thousand years has been familiar with the inevitably soaring budget. In China the resulting problem was more serious than it has proved in the contemporary West, because it was not coupled with a rapidly growing economy that made possible a corresponding increase in revenue; but the basic fiscal phenomenon has been the same.
Still another aspect of the Chinese cycle has been the steadily expanding defense problem and defense budget. To defend the homeland, the Chinese had to secure the borderlands, and to defend these they had in turn to secure the borderlands beyond them, and thus step by step the defense problem expanded both geographically and financially. The parallels to our own position today are marked. I should not wish to push these parallels to a justification or condemnation of our present foreign policy, but I merely wish to point out that in this, as in many other ways, the patterns of Chinese history find parallels in our own present experience—and that therefore a deeper understanding of China’s past might have considerable relevance for us today.
I should not for a moment advocate that we attempt to squeeze modern European or American history into the patterns of the Chinese dynastic cycle. This would be no better than the attempt we have made to force Asian history into our traditional patterns. All I am saying is that an historian who has a thorough understanding of the dynamics of the Chinese administrative cycle might develop some very stimulating new conclusions about recent European and American history.
An even more obvious application of the theories of the dynastic cycle would be to present-day China. I do not at all agree with those Occidental traditionalists who see in the Chinese Communists nothing but a new dynastic start or an atavistic return to China’s first great imperial dynasty, the Ch’in, with its obviously totalitarian philosophical notions. On the other hand, it is indeed unfortunate that the Chinese themselves have become so enamored of Occidental concepts of progress—Marxist style—that they seem quite oblivious to the many obvious parallels between Chinese Communism and some of the most deplorable features of the ancien regime that they are hoping to destroy.
If we were to take Asian history at all seriously, we might even be able to shake loose from the single most misleading aspect of Western historical theory—that is the assumption that progress is not only inevitable, but is also definitely unilinear. We all know that history falls into ancient, medieval, and modern categories. These categories would be all right if they merely indicated time sequences, as their names imply, but they have come to mean much more than this. “Ancient”
