3 - Phase I and Onwards

Summary

As far back as the rise of unified Qin dynasty in 221 BCE, Asia’s predominant pattern has been concentrated power, not balance of power. Although Chinese power has waxed and waned over the centuries, what is perhaps most enduring was the centrality of China. Every other political actor that emerged in the past two thousand years emerged within the reality or idea of Chinese power. Regarding state formation, although the initial ideas for the subsequent bureaucratic Chinese state emerged at that time, it was neither pervasive, nor did the ideas result from war. Rather, the Qin state (221 to 206 BC) emerged as a result of hegemony, not about conquest or fighting or war. State formation was a result of unification and the need to administer a massive territory and also consolidate political rule beyond the aristocracy in the state and royal court itself. Indeed, what scant proto-bureaucratic innovations that did arise in Phase I were nascent and superficial in scope, and even in China the full Chinese state is usually seen to have emerged in the 7th and 8th centuries AD, not 800 years earlier during the Qin.