Sinic Civilization
The original Chinese civilization (c. 2000 BCE – c. 400 CE), parent of Chinese and Japanese civilizations — the East Asian case study Quigley uses to extend the seven-stage model beyond the Northwest Quadrant
Also known as: Sinic, Sinic Civilization, Ancient Chinese civilization, Shang-Chou-Han civilization
Sinic Civilization is Quigley's analytical unit for the original civilization centred on China — the producing society that rose in the Yellow River (Huang Ho) Valley after 2000 BCE, culminated in the Ch'in and Han universal empires (after 250 BCE), and was largely disrupted by Ural-Altaic invaders after 400 CE (EoC 79). From its debris, in Quigley's typology, emerged two successor civilizations: Chinese civilization (beginning c. 400 CE and culminating in the Manchu Empire) and Japanese civilization (EoC 79–80). Sinic civilization is one of the few cases in Quigley's sample that, like Classical civilization, ran the seven-stage cycle to its conclusion — Expansion, Universal Empire (Ch'in–Han), Decay, and Invasion — and it occupies the same structural role in East Asia that Classical civilization occupies in the Mediterranean.
Origin: The Yellow River Civilization
Quigley locates Sinic civilization's origin in the Yellow River (Huang Ho) Valley after 2000 BCE: "Of these the earliest, Sinic civilization, rose in the valley of the Yellow River after 2000 B.C., culminated in the Chin and Han empires after 250 B.C., and was largely disrupted by Ural-Altaic invaders after A.D. 400" (EoC 79). The mixture that produced it combined neolithic Chinese agricultural populations with intrusive Bronze Age cultural elements transmitted from inner Asia. Quigley is professionally cautious about the East Asian case — "we cannot speak with confidence on this subject" — and accordingly oversimplifies by listing no more than three Far Eastern civilizations: Sinic, then post-Sinic Chinese (c. 400 CE onward), and Japanese (EoC 79). His typology accommodates the long East Asian chronology by treating it as a parent-and-successors sequence comparable to the Mesopotamia/Canaanite/Minoan or the Classical/Western/Islamic patterns of the Northwest Quadrant.
Instrument of Expansion: The Bureaucratic-Feudal State
Although Quigley does not give Sinic civilization a chapter-length analysis in Evolution of Civilizations, his Weapons Systems and Political Stability contains his most sustained East Asian treatment (some 29 pages on Sinic and Chinese cases). The instrument of expansion is best read as a political-bureaucratic organisation — the feudal lordship system of the Chou dynasty, transforming gradually into the bureaucratic imperial state of the Ch'in and Han, and fused throughout with ritual-Confucian ideology. This is structurally similar to Quigley's Egyptian/Andean/Minoan type — "a state that created surpluses by a process of taxation or tribute collection" (EoC 138) — though refined by an unusually developed Chinese administrative scholar-official class with examination-based recruitment by Han times. The Chou feudal system distributed land to hereditary lordships in exchange for military service and ritual obligation, with surplus accumulated at multiple levels — local lord, regional duke, royal court — and reinvested in the productive innovations characteristic of Bronze Age and early Iron Age China. The Ch'in-Han transformation, beginning with the Legalist reforms of Shang Yang in the fourth century BCE and culminating in the Han bureaucratic state, replaced the feudal-aristocratic surplus-extraction with a state-bureaucratic version: direct taxation of peasant households by imperial officials, corvée labour mobilised for state projects, state monopolies on iron and salt, and a standing army funded from these revenues. The Ch'in-Han bureaucracy satisfied the three conditions of an instrument of expansion: incentives to invent (in iron metallurgy, agriculture, hydraulic engineering, the crossbow, papermaking, the seismograph, and a long catalogue of Sinic firsts), accumulation of surplus through state taxation and corvée labour, and investment in productive infrastructure (the great canals such as the Cheng-Kuo Canal, the Great Wall, the imperial road system, and large-scale state granaries that smoothed grain supply across the empire). The instrument worked spectacularly well for some four centuries before institutionalising into the late-Han pattern of magnate latifundia and powerless central state.
The Seven Stages Applied to Sinic Civilization
Quigley's clearest application of the seven-stage model to the Sinic case is in chapter 4: "The core area of Sinic civilization was in the Huang Ho Valley. This area was conquered by Chou about 1000 B.C. and by semiperipheral Ch'in from the mountains of Shensi eight centuries later (221 B.C.). The whole of Sinic society was then brought into a single universal empire by the Han dynasty from its southern periphery (202 B.C.–A.D. 220). The Sinic civilization was destroyed [as a civilization]" by the post-Han invasions (EoC 155). The Chou conquest of c. 1000 BCE represents the conquest of the core area by a semi-peripheral power; the Ch'in conquest of 221 BCE represents the further-peripheral unification; the Han dynasty supplied the Universal Empire (202 BCE – 220 CE); the post-Han Three Kingdoms and Northern-Southern Dynasties period was Decay; and the Ural-Altaic invasions of the third through fifth centuries CE supplied the Invasion phase that ended Sinic civilization (EoC 79, 155). The mapping is unusually clean and supplies Quigley with his East Asian counterpart to Classical Rome.
A Civilization Destroyed Before Reform
Sinic civilization is one of Quigley's principal cases of destruction by external invasion at the close of the cycle: "In Stage 6 [Decay], however, [a civilization] is in danger from any society, even a parasitic one, as is clear from the destruction of Cretan, Classical, Hittite, and Sinic civilizations by non-civilized invaders" (EoC 163–164). The general rule is that the civilization in Decay cannot defend itself even against materially inferior invaders because its productive system has institutionalised; the instrument of expansion has become a vested interest rather than a means of generating surplus for new investment. Sinic civilization, having failed to reform the bureaucratic-feudal instrument after the Han collapse, was overrun and replaced by the successor Chinese civilization that emerged from the debris after 400 CE. This is one of Quigley's structural arguments for why a civilization in Decay is more vulnerable than a civilization in Expansion: the very capacities (military discipline, productive surplus, social mobility) that the cycle of institutionalisation has eroded are precisely those needed for defence.
Parent of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations
In Quigley's typology of cultural links, Sinic civilization is the parent of both successor Chinese civilization (post-400 CE, culminating in the Manchu Empire) and Japanese civilization, and probably others in East Asia (EoC 80). The cultural inheritance — Confucian classics, ideographic writing, Buddhism-via-China-and-Korea, the bureaucratic state model, the ceramic and metallurgical tradition — was transmitted both by physical continuity within China and by export to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. The post-400 successor Chinese civilization is the one Quigley regards as having reached its own Universal Empire under the Manchu (Ch'ing) dynasty and as being in late Decay or early Conflict when intruded upon by Western powers in the nineteenth century. Quigley also leaves analytically open the possibility that contemporary China is the early Mixture phase of yet another new civilization rising from the encounter of late-Chinese and intrusive-Western elements (EoC 166).
Significance: The East Asian Test Case
Sinic civilization matters in Quigley's argument as the major East Asian test case for the seven-stage model. By showing that the same pattern of mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, peripheral universal empire, decay, and invasion can be discerned in a civilization that had no contact with the Northwest Quadrant for most of its history, Quigley establishes the cross-cultural generality of his framework. The clean mapping of Chou/Ch'in/Han onto the peripheralisation rule is one of his most cited illustrations (EoC 155). It also supplies his typology with a second case (alongside Classical) of a civilization that has completed the cycle, providing the empirical basis for his analytic distinction between mid-cycle and late-cycle civilizations.
Cited in
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 79 Quigley
Of these the earliest, Sinic civilization, rose in the valley of the Yellow River after 2000 B.C., culminated in the Chin and Han empires after 250 B.C., and was largely disrupted by Ural-Altaic invaders after A.D. 400.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 80 Quigley
From the debris of this Sinic civilization there emerged two other civilizations: (a) Chinese civilization, which began about A.D. 400, culminated in the Manchu Empire.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 155 Quigley
The core area of Sinic civilization was in the Huang Ho Valley. This area was conquered by Chou about 1000 B.C. and by semiperipheral Ch'in from the mountains of Shensi eight centuries later (221 B.C.). The whole of Sinic society was then brought into a single universal empire by the Han dynasty from its southern periphery (202 B.C.—A.D. 220).
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 163 Quigley
In Stage 6, however, [a civilization] is in danger from any society, even a parasitic one, as is clear from the destruction of Cretan, Classical, Hittite, and Sinic civilizations by non-civilized invaders.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 166 Quigley
By that time the new Indian civilization or the new Chinese civilization may be in Stage 3 and will present greater threats to both Western and Russian civilizations than either of these will present to the other.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 138 Quigley
[The instrument of expansion] can be any kind of organization, military, political, social, religious, and so forth.
- weapons-systems-political-stability Quigley
The Sinic-Chinese case is the most important East Asian instance of the relationship between weapons system, social structure, and political durability — from the feudal chariot-aristocracy of the Chou through the bureaucratised infantry of the Ch'in-Han to the steppe-cavalry pressure that destroyed Sinic civilization after 400 CE.