ChinaFun

The People’s Republic Of China
On October 1, 1949, the People’s Republic of China was formally established, with its national capital at Beijing. “The Chinese people have stood up!” declared Mao as he announced the creation of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.” The people were defined as a coalition of four social classes: the workers, the peasants, [...]

                                   EARLY DAYS OF THE REPUBLIC
The Provisional Republican Government was set up on 10 October 1911 by Sun Yatsen (1866-1925). Educated in Hawaii and Hong Kong, a Christian and trained medical practitioner, Sun developed a political programme based on the ‘Three Principles of the People’: nationalism, popular sovereignty and livelihood. In 1895 his ‘Revive China [...]

The Manchu proclaimed their new dynasty the Qing (1644-1911), al- though it took them four decades to stamp out Ming loyalists in the south and pacify the entire country. This victory for the Qing came at great cost to the population with acts of severe brutality and massacre.
The Qing neutralised threats from inner Asia by [...]

A man of no great education, Zhu Yuanzhang was a born leader and a strong if harsh ruler. Remembered for his tyranny (he had some 10,000 scholars and their families put to death in two paranoid purges of his administration), he also did much to set China back on its feet in the aftermath of [...]

Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, now reigned over all of China as em- peror of the Yuan dynasty. He had inherited the largest empire the world had ever known. Foreigners were easily incorporated into this ethnically complex empire as land routes were reopened. European missionaries and traders, such as Marco Polo, went to and fro [...]

Another period of disunity followed the fall of the Tang until the North- ern Song dynasty (960-1127) was established. The Northern Song was a rather small empire coexisting with the non-Chinese Liao dynasty (which controlled a belt of Chinese territory south of the Great Wall) and rather less happily with the Xi Xian, another non-Chinese [...]

The reams of literature produced during the Tang dynasty has prompted historians to think of it as the Golden Age. The Three Hundred Tang Poems, compiled from over 48,000 poems preserved from this time, pro- vides Chinese conversation with quotable quotes, much as Shakespeare does in English.
Sui Yangdi was succeeded as emperor by his own [...]

The Wei dynasty fell in 534. It was succeeded by a series of rival regimes until nobleman Yang Jian (d 604) seized all before him to establish the Sui dynasty (581 -618). While the Sui was a short-lived dynasty, its accom- plishments were many. Yang Jian’s great achievement was to bring the south back within [...]