The history of China

China has one of the longest continuous histories of any country. Farming villages along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers grew into Bronze Age kingdoms in the second millennium BCE, and in 221 BCE the state of Qin united them into an empire that, under a long succession of dynasties, lasted until 1912. Periods of unity alternated with periods of division and conquest by peoples from the steppe, yet the written language, the imperial bureaucracy and Confucian ideas gave Chinese civilisation a remarkable continuity. In the nineteenth century the Qing empire was humbled by Western powers and Japan, and after decades of revolution, civil war and invasion, the Communist Party founded the People's Republic in 1949, which since the 1980s has become the world's second-largest economy.

Fossils of Homo erectus show that early humans reached what is now China more than a million and a half years ago; the remains known as Yuanmou Man in Yunnan are dated to about 1.7 million years ago, and the famous Peking Man fossils from the Zhoukoudian caves near Beijing to several hundred thousand years ago. Modern humans were present by at least 80,000 years ago.

China was one of the places where farming was invented independently, part of the wider Neolithic Revolution. Rice was cultivated along the Yangtze by around 7000 BCE, and millet in the loess lands of the Yellow River at about the same time. Thousands of villages followed. The Yangshao culture of the middle Yellow River, known for its painted pottery, flourished from about 5000 to 3000 BCE, and the later Longshan cultures built walled towns and made fine black pottery. In the Yangtze delta the Liangzhu culture (about 3300 to 2300 BCE) built a large walled centre with dams and carved elaborate jade objects. In Sichuan the bronze masks of Sanxingdui reveal a distinctive Bronze Age civilisation unknown to later written history.

Chinese tradition begins with the sage kings Yao and Shun and with Yu the Great, who tamed the floods and founded the Xia dynasty. Whether the Xia existed is debated, since no writing from it survives, but many Chinese archaeologists identify it with the Erlitou culture of about 1900 to 1500 BCE, whose palaces and bronze workshops near Luoyang mark the beginning of state-level society.

The Shang dynasty, from about 1600 to 1046 BCE, is the first confirmed by written evidence. Its kings ruled the North China Plain, and from about 1300 BCE their capital stood near modern Anyang, where excavations have uncovered royal tombs, chariots, human sacrifices and magnificent ritual bronzes. The kings consulted their ancestors by heating turtle shells and ox bones and reading the cracks, inscribing the questions on these oracle bones in a script that is the direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters.

Around 1046 BCE the Zhou, a people from the Wei valley in the west, defeated the last Shang king at the Battle of Muye. The Zhou dynasty justified its victory with the idea of the Mandate of Heaven: Heaven granted the right to rule to a virtuous house and withdrew it from a corrupt one, a doctrine later dynasties used to explain their own rise and fall. The early Zhou kings ruled from near modern Xi'an and granted lands to relatives and allies, who governed them as hereditary lords.

In 771 BCE invaders sacked the western capital and the court moved east to Luoyang. The Eastern Zhou kings kept their ritual prestige but lost real power, as the great lords became rulers of independent states. In the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 BCE) these states competed and formed alliances; in the following Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE) a handful of large kingdoms fought ever bigger wars with mass infantry armies, iron weapons and crossbows. Sun Tzu's Art of War belongs to this world.

Political disorder produced an extraordinary flowering of thought, often called the Hundred Schools. Confucius (551 to 479 BCE) taught that order rested on virtuous rulers, proper ritual and respect within the family, ideas developed by Mencius and Xunzi and later known as Confucianism. The Daoist texts attributed to Laozi and to Zhuangzi urged harmony with the natural Way, Mozi preached universal love and opposed aggressive war, and the Legalists, above all Han Fei, argued that a state should be run by strict laws, rewards and punishments. Together these schools shaped Chinese philosophy for the next two thousand years.

The western state of Qin adopted Legalist reforms in the fourth century BCE, abolishing hereditary privilege, rewarding soldiers and farmers, and dividing its lands into administrative districts run by appointed officials. In Qin's wars of unification between 230 and 221 BCE, King Ying Zheng conquered the six remaining kingdoms and took the new title Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor. As Qin Shi Huang, he standardised the script, weights, measures, coinage and even axle widths, built roads and canals, and joined earlier frontier walls into a long defensive line against the northern nomads. His government also burned books it considered subversive and used forced labour on a vast scale, including on his tomb near Xi'an, guarded by the Terracotta Army. The Qin dynasty collapsed in revolts soon after his death in 210 BCE.

From the civil war, a commoner named Liu Bang emerged victorious and founded the Han dynasty in 202 BCE. The Han kept the Qin system of centralised administration but softened its harshness, and so laid the foundations of imperial China; to this day the majority Chinese call themselves the Han people. Under Emperor Wu of Han, who reigned from 141 to 87 BCE, Confucian learning became the basis for training officials, and armies pushed against the Xiongnu confederation of the steppe, into the Korean peninsula, northern Vietnam and the oases of Central Asia. Zhang Qian's journeys west helped open the trade routes later called the Silk Road.

A court official, Wang Mang, seized the throne in 9 CE and founded a short-lived Xin dynasty, but the Han were restored in 25 CE with a new capital at Luoyang. The Eastern Han saw the invention of paper, traditionally credited to the court official Cai Lun in 105 CE, and the arrival of Buddhism from India. Court intrigue, powerful landlords and the Yellow Turban rebellion of 184 CE weakened the dynasty, and in 220 it ended.

The Han empire split into three rival states, Wei, Shu and Wu. The Jin dynasty briefly reunited the country in 280, but civil war among its princes opened the north to peoples from the steppe frontier, who sacked Luoyang in 311. For nearly three centuries China was divided. In the north a succession of non-Chinese and Chinese kingdoms rose and fell, until the Northern Wei, founded by the Xianbei, unified the region in 439. In the south Chinese dynasties ruled from Jiankang, modern Nanjing, where much of the old aristocracy had fled, and the Yangtze lands were settled and developed as never before.

This was the great age of Buddhism in China. Monks translated sutras, pilgrims travelled to India, and rulers sponsored temples and the huge cave sculptures of Yungang and Longmen. In 581 a northern general, Yang Jian, founded the Sui dynasty, and in 589 he conquered the south, reuniting China. The Sui built the Grand Canal linking the Yangtze to the north, but the second emperor's costly failed wars in Korea provoked rebellion, and the dynasty fell in 618.

The Tang dynasty, founded in 618 by Li Yuan and consolidated by his son Emperor Taizong of Tang, is often counted the high point of Chinese power and culture. Its capital, Chang'an, may have held a million people and welcomed merchants, monks and envoys from Persia, Central Asia, Korea and Japan. Tang armies defeated the eastern Göktürks and extended Chinese control deep into Central Asia, while the monk Xuanzang brought back Buddhist scriptures from India. Wu Zetian, consort of Taizong's son, ruled first through her husband and sons and then, from 690 to 705, as emperor in her own right, the only woman ever to do so. The civil service examinations, begun under the Sui, grew in importance, and the eighth century, the age of the poets Li Bai and Du Fu, was the golden age of Chinese verse.

The dynasty was shaken by the rebellion of the general An Lushan, which began in 755 and lasted until 763, killing huge numbers of people and leaving military governors powerful in the provinces. The Tibetan Empire briefly occupied Chang'an in 763, and the Tang relied on the Uyghur Khaganate as allies. In the 840s the court persecuted Buddhism and closed thousands of monasteries, and the great rebellion of Huang Chao in the 870s and 880s ruined the capital. The last Tang emperor was deposed in 907.

After half a century of division known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, the general Zhao Kuangyin founded the Song dynasty in 960 and reunited most of China. The Song never controlled the far north, which was held by the Khitan Liao dynasty, while the Tangut kingdom of Western Xia held the north-west; the Song bought peace with annual payments of silver and silk. In 1127 the Jurchen, who had overthrown the Liao and founded their own Jin dynasty, captured the Song capital Kaifeng and the emperor himself. The court fled south and re-established itself at Hangzhou, ruling the Southern Song until 1279.

Militarily weak, the Song was nonetheless an age of extraordinary economic and cultural vitality. New strains of rice and the spread of farming in the south supported a population that passed 100 million. Cities bustled with shops and restaurants; the government issued the world's first paper money; woodblock printing made books cheap, and Bi Sheng invented movable type in the 1040s. The magnetic compass came into use at sea, and gunpowder weapons in war. Officials were now chosen mostly by examination, creating a scholar-gentry class steeped in the classics. The reformer Wang Anshi tried to strengthen the state in the 1070s, and the philosopher Zhu Xi (1130 to 1200) created the synthesis known as Neo-Confucianism, which became official orthodoxy for the next seven centuries.

From 1211 Genghis Khan and his successors attacked northern China as part of the expansion of the Mongol Empire. The Western Xia were destroyed in 1227 and the Jin in 1234, with enormous loss of life. Genghis's grandson Kublai Khan proclaimed the Yuan dynasty in 1271, built a new capital at Dadu, on the site of modern Beijing, and in 1279 destroyed the last Southern Song forces. For the first time all of China was ruled by a foreign conqueror. The Yuan divided the population into ranked ethnic categories, employed Central Asians and other foreigners in government, and for decades suspended the examinations. Long-distance trade across Mongol Eurasia flourished, and European visitors such as Marco Polo described the wealth of Kublai's court. Invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 failed.

In the fourteenth century floods, famine, epidemics and quarrels within the ruling family weakened the Yuan, and popular rebellions spread, many inspired by the millenarian Red Turban movement.

One rebel leader, Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and Buddhist novice, defeated his rivals, drove the Mongols north and in 1368 proclaimed the Ming dynasty as the Hongwu Emperor. He ruled from Nanjing as a harsh autocrat who purged tens of thousands of officials. His son the Yongle Emperor, who seized the throne from his nephew in 1402, moved the capital to Beijing and built the Forbidden City there. Yongle also sent the admiral Zheng He on seven great voyages between 1405 and 1433, with fleets of large ships that reached South-East Asia, India, Arabia and East Africa. After these voyages the court turned away from naval expeditions and concentrated on the northern frontier, where the Mongols remained a threat; they even captured an emperor in 1449. Most of the brick Great Wall seen today is Ming work.

The Ming state was firmly Confucian, but the economy grew more commercial. Silver from Japan and from Spanish America, arriving through trade with the Portuguese, who settled at Macau in 1557, and with the Spanish in Manila, became the currency of taxes and trade. Philosophers such as Wang Yangming challenged Zhu Xi's orthodoxy, and Jesuit missionaries led by Matteo Ricci introduced European science at court. In the 1590s Ming armies helped the Joseon dynasty of Korea repel Japanese invasions at great cost. Later, factional strife, fiscal crisis, famine and peasant revolts undermined the dynasty. In 1644 the rebel Li Zicheng took Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself.

The Manchus, descendants of the Jurchen, had been united by Nurhaci and his son Hong Taiji, who named their state Qing in 1636. When Beijing fell to the rebels, the Ming general Wu Sangui let the Manchu armies through the Great Wall, and they took the capital in 1644 and proclaimed the Qing dynasty as rulers of all China. Conquest of the south took decades and was accompanied by massacres, and Han men were forced to adopt the Manchu queue hairstyle as a sign of submission.

The Qing reached its height under three long-reigning emperors. The Kangxi Emperor (1661 to 1722) crushed the revolt of the Three Feudatories, annexed Taiwan in 1683 and fixed the border with Russia in the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. His grandson the Qianlong Emperor (1735 to 1796) destroyed the Dzungar Mongol state in campaigns of the 1750s in which most of the Dzungar people were killed or died of disease, a destruction many historians describe as genocide, and added the region later named Xinjiang. Mongolia and Tibet were also brought under Qing authority, giving the empire roughly the borders the country claims today. Peace and new crops from the Americas helped the population roughly double in the eighteenth century, to some 300 million by 1800.

By 1800 population pressure, corruption and rebellion strained the empire, just as the British Empire and other Western powers pressed for open trade. British merchants paid for Chinese tea with opium smuggled from India, and when the Qing tried to stamp out the trade, Britain went to war. The First Opium War of 1839 to 1842 ended with the Treaty of Nanjing, which ceded Hong Kong and opened ports such as Shanghai and Guangzhou to foreign trade, the first of a series of agreements the Chinese came to call the unequal treaties. A second war from 1856 to 1860 ended with British and French troops burning the Summer Palace outside Beijing, and Russia took large territories in the north-east.

At the same time the Taiping Rebellion, led by Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus, set up a rival kingdom with its capital at Nanjing from 1853. By its suppression in 1864 the war had killed perhaps 20 to 30 million people, one of the deadliest conflicts in history. Reformers launched a Self-Strengthening Movement to build arsenals, shipyards and railways, but the court, dominated from 1861 to 1908 by the Empress Dowager Cixi, resisted deeper change. Defeat by Japan in 1894 and 1895 cost China Taiwan and its influence in Korea, and a brief attempt at radical reform in 1898 was stopped by Cixi. In 1900 the anti-foreign Boxer movement besieged the foreign legations in Beijing, and an eight-nation army occupied the capital and imposed a huge indemnity. Belated reforms followed, including the abolition of the civil service examinations in 1905, but revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen now aimed at a republic. An army mutiny at Wuchang on 10 October 1911 spread across the provinces, and on 12 February 1912 the six-year-old emperor Puyi abdicated.

The Republic of China was proclaimed with Sun Yat-sen as provisional president, but power soon passed to the general Yuan Shikai, who suppressed parliament and in 1915 tried to make himself emperor. After his death in 1916 China fell apart into regions controlled by rival warlords. Anger at the award of Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan after World War I sparked the May Fourth Movement of 1919, in which students and intellectuals demanded national renewal, science and democracy. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai in 1921.

Sun's Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, allied with the Communists and the Soviet Union, and after Sun's death in 1925 his successor Chiang Kai-shek led the Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928, which reunited much of the country under a Nationalist government at Nanjing. In 1927 Chiang turned on his Communist allies and massacred thousands in Shanghai. The surviving Communists set up rural bases, and when Nationalist offensives drove them out of the south in 1934, they made the Long March to Shaanxi in the north-west, during which Mao Zedong became their leader.

Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo under Puyi. In July 1937 a clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing began full-scale war with the Empire of Japan. Japanese forces took the coastal cities and in December 1937 captured Nanjing, where in the Nanjing Massacre they killed civilians and prisoners of war, in numbers estimated at tens of thousands to well over 200,000, and raped many thousands of women. The Nationalist government retreated to Chongqing, while Communist guerrillas expanded behind Japanese lines. The war merged into World War II in 1941, and by Japan's surrender in 1945 somewhere between 15 and 20 million Chinese had died, most of them civilians.

The uneasy wartime truce between Nationalists and Communists collapsed, and the Chinese Civil War resumed in 1946. Despite American support, the Nationalists, weakened by inflation, corruption and war, were defeated. On 1 October 1949 Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China in Beijing, and Chiang's government withdrew to Taiwan, where the Republic of China continues to govern. The People's Republic regards Taiwan as part of its territory, a claim the government in Taipei rejects, and the island's status remains one of the most sensitive questions in international politics.

The new government carried out a land reform in which landlords were dispossessed and between several hundred thousand and two million people were killed, and it fought the United States and its allies in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. Chinese troops entered Tibet in 1950, and after a failed uprising in 1959 the Dalai Lama fled to India. With Soviet help, a five-year plan built heavy industry, and agriculture was collectivised. In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to transform the country rapidly through vast communes and backyard steel furnaces. Unrealistic targets and grain requisitions caused a famine from 1959 to 1961 in which an estimated 15 to 45 million people died; most scholars put the toll at around 30 million.

China broke with the Soviet Union around 1960 and tested its first atomic bomb in 1964. In 1966 Mao, seeking to reassert his authority, launched the Cultural Revolution, urging young Red Guards to attack party officials, teachers and "old" culture. Temples, books and art were destroyed, millions were persecuted or sent to the countryside, and hundreds of thousands to perhaps two million people were killed before it ended with Mao's death. In the later years of the Cold War, China took the United Nations seat held by the Republic of China in 1971, and in 1972 US President Richard Nixon visited Beijing. Mao died in September 1976, and his radical allies, the Gang of Four, were arrested within weeks.

By 1978 Deng Xiaoping had emerged as the country's paramount leader. His policy of reform and opening up dissolved the communes, allowed farmers to sell surplus crops, created special economic zones such as Shenzhen to attract foreign investment and allowed private enterprise to grow. A one-child policy introduced around 1980 sharply limited family size, often through coercion, until it was relaxed in 2015. The economy grew at around ten per cent a year for three decades, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, though at great environmental cost and with widening inequality.

Economic reform was not matched by political reform. In the spring of 1989 students and workers gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and in other cities to call for freedom of speech and an end to corruption; on the night of 3 to 4 June the army cleared the square and surrounding streets by force, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of people. Under Jiang Zemin and then Hu Jintao, rapid growth continued. Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and Macau in 1999 under the formula "one country, two systems", China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, and Beijing hosted the Olympic Games in 2008. By 2010 China had become the world's second-largest economy.

Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Communist Party in 2012 and president in 2013. His rule has combined a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative of infrastructure lending across Asia, Africa and Europe, a rapid build-up of the armed forces and a more assertive stance in the South China Sea and on the border with India, with tighter party control over the economy, the internet and society. In 2018 the constitution was amended to remove the two-term limit on the presidency, and in October 2022 the party congress gave Xi a third term as its leader.

From 2017 the authorities in Xinjiang detained around a million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in internment camps. Many governments, human rights organisations and researchers have described the campaign as crimes against humanity, and some as genocide; the Chinese government rejects these charges and describes the facilities as vocational training centres aimed at countering extremism. After mass protests in Hong Kong in 2019, Beijing imposed a national security law on the city on 30 June 2020, criminalising secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, and much of the pro-democracy movement was dismantled.

The COVID-19 pandemic was first identified in Wuhan at the end of 2019. China kept strict "zero-COVID" lockdowns for nearly three years, until protests in late 2022 were followed by the policy's abrupt abandonment. In 2022 the population fell for the first time since 1961, and the country now faces a rapidly ageing society, a prolonged crisis in its property sector and growing rivalry with the United States over trade and technology, while leading the world in manufacturing and renewable energy investment.