英文：為什麼歐洲有幾千年不同的政府結構，而中國祇有一個？是因為中國找到了完美的結構，還是因為它從不理會非富裕的中國人？

 Why does Europe have thousands of years of different government structures when China has had only one? Is it because China found the perfect structure or because it never bothered with the non-rich Chinese?

China is an isolated and Precocious civilization. Even with internal divisions and foreign invasions, it could easily become a unified dynasty.

China was an isolated civilization, so far away that the Persian, Alexandrian, Roman and Arab empires did not dare to waste their time.

China's royal family did not have the habit of intermarriage with foreign countries, naturally it is impossible to find an heir to the throne abroad.

Chinese dynasties are replaced by fighting, and any heroic warlord thief who wants to become emperor can revolt and mutiny, as far as Mao Zedong is an example.

If you lose, you will still be a good man thirty years later.

The next step is to rely on examinations to select officials to manage cities above the county level, and below the county level in the townships and villages rely on the clan chiefs to handle.

As the examination selects officials, the talent of the examination cannot be hereditary, and naturally cannot form a noble nationality.

The number of officials admitted to the examinations and selections was limited to a certain number of places in each province and would not be concentrated in metropolitan areas. The place where the officials served could not be in their birthplace either, but only in a foreign country.

Such a simple operation let the people know that if they were willing to study, they would naturally have an official job.

The country would naturally be concentrated under one central authority.

But the number of Mandarins was very small compared to the population. In the Qing for example there were 27,000 jinshi degrees earned from a population of 400,000,000, which is 0.007%. So we couldn’t really refer to that as meritocratic. And really that proportion should be a lot smaller since the Qing lasted for 261 years and the average Mandarin position may have been only 20 years.

There were more clergy in Europe, as a proportion of the population at 1.000% (including the zeros to show how many more there were), even before considering the other educated (and therefore better paid professions), considering each European country had its own bureaucracy, law courts, and academia. And as far back as reliable records go (1300s), European wages have been higher than Chinese wages, can the Chinese system then be said to be meritocratic? No, I really could not agree with that.

So why do you think there was only one government if you agree by proportion that it wasn’t a meritocracy in China?

The Chinese word for democracy means to be the master of the people and to make decisions instead of the people. The biggest of this masters is the emperor, followed by officials at all levels.

Western democracy means that the people themselves are the masters, they take the power and run the country.

The Chinese idea of polity is to revere the ancient system, and the content of the examinations for selecting officials is based on Confucius' ideas, which cannot be interpreted casually by themselves.

The Western thinkers of polity, from Democritus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Bodin, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, to the present day Jennings, Rasky, Huntington.

There is only one political thinker in China, and the examinations of all the dynasties only test the ideas of Confucius, forming a super-stable structure, and there is only one idea of all the people: Help me make decisions, don't bother me. So there is only one political structure ideology.

In the West, there are so many political thinkers who want to make their own decisions that political experiments naturally increase and political structures naturally diversify.

Very good comment, but that reinforces the question: why is there only one in China? I mean, setting aside the Hundred Schools of thought, some of which, admittedly two and a half Millenia ago now, offered alternatives to the Confucian government philosophy, why has only one government structure persisted until the modern era? Why weren’t there people collaborating to remove power from the wealthy few, and share it among the many instead of the few? Why weren’t intellectuals who benefitted from the unfair system considering how they would feel if they were on the short end of the stick?

Why is there no patriarchal aristocracy in China? Wealthy business aristocrats?

China was divided into territories by co-owners to clansmen, kings and meritorious vassals during the Zhou Dynasty era (c. 1100 BC - 256 BC).

When Qin Shi Huang (259 BC-210 BC) unified China, the discussion of county system vs. feudal system emerged. As a result, Qin Shi Huang chose the county system in order to avoid further wars between clansmen and vassals for the throne as in the Zhou Dynasty.

The early Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD) chose county and feudal system in parallel. However, there were still rebellions of meritorious officials and rebellions of clansmen and nobles, so it was changed to county system. It was also required that the patriarchal nobles who did not rebel had to divide their territories to their children, so the noble fiefs became smaller and smaller and no longer had the power to threaten the emperor.

At the beginning of Jin Dynasty (266-420 CE), because the power of the clansmen of the great families was considered a threat to the royal family, the clansmen were divided into vassals, which resulted in the Rebellion of the Eight Kings.

From then on, there were no more feudal lords in China, only a unified central dynasty.

But I dont think patriarchal aristocracy is why there are different government structures in Europe.

Greek states in Ancient Greece had differing ways of responding to domestic and international issues. These states spoke the same language and the military or economic performance of one state, or the welfare of another, influenced the other states one way or another.

This is famously explored in 400BC Thucydides’ ‘Peloponnesian War.’ In particular it was the communal resistance of workaday Athenians to Persian violence, that lead the populace to realise that their survival and welfare lay in the hands of the many, and definitely not in the hands of the wealthy few. This was not the first European democracy, but the most influential.

The Roman Republic continued this democratic process, though different, to the Empire where it was maintained but hollowed out. There were for a Millenia nods to Democratic values or at least reducing the concentration of power ie Magna Carta, ultimately in Medieval Europe, the same circumstance existed as in Ancient Greece, ie a communal language in Latin (not replace by vernacular until the late High Middle Ages, ie the last scientific paper published in Latin 1860AD), meant that the welfare or performance of one state influenced the actions or reactions of another.

Culminating in the Renaissance to the Modern Era, where there have been a range of experiments most famous those of the US and France which were influenced and direct descendants of Athenian and Republican Roman democratic ideals.

The same issue exists in China, the poor have suffered at the exercise of power by the wealthy (ie imperial family, or anyone who could afford not to work so as to study for the imperial exam (a tiny percentage)). But aside from a change in Emperor, it seems a big open question why the poor majority of China didn’t end the Imperial structure until Communism was introduced?

Chinese people like to bless others with "promotion and prosperity"”升官发财” as an auspicious saying, and many of them really do it.

Confucianism advocates "cultivating one's moral character, cultivating one's family, ruling one's country, and pacifying the world", and regards being an official as the right way to seek wealth and prosperity, and a scholar who does not aim for a career in government is regarded as not doing the right thing.

In the course of more than 2,000 years of history, the concept of "becoming rich as a government official" has evolved into a national cultural tradition and a general social mentality.

In the West, people get rich by doing business; in China, there has only been one boss emperor for generations, just like the one-party dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party today, and Chinese people want to get rich mainly by relying on power, because only power can protect wealth.

Traditional Chinese political thought focuses on how the emperor can control the ministers and the people, because the emperor is equal to the mandate of heaven, there is only one emperor, the people should not be obsessed. Just be a good subject.

The methods of control focused on three main areas.

The emperor manipulates the intrigues of his ministers, those who do not show their voices and identify loyalty, reward and punishment unpredictable and factual calculations.

To implement the decree with severe punishment and heavy rewards, so that all those who obey the law or lack of reward, all those who violate the law and violate the order there is no escape from punishment.

The authority of the government was extended and concentrated in the hands of the lord, so that he became an object of intimidation in order to suppress his subordinates.

Therefore, Chinese political thought focuses on spiritual "control" rather than on changing the institutional structure. For fear of a recurrence of

Thanks for your response, it is informative. There is still a niggling question in me, like 10%, which I think will go unanswered, it’s so strange to me that so many generations were not exposed to a circumstance that demanded a change. Even today, it seems to me that change from the CCP system would be necessary for me, but not enough evidence from China itself to say there is a movement for it

That is why some people call Chinese society and culture a "precocious culture"! or "super-stable structure of Chinese society"

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%85%B4%E7%9B%9B%E4%B8%8E%E5%8D%B1%E6%9C%BA%EF%BC%9A%E8%AE%BA%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A% E8%B6%85%E7%A8%B3%E5%AE%9A%E7%BB%93%E6%9E%84/2044593

I don’t mean this offensively, but I don’t believe it. I think China is the same as every other culture on the planet. We all have gripes and prides. But I guess Europe was the only civilisation that tried to separate the wealthy from the powerful, which might be why the middle class started there?

Chinese overseas immigrants were slaughtered by the Spanish in the Philippines and by the Dutch and Indonesians in Indonesia. Did any Chinese immigrants therefore want to unite with the Chinese there to establish their own country? Why not?

https://www.quora.com/Chinese-overseas-immigrants-were-slaughtered-by-the-Spanish-in-the-Philippines-and-by-the-Dutch-and-Indonesians-in-Indonesia-Did-any-Chinese-immigrants-therefore-want-to-unite-with-the-Chinese-there-to-establish

Yeah the Batavia Massacre occurred in 1740 during the Qing, and I don’t know if good records exist or if they are not accessible to me in English, but I wonder if the majority poor Chinese were treated worse in China by the ethnically distinct Manchurians? Certainly, thirty years later, Adam Smith describes the Chinese as the poorest people in the world, because they support a tiny population of the worlds richest in China.

Is it possible that this question, similar to the Joseph Lee conundrum, is also a pseudo-proposition?

The Joseph Lee dilemma is a question posed about the historical development of China, first raised by the British scholar Joseph Lee in the 1930s when he began his research on the history of Chinese science and technology, and formally called the historical question the "Joseph Lee dilemma" (English: Needham's Grand Question) by the American economist Kenneth Boulding in 1976. Its theme was "Why did the scientific and industrial revolution not occur in modern China, despite the many important contributions of ancient China to the development of human science and technology? Many people have further promoted Joseph Lee's problem, and questions such as "Why did China lag behind in modern science" and "Why did China lag behind in modern times" have been hotly debated. "Why did science happen in Western societies? is the flip side of Joseph Li's question.

https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%8E%E7%BA%A6%E7%91%9F%E9%9A%BE%E9%A2%98

"Joseph Needham, a British scientist who studied biological embryology, asked why China, which was so far ahead of Europe in applying natural knowledge to human needs before the fifteenth century, did not develop modern science.

https://case.ntu.edu.tw/blog/?p=36183

After completing his doctorate in physics at a prestigious university in the United States and returning to the Chinese University of Hong Kong to engage in the study of philosophy of science and culture, F.C. Chan spent a long time writing a 900-page book, Inheritance and Rebellion, which crawls through the historical literature on the succession of modern Western science since the Greek tradition, in an attempt to answer the written subtitle of his book, "Why Modern Science Emerged in the West", which is in fact a response to the so-called "Joseph Lee's Question". This is in fact a reply to the so-called "Joseph Lee's question.

In Chen Fangzheng's magnum opus, he proved with literature that although modern science was born in Europe in the seventeenth century, the history of ideas inherited from it is in fact traced back to the ancient Greek tradition, and that tradition has been inherited from one generation to the next and has become a system of its own, while the historical tradition of China, on the contrary, does not have such an inheritance of ideas at all. Therefore, we should not ask why China did not develop modern science, but rather, it is impossible for China to develop modern science, that is, the so-called "Joseph Lee's question" is a false issue.

https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010906398

Yes I think you are right, the two are similar.

Both reflect the impact of nationalism on education and even very intelligent peoples views of identity after that education.

I wonder if the lack of system change one is a cultural product, as in perhaps the Chinese civilisation is organised at the family level, where there is not too much concern and less action, about what happens to people outside the family? In the West, the Greek and Roman philosophy had the concept of the ‘brotherhood of man,’ and I wonder if the absence of such an idea contributes to the lack of concern for social issues in Chinese civilisation outside the Confucian focus on the family?

Chinese were slaughtered overseas, why didn't these Chinese create a country of their own to protect themselves?

And what was the reaction of the Chinese emperor? The emperor thought that it was just a war between foreigners and Chinese merchants overseas, and it was not clear who was right and who was wrong; and among Chinese scholars, peasants, workers and merchants, merchants were the lowest, and it was impossible for the imperial court to send troops to retaliate against Spain for the untouchables?

And at the time the Emperor was Manchurian, with annual Shamanistic rituals completely alien to Chinese culture. Perhaps the Chinese were expendable to the Manchurian? I am pretty sure at the time that emigration and foreign trade were illegal, and so beyond the protection of the Chinese state if done illegally? There’s not much of a record of state sponsored Chinese colonies (by contrast Greek, Crusader states, Colonial era Europe), from which to understand the action or inaction by the parent country in response to treatment of Chinese in colonies in South East Asia or India.

中国社会超稳定结构

https://www.books.com.tw/products/CN10727914

It can also be seen that these feudal lords did not acquire the title of vassal because they were rich, but were founding princes or suzerain princes.

So where are the rich people in China?

The economic policy of ancient China was to emphasize agriculture and suppress commerce, meaning that agricultural production was emphasized and the development of commerce was suppressed. The rulers regarded agriculture as the main business and commerce as the last business.

After Qin Shi Huang destroyed the Six Kingdoms, he continued the policy of emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce in the Qin Dynasty, and sent merchants to the border to guard the borders several times.

Since then, successive dynasties have insisted on the policy of emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce.

However, during the Southern Song Dynasty, Ye Shi was the first to question the policy of emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce.

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Huang Zongxi proposed that industry and commerce were the basis.

After the Opium War, this policy was gradually abolished.

After the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing government even issued an order explicitly supporting the development of industry and commerce.

Therefore, in China, under the monarchy, the whole country was the private property of the emperor, and all the subjects worked for the emperor, but the officials were paid very little.

Take a look at the list of the top ten richest men in Chinese history

How many of them were real businessmen? Most of them were formed by serving as officials who were corrupt and asked for bribes. As soon as the emperor stopped trusting, all the property was confiscated by the emperor.

Liu Jin: eunuch; embezzlement

Heshen: official, businessman; embezzlement, pawnshop, bank

Lu Bu Wei: merchant, prime minister; business, investment

Wu Bingjian: trading merchant; Jardine Matheson

Hu Xueyan: official, merchant; business, money bank, misappropriation of official silver for lending and borrowing

Shen Wansan: merchant; reclamation, foreign trade

Deng Tong: male favorite of Emperor Wen of Han; money casting

Liang Ji: relative, official; embezzlement

Shi Chong: official; robbed merchants, embezzlement

Fan Li: merchant who escaped politics; doing business

Why didn't the Chinese readers revolt?

Chinese private schools are similar to Islamic madrassas, where only the four books and five scriptures are read and no science is studied.

Chinese scholars are busy with the imperial examinations all their lives and want to become officials.

What if they never got the imperial examinations? Besides continuing to be a teacher in their hometown, they would go to become robbers. Huang Chao of the Tang Dynasty, Hong Xiuquan of the Qing Dynasty, and Mao Zedong of China all failed in their study careers and thought, "If I am not allowed to become an official, then I will rebel and become a bandit and rob the emperor's position.

So it can be known that Chinese readers have not thought about the structure of government in their knowledge, but only the problem of being an official to control people.

The English language Mandarin is derived from the Portuguese Mandarim, which is derived from the Malay menteri (courtier, minister), which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit mantrin (minister). Its transmission trajectory is the same as that of China, Sanskrit → Malay → Portuguese → English