China
The civilizational core of East Asia
Also known as: China, Chinese, China's, Red China
The civilizational core of East Asia and Quigley's representative case of Sinic Civilization. T&H's modern China chapters cover the late Ch'ing collapse, the Republic, the Sino-Japanese War, the civil war, and the Maoist consolidation (T&H 22).
Quigley's Framing
For Quigley China is the longest continuous civilization in the historical record — the case that most clearly tests his cyclical theory in The Evolution of Civilizations. He treats Sinic Civilization as having passed through multiple full cycles of mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, universal empire, and decay, with the late Ch'ing dynasty representing a terminal universal-empire phase. The modern Chinese collapse — 1839 onward — is read as the impact of an alien, expanding Western Civilization on a decaying universal empire, not as a simple story of Western superiority.
Strategic Role
T&H's twentieth-century China is the great theatre of failed and partly-failed Western intervention: the Open Door, the missionary century, the Republican experiment, the Japanese invasion, the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists, and the eventual Communist victory in 1949. Quigley is sharply critical of Dulles-era American policy toward China — particularly the refusal to recognize the People's Republic — and he reads the Sino-Soviet split as the predictable outcome of two peripheral powers competing for the same revolutionary space. China is, for him, the sleeping giant of the second half of the century, certain to return to great-power status whatever its internal regime.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 22 Quigley
China, the civilizational core of East Asia, is the longest continuous civilization in the historical record.
- evolution-of-civilizations Quigley
The late Ch'ing dynasty represents a terminal universal-empire phase of Sinic Civilization.