiaoping “a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat”. Jin Yong used that quote to point out that a Manchu like Kangxi is an all time great emperor. He initiated the High Qing era with stability, general prosperity for the common people.
Good rulers don’t need to be Han. Even the ethnicity of Han is problematic due to millennia of intermixing with various ethnic groups. DNA tests show divergence between northern Han and southern Han. Northern Han typically have nomadic steppe people mixed in their DNA, while the southern Han can carry Thai, Vietnamese or austronesian DNA.
That’s like saying England is not English because it’s been ruled by Normans since AD 1066. At least the Han overthrew Mongols and Manchus eventually who even adopted Chinese dynastic names. England is stuck with Norman rule even today with the English class system, the Chinese don’t suffer from that.
And why is China unified because of Americans and Soviets? Have you never heard of a dude named Mao Zedong, the Communist Party of China and the People’s Liberation Army???
@@martytu20 Well, my point was that I don't think China is an inevitable concept. But, of course, China is a concept that exists today. Is this good or is this bad? That is the real good question. Large, diverse empires (am I allowed to call China that?), are difficult to manage. Some people lament the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, although most places that lived under such a system did not enjoy it much. I strongly believe, long before I saw this video, that the Western Roman Empire going away was probably a good thing, in the long run. Smaller polities are more responsive to their constituents, generally speaking. Having different kingdoms gives people nearby alternatives to flee too, if one ruler gets too many stupid ideas. China, for all its growth the last 40 years, still ranks very low on the income/person list. The reasons for this are probably extremely difficult to get at, but look--China spends more than its entire defense budget on internal security and policing. Same as all Empires in the past had to do. Is this a benefit to the average person or a drain on the living standards of Chinese? These are open ended questions.
I was finally able to pin down to one thing in the vast amount of features of the Chinese bureaucratic machinery that were different from Roman governmental bureaucracy at that time: the census. Don't get me wrong, the Roman Empire did eventually conducted its census. However, the Qin dynasty was actually founded on the strength of her ability to conduct full-scale population census which included creating family registries and thus the need to have proper names. A name gives people an identity. This turn of historical events was masterfully captured in the manga Kingdom (especially chapters 800-807).
The Roman Empire was geographically more distant and dispersed compared to China due to the Mediterranean Sea
Don't you know China is as big as Europe?
@@alexhu5491 Are you talking about modern China or historical China? Because historical China was much smaller than modern China
The issue is not related to the surface only, but to the way it is distributed. Historical China had its entire surface united into one bloc, while the Roman Empire had its surface distributed over large distances separated by the Mediterranean Sea.China was also more culturally and linguistically unified than the Roman Empire, and this is again because China is united into one bloc, unlike the Roman Empire
In fact, the Romans' ability to keep their empire united for centuries is a remarkable achievement
@@akramkarim3780 Roman Empire and Han Empire exist in the same period, Roman Empire 5 million km, Han Empire 6 million km, each Chinese region have different geographical aspect. Don't you know in ancient times sea and river are better way of communication, trade?
@@alexhu5491 The Han Empire, which had half its area in the deserts of western China?
You are talking about trade, while I am talking about the movement of peoples and armies over great distances and across the seas, which is very difficult
You're mixing everything together and arguing while my point is clear, the Roman Empire extended over greater distances than historical China and was divided by many seas, making it difficult to maintain or reunify
simple, clear, easy
@@akramkarim3780 The Romans conquered Carthage thanks to the Roman navy, Caesar conquered Egypt thanks to the Roman navy, Lucius Cornelius Sulla conquered Greece thanks to the Roman navy, the Mediterranean Sea is the Romans' backyard
Very interesting video. An analogy that comes to my mind is the East Slavic People, who are also adjacent to the Eurasian Steppe. The original Kievan Rus state disintegrated into numerous rival princedoms before being predominantly conquered by the Mongols. The Slavic principalities then gradually severed ties with the Mongol rulers and re-assembled themselves into a larger East Slavic state spearheaded by The Grand Duchy of Moscow, later rebranded The Tsardom of Russia. When the Russian Empire finally collapsed it was rapidly reconquered by the Bolsheviks who in turn collapsed in 1991. This is of course a massive oversimplification but I think it fits into the discussion of how states adjacent to the Eurasian Steppe seem to collapse and reassemble themselves time and time again.
I think the most important issue is still population and language. During 五胡乱华(Upheaval of the Five Barbarians) it was pretty much a disastrous barbarian invasion and immigration, but their rulers eventually chose to speak Chinese and follow Confucianism. After that, Yuan and Qing both came as warlords, still using Chinese bureaucrats, and the majority of the population was still Chinese. Qing almost worked like Spartans, they divided their own Manchurians from the Chinese and disallowed interracial marriage. In late 19th century, they didn't introduce any degree of democracy because the Manchurian would surely get outvoted in that case. There was nothing like Jizya to encrouage conversion either.
华北平原(North China Plain) also contains most of the people, even today. Any state that controlled it almost meant absolute dominance at then, preventing separatist states.
So imagine the Franks and Goths were all Roman wannabes, and reconquesting Italy means Justinian almost automatically regained control of the entire Mediterranean. Bulgarians all chose to speak Greek. There was no old enemy like Persia either. And the Seljuk and Ottomans were a group of warlords only, either converted to Orthodox or didn't bother converting churches into mosques. And by the end of WW1 there were tens of millions of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, with only a few thousand Turks living in a separate zone in Constantinople. Yeah, that's easy Megali Idea for sure.
Maybe Persia would be a better example...
The assumption of sinification isn't entirely true. The Yuan also called themselves the Yeke Mongyol Ulus ('Great Mongolian Empire'), and also claimed themselves the successor of the fragmented Mongol empire. It is more a Mongolian empire over Chinese lands, rather than an uncomplicated Chinese empire. The Yuan in any case de-sinicized when they were displaced by the Ming in 1368 back to the steppes.
The Qing did not disallow interracial marriage - the historians Peter Perdue and Pamela Kyle Crossley pointed out that the Manchu emperors often promoted intermarriages between Manchu and Mongol nobilities at the exclusion of the Chinese, up to as late as the early 19th century.
@@rabbit-munch-carrots Kublai Khan did have some great ambitions but de facto he was pretty much just a Chinese emperor with some extended territory like Tang or Qing. Most Mongolians didn't like the idea but he did sinicize a lot. Chinese bureaucrats, laws, emperor title, and moved to Beijing. He was trying to be recognized as a Chinese emperor.
While Great Yuan was only the formal name in Chinese, its formal name did change from 大蒙古国 to 大元大蒙古国. That could be Great Yuan Great Mongolian Empire, Great Mongolian Empire of Great Yuan, or Great Yuan-Great Mongolian Empire. Still something important.
It was pretty much a Chinese empire except it treated Chinese like living stocks systematically. But honestly, that's basically what every Chinese empire does, even today. (Ming wasn't better anyway)
Northern Yuan at first still controlled a few Chinese provinces, and even after that, the systems and titles were still pretty Chinese.
For the interracial marriage part, sorry. Didn't think much about it, was only trying to discuss Chinese-Manchurian relations there. And yeah there were Manchurian-Mongolian marriages.
@@benmedicaster2689那是按照等级划分的。像印度一样有四等人制度。谁先越早加入就等级就越高。谁越晚加入谁就属于底层
The simplest answer is geography. Europe has tons of natural barriers, preventing an offensive force from crossing and making easy the formation of seperate identities. China in comparison doesn't. So China tends toward unification, and Europe towards the opposite.
But Rome reunified many times. China was reunified multiple times by different people groups, with different languages and traditions. The same could be applied for Rome: the HRE and Costantinople both considered themselves Rome. A better question would be why no successor of Rome successfully conquered all the former territiories.
P.S. other honorable mentions, all the kingdoms of Italy ( the one of the ostrogoths, the one of the lombards, and so on) all claimed to be Rome. The Holy roman emperor was "roman" because he took also the crown of Italy.
The Roman state went through great changes and upheavals, but ultimately lasted much longer, in one form or another, than any particular dynasty in China. Though some dynasties might be seen more as continuation of the same state than others were. But it seems to me that in the long term that China was much more effectively unified/assimilated in an ethnic sense. Geographically as well, the core regions of China seem much more easy to repeatedly conquer and hold together as a cohesive whole. In the case of either empire, the territorial extent between different 'versions' was never exactly the same, but certainly the 'core' regions of China were more consistent, even if there was perhaps somewhat a similar split between north and south as there was between the Roman west and east.
THE alternate history scenario by default: Rome remaining united and China fragmenting into nations...
I think this is the wrong question in many ways:
(1) The Western Roman Empire fell, but the Eastern Roman Empire remained. It is only in the modern era it is recognised as the "Byzantine" Empire. To everyone during its existence, Byzantine was Rome. And it did wax and wane during the last 1,000 years of its existence until the Ottomans ended it.
(2) People did try to unify Western Rome too. Take Charlemagne, for example, who ruled over an Empire comprising most of modern day France, Germany, the Benelux, and most of northern Italy.
(3) The difference between China and Rome is, I think, one mostly of geography. China is a contiguous landmass, whereas Rome spanned the periphery of the Mediterranean. It is far easier to unify China and assimilate it into a single culture than for Rome to do the same. Indeed, China had Qin Shihuang who standardised laws, language, weights, etc. I don't think any Roman Emperor ever wielded the kind of power Qin Shihuang did over China.
The answer is simple.
When China is disunited, patriotic heroes arise to unite it again or free it from foreign domination. From the Duke of Zhou to Confucius to the First Emperor and of course The Three Kingdoms Period, it was an Age of Heroes with Patriots swearing oaths of Brotherhood in Peach Orchards 🍑 to preserve Chinese civilization and China itself. These tales inspired the founders of T’ang, Song and Ming dynasties as well as Mao Zedong and the warriors of the People’s Liberation Army today.
Rome, Greece and Western civilization has always lacked heroes of the caliber of Guan Yu and his sworn brothers or a cultural Hero like Confucius. The West lacked Heroes and Patriots sworn to uphold and cleanse the sacred soil of their civilization unlike China. The West never developed the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, never developed the concept of the sacredness of a civilization and nation and heritage like China.
Lame. The Roman empire was filled with individuals who would've loved to reunify it.
What nonsense. You are espousing the ideology of Han chauvinism that did not exist until the modern era and sought to lazily paint the downfalls of Chinese dynasties as the results of foreign malice rather looking inward to its deficiencies. To borrow a quote from Durant: "A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within".
Duke of Zhou was impactful in consolidating the Zhou dynasty during an era of INTERNECINE strife. These were proto-state stage of history when the Han/China identity have not even stabilized yet.
Confucius did more to damage and impeded the progress of Chinese civilization's early start by entrenching social class rigidity and fostering a culture of subservience to those in power. His teaching found favor with despotic rulers as it supported their consolidation of power while extinguishing the parallel development of legalism in governance, relying only on governors behaving in a "moral" fashion as way to ensure good governance.
Qin was a state on the periphery of Chinese civilization that spend its entire time slaughtering hundreds of thousands in neighboring states to impose their own hegemonic domination. People of this era identified more as being Zhao, Wei, Qi or Chu, rather than being Chinese despite your 1500-years-too early anachronistic portrayal. Viewed from another perspective, it is the first Emperor that was the foreign invader that wiped out multitudes of culture, language and imposed their way of life upon the rest of China.
Three kingdom was a civil war stemming from the downfall of the Han due to internal political instability and strife. Han did more to tear the state apart than any borderland foreign power could hope to achieve seeing that the Xiongnu has already suffered extermination under Han Wu Di. You ought to read less fictionalized romance portrayal and more actual history. Liu Bei was a warlord that opportunistically took advantage of political fragmentation and carved out a state for himself. He and his "brothers" utterly failed in unifying China but instead prolonged its fragmentation, weakened the whole of the civilization and depopulated the Northern plains. The Jin may have briefly restored unity but they were short-lived and Northern China subsequently experienced a chaotic 280 years of nomadic tribal groups dominating dynastic politics. I would hardly call Liu Bei a "patriots" given the consequences of his action.
Sui's founding emperor was from a northern military aristocracy family that had intermarried with Xianbei clans for generations and served as generals under the Xianbei's Northern Zhou state. Emperor Wen even had a Xianbei name: 普六茹堅. Seems to me he sought to re-conquer rest of China more for his own personal ambition and strive for power rather than for, again anachronistic, ideals of patriotism. Espousing Han dominion was only a tool to consolidate his control over the majority Han populace. Tang dynasty's Li family share similar origin, they are also northern military aristocracy with deep hereditary ties to the Xianbei elites that they subsequently concealed. During the Sui collapse they were local governor of Taiyuan and seized the opportunity to raise rebellion and seized power from the Sui...who are nominally self-identified as ethnic Han.
Song Emperor Taizu came to power by usurping the throne of the ethnic Han Later Zhou dynasty and they didn't even fully reunify China. Northern Chinese lived just fine under the Tangut-led Western Xia and Khitan-led Liao for better part of 200 years. Subsequent mongol conquest under the Yuan was propelled with ample assistance from Northern Han. Yeah...real "patriotic" heroes as you claimed.
The Chinese civilization is what has endured for millennia, but not as a contiguous state. And Chinese culture is not as homogeneous as you portray, the writing maybe the same but I cannot converse with a southern canton speaker with my Henan accent. Mandarin is modern development propelled into common use and regional cultural practices contain multitude of variations. The simplest explanation for ability to reunify on multiple occasions is geography. China is bound by the sea to the south and east. high mountain ranges to the southwest, desert to the west and barren tundra to the north east. Only a sliver of land corridor along the northwest form path of invasion for nomadic tribes. The central plains is a wide expanse with no barriers while two primary rivers traverse east-west with multitudes of smaller tributaries connecting the north and south. These factors molded the concentration of combat power to the northwestern frontier that granted military ascendancy over the economically-focused southern region. By controlling only a few critical river junctures, namely Xuzhou and Xiangyang, most historical dynasties originating from the north with access to more population and calories due to arable land can impose domination over the rest of China. But history marches on. Over the centuries, Northern China is losing economic relevance to the southern neighbors with the coastal regional gaining far more prosperity than the agriculturally focused heartlands like Shaanxi and Henan. Let us see how much longer the Northern China can continue to assert domination.
you're as bad as the romaboos
@@syjiang ‘Han Chauvinism’ is the force that will dictate the destiny of the planet Earth, the ‘-ism’ more influential than any other, … greater than liberalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, Islamism, etc.
@@chillin5703 like who? What Roman patriots stepped forward to defend the Realm? What Roman hero measured up to Guam Yu? What was the Roman equivalent to the Peach Orchard Brotherhood?
I would say that 1) Rome was ended "slowly" by outer threats. It's western parts were conquered by multiple factions. "Bysantium empire" was largest successor nation, which never really managed to re-conquer things or have new rise, but more likely slower descension. Later Ottoman empire holded pretty much what was Byzantium, adopted even their symbols (crescent moon, etc). While China collapsed almost always by inner instability, not by conquerors from outside (Mongol invasion is only exception I know, and they became new version of China). There was no similar fragmentation like Rome had.
2) When China been fragmented, there been strong feeling of insecurity among population, thoughts that life was better when empire ruled, and now things are more stressful. And that build will to reunite the lands, and support for those who want to reunite the nation. But I do not be aware of descension of Rome having similar phenomenon. People had more acceptance for life without empire, feeling that empire is not needed really. And therefore there were no strong will to reunite empire, nor support for people who attempt to do so. This might be because conquerors had power structure and way to organise society which replaced the Roman one, and was good enough for people to not have too much nostalgia for empire. Or, maybe Rome was quite horrible power for most of it's people, and majority of it's people did not wanted it back? Or both of these reasons - or something else.
All in all, I see that main reason is, that people from the regions supported idea to recreate empire in China, but not in Rome. For recreating Rome or similar been maybe in dreams of some amount of people, and been supported by some amount of people, but also been opposed by well enough people to make it not happening.
>Why Didn't Rome Reunify, When China Did?
I haven't even watched the video yet, but this one's easy: Rome wasn't as ethnically and culturally homogenous as china.
I’d say it was also that China had a reasonably large core area that an Empire could base itself around. While Europe has multiple areas with a decent amount of geographic boundaries between them.
you're mistaking effect for cause
neither was China at the start
Romans in late antiquity used "gens Romana" to refer to themselves.
Your provided argument of empires rising from peripheral states makes a lot of sense. The way I see it, Rome was the only one able to do that with Gaul (modern day France and northern Italy), as the region would become the heartland of strong empires thereafter. They were also able to take advantage of a very similar cycle of empires taking place in the Levant and Anatolia, which is how they got the other half of their empires. Plenty of empires before and since formed the cycle in the Middle East, Rome just so happened to be the only one with sufficient forces and interest westwards to take over the western Mediterranean as well. Meanwhile, in China (and India to a similar degree), it's all rich open territory over which culture and political strength diffused fairly thoroughly.
Also, it's interesting you bring up the Pannonian basin, as one reason the nascent Hungarian kingdom wasn't nearly as powerful as it could've been was because of the Mongols significantly weakening them. A similar story goes for Poland, and there are absolutely other factors.
I kinda disagree with the end of the video. The Europeans were divided, fight among themselves, and quite possibly, hindering their society. While China was united, they invented gunpowder, silk making, porcelain crafts, compass, block printing (maybe Koreans), efficient paper making and more. Only when the Mongols re-established the Silk Road, the Persian, Ottoman, and later the European learned about these technology. Mind you that all these technologies are invented by many unified dynasty, not under a single rule, and yet, they persist.
Do remember also that European powers become very wealthy after they conquered many lands, either from tribes, weakened kingdoms, and of course, treachery within a dying empires like Qing and Mughal. Not because they're disunited.
European powers starts become very wealthy after 30 years war, with peace of Westphalia. It's the peace the weaning of Church's influence that makes merchant more powerful and that brings in the wealth. The main problem is the Catholic Church that is preventing the innovation and draining out all the wealth to build astonishing beautiful Cathedrals.
@fromfareast3070
Kinda agree with you. 30 years war was quite brutal, and it reduces the power of the church a lot. However, I shall make it clear that the advancement of science and technology is actually being sponsored by the church during the Medieval Europe (because they have all the wealth). It's just that everything must be approved by them first, hence it's not readily available to the masses, they keep the knowledge for themselves.
Good points, but single rule can also be dangerous. In Emperor Hongxi ordered Zheng He's treasure fleet to be burned in 1424, and you could argue that that was a set back for Chinese development.
@@anotherelvis Given the circumstances at the time, the burning of the treasure fleet made sense given that the Ming is having some financial issues due to building the Great Wall and crop failures. The Empire simply doesn't have the resources to keep a massive fleet operating around. And besides, if you look at it at a Chinese perspective, it wasn't really necessary to keep such a fleet around. As far as the Chinese are concerned, everyone else living outside the core Chinese territory are barbarians. They see no worth going around and finding new lands - China even at the time, has plenty of lands. Even if the Chinese fleets managed to arrive in Alaska or California, they would just look at it, see nobody lives there and go back home and report to the capital that these lands are worthless and worse than the land occupied by barbarians (since again, nobody lives there). The Chinese people dont have the problem the Europeans are facing back then. Afterall, the main reason why colonialism started was not because of the sake of getting new lands but to have something to trade with China. It could be silver, gold, sugar or anything that would be of value for the Chinese, which are not that many kinds of items to begin with. In fact, the discovery of the new world was driven by the motivation of the Europeans to find a way to China that would bypass the Ottoman-controlled silk road. For China, well, they are China. They think they have everything.
Political power struggles tend to divide China while the common written language and common Cultural customs tend to unify China.
roman republic offshoot still lives as some small state in Italy that interacted with the U.S president Abraham lincoln.
Wait, what? 0-0
@@JustinCage56 talking about San Marino I think. It's a bit of a stretch because if that counts, then every state in the ex roman empire counts
@@JustinCage56 San Marino, do not know why name do not come to me.
@@FlameQwert If San Marino counts then the US and Iraq should also count, and everything between the them
@@HD-mp6yy U.S does not count as a offshoot but a successor state.
What in Iraq history make it an offshoot?
As a Chinese person I think it has some geopolitical factors. The strongest edge faction who conquered central plain firstly can easily swept all other local factions easily. Except later Tang in Five Dynasties due to their own defects.
At 3:00 you forgot the Song Dynasty
there were nomand anti-emperors
@@hokton8555 what's nomand?
If you mean nomad, Song was definitely not a nomad power
@@sumi2973 the juchen dynasty & qara qitai
technically speaking, china was not unified under one emperor
Unlike other dynasties before and after Song, Khitan Liao and Song were "more or less" equal diplomatically.
There were now two suns in the sky😂
Because China was not only unified via hard power, soft power also unified it with more lasting effects thanks to contiguous topography and early governmental standardizations.
The institutions and values created in Rome rule the world. Latin in its Portuguese, French and Spanish versions is present in every continent. China is today a popular republic, those are both latin terms.
I don't know, maybe we should ask ourselves instead why Rome survived and the Chinese Empire did not.
Chinese system are too complex and isn't suitable to be applied to other cultures with different historical context.
Even traditional Sinosphere countries like Japan, Vietnam, and Korea
Didn't completely adopt Chinese values,
Alter some of them to fit their own cultures (Japanese Zen Buddhism and the kana script),
Or even just straight up abandoned it the moment they saw some aspects of Chinese culture as impractical
(Korea and Vietnam ditching Chinese characters for other writing systems)
Hey I hope you do more videos on the the great divergence
"demographics are key" China with a legit massive Han ethnic core always had the manpower to overwhelm and influence it's region and does to this day via Sinicization policies. Rome on the other hand had no proper ethnic basis nor awareness and population to deal with the multiple ethno-linguistic groups (Germanians, Turks, Slavs, Arabs,...) taking over their territories
One can say that Rome, having been burdened with demographic losses, succumbed to strange outside forces and internal divisional disunity
@@shinsenshogun900More internal division than demographic losses.
i think another thing thats an important consideration is that the chinese language specifically through its written system has maintained cultural continuity over the millennia in a way that greek or latin struggled to do. even when latin remained the liturgical language which the upper classes of europe regardless of their vernacular likely knew after rome's fall, the long-term trend of the roman language speakers being mixed and ruled by speakers of germanic and slavic languages is different to that of china where the vernacular dialects if not intelligible still remained part of the same fundamental family from my understanding not accounting for periods such as the mongol or other conquest periods which were later overturned. for sinic-derived language hegemony
China had free man called Peasants. They aren't slaves or serfs. They had family names. Also Chinese peasants can became Rulers. Merit vs born/given position.
The reign of the 5 good emperors were a series of adopted heirs that were competent.
Much like how Roman families have powerful lineage, China also has powerful clans that dominated the bureaucracies until the Tang-Song period. The Sima clan managed to usurp the throne from the Cao by weakening the Cao family.
China was not a bastion of meritocracy though in theory it was. The truth of the matter though is that the exams peasants took to enter the Chinese bureaucratic elite were exceedingly difficult by design. Furthermore, over the centuries the entrenched bureaucratic elites and the state as a whole made it more difficult for new blood to enter the bureaucratic elite. Such was done by the Chinese State, and by extension the entity we know as “China” for the purposes of keeping power in the state, discouraging any and all change and progress to keep the elites and the state in power, and to ensure full control and domination of the societies and their civilizations of which China by its very existence restrained, oppressed, and exploited.
In reality, literacy in China is very expensive, because of how involved reading and writing is in Chinese culture. This same phenomenon was also present in Japan and Viet Nam (when Viet Nam used Chu Nom writing system).
Diocletian's father is thought to have been a freed slave. How's that for social mobility?
One forgets of a tale of a barbarian slave turned emperor: Shi Le, founder of the Jie-led Later (Shi) Zhao
i also really love this question! however the counterquestion that i always come back to is that if we make the simple answer that "rome" is merely one mediterranean empire of many and that the character of sea empires and keeping them united over centuries is a fundamentally different problem than that of china, why not the north european plain? in the same way that in the east the eurasian steppe gradually narrows and enters the fertile chinese plain, on its western part it also similarly narrows past the carpathians to the fertile plains of germany and france. is it merely climactic reasons that prevent a similar series of state formations in northern europe that we see in the yellow river and later yangtze? why didnt the large unifications of charlemagne, attila, napoleon. or hitler give rise to any real unification in the large european plain in a way that we see in china?
I would argue its because Rome had multiple rivals on its borders, had a great deal of internal division, as well as great ambition from both inside and outside the empire that were to its expense. Its also worth noting the Roman state was never as powerful as the Chinese state nor was it as domineering over and inhospitable towards civilization as the Chinese state and the idea of a “China” is. I would also argue the collaspe of Rome was ultimately a good thing for the entire world as the removal of such a monolithic and monopolist state drove progress through competition.
Because every Chinese emperor had a dream to surpass Qin Shi Huang, and unification was the most fundamental requirement.
Gosh! there is a very simple answer to this question. China is built on the 2 long rivers: Yellow and Yangzi. The need to control the flooding, particularly the Yellow river, demanded unification.
Rome is build on a sea. By nature, it was a miracle that Rome empire even existed.
It’s way simpler than that. The military power after Sui didn’t “come from the steppe”. Tang, Song and Ming were all Han. China just had ultra low taxes compared to every other country before 1911. Whenever the empire collapse life got much worse, and when it got back together, life got better. The opposite was true of Rome as taxes increased endlessly and ruined the people. Life got better everywhere but Britain when the empire collapsed, so there was no desire from the common people to see it reunify.