Many times throughout history, it has taken civil war or even war between the different states/provinces many years to decide who deserves the “Mandate of Heaven.” Remaining mostly an agriculturally based society, these skirmishes arise typically with a family whose local influence in the field or political system has some clout and the oppression of those in the local area. Communication from community to community was not established until around the Qin/Ch’in dynasty around the birth of Christ. To this day, local uprisings, typically with students or the intellectual community, are the basis of all revolutionary actions brought against the government.
Change, the amount allowed, and the rate at which it occurs is another consistency throughout the existence of China. China has always feared change for it challenges those with power to change also. Those with the power and influence feel that with change, their power may change meaning they may not remain the family in charge. China has always regulated change through small means: from the nationalistic intentions of the Qin/Ch’in dynasty in bringing a unified China to the surface to the intellectual turn in the Ming dynasty that ended all overseas exploration because of the loss in trade value in what China was receiving compared to what it had to offer. The changes allowed or forced upon the people of China by whatever governing power always occurred because it benefited, in the most parts, the upper class citizens as there has been no strong middle-class developed in most of Chinese culture. These changes have not always gone unnoticed or even pleasantly received by the majority of the Chinese population, which is in the rural lower-class economic bracket. This reason alone caused many problems throughout history in China.
How each political power dealt with these uprisings from the majority of the people in their country is what defines each time-period. Some put more restrictions on the people, others decided to make a war out of it; any way they chose to deal with it, eventually they were over-run. This is one of the major differences in how each dynasty ruled. Some worked not in direct fear of the common folk, but more understood that they as a central family could not properly rule the country with out help from those around China, living beside the common person. Many chose to run things locally not with some national government that they distributed to the state/province, as an extended hand; but worked with the local people, allowing someone from their own homeland to run the state/province to what they saw best fit.
Confucianism is another thing that has wavered among dynasties throughout Chinese politics. In some dynasties, take the T’ang dynasty for example, who embodied Confucianism to its fullest extent as they employed the civil exam system based on Confucius’ thoughts and practices for placement in their government. Others chose to disregard the thoughts of Confucius and rule how they saw fit, like Chinggis Khan and the Yuan Dynasty.
As time has passed, tradition has guided the Chinese political system through its ages. Some dynasties thought the previous tradition had worked fine with minimal tweaking where as others decided that for their family to remain in power for many generations, major changes in how things were done, needed to be changed. Either way, its people with or without the political powers approval, embodied the traditions of China and China has allowed China to be one of the longest standing, continuously existing civilizations ever.
