Do Chinese people wish a democracy?
Had they ever had democracy?
Democracy is not that old. It started in Europe with some parliaments for the little lords of the country. Not with the vote of the populace. Only a minority participated in the elections. Only people with some amount of properties.
Then, in Western countries democracies had worked relatively well, when the economy was robust. But in times of economic depression, like in the 30’s all sort of devils came out of the box.
In general, nations can go all right so far as theres is not any economic depression for a reason or other.
Even the famous Athens’ democracy only lasted 62 years. Why it ended? As soon as a new period of hunger started, Athenians started an invasion of Sicily that failed. The king of Sicily refused to sell them grain. It is not clear to me if the Peloponnese wars were due to cold or an excess of population.
Peloponnesian War | Summary, Causes, & Facts
Peloponnesian War, (431–404 bce), war fought between the two leading city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta. Each stood at the head of alliances that, between them, included nearly every Greek city-state. The fighting engulfed virtually the entire Greek world, and it was properly regarded by Thucydides, whose contemporary account of it is considered to be among the world’s finest works of history, as the most momentous war up to that time.
594 BCE – 593 BCE In Athens the archon Solon lays the foundations for democracy.
c. 508 BCE Aristotle claims that the institution of ostracism is introduced in Athens under Cleisthenes.
c. 508 BCE Reforms by Cleisthenes establishes democracy in Athens.
c. 487 BCE The first ostracism vote takes place in Athens and Hipparchus is exiled.
c. 482 BCE Aristides is voted in an ostracism in Athens and exiled from the city.
c. 471 BCE The general and statesman Themistocles is voted in an ostracism and exiled from Athens.
463 BCE Pericles leads a prosecution of Cimon on charges of corruption but he is acquitted.
462 BCE – 461 BCE Radicalisation of democracy in Athens; Cimon exiled, Pericles comes to exercise influence.
c. 462 BCE – 458 BCE Pericles introduces democratic institutions in Athens.
c. 461 BCE Cimon is voted in an ostracism in Athens and exiled from the city.
c. 460 BCE – c. 320 CE Period of full and direct citizen democracy in Athens.
c. 417 BCE In the last recorded ostracism the demagogue Hyperbolos is exiled from Athens.
411 BCE The oligarchy of the 400 take over the democracy in Athens and in a matter of months is replaced by an oligarchy of 5000 chiefs.
I remember that Athens democracy lasted only 51 to 62 years. Depending on the dates you chose to determine when Athens was a democracy. The start of democracy in Athens was caused by a civil war related to hunger and debts of the poor farmers. 5th century BCE.
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I am not an expert of Chinese history not even in European history. But recently because all the noise that came out with “climate warming alarm” I began to get an interest in paleoclimate. And a part of paleoclimate is that from 10,000 years ago to the present.
It came out that each time, no so far off in time, that a severe cold swept the planet, most civilizations collapsed.
I present here a graphic of the climate of the last 4,000 years. I had been checking the historical events and the archaeological references for this period of time and I had been printing notes around the graphic of temperature of Greenland taken from the ice cores of GISP2
Mark Hanna commented that the Chinese dynasties lasted a lot. But I was interested in the periods in which China changed their dynasties. You can see a clear correlation between the periods of cold, meaning droughts and harvest failures and great wars in China.
I mentioned China because this question refers to China. The main doubt that come to my mind is the period of the Tang dynasty that seems it was a bad period of could, at least in the graphic. If this period was really as bad as in Europe, the only explanation for the lack of wars, had to be an extreme case of poverty. It was almost impossible to make great wars, for lack of resources. But the period known as the 5 Dynasties, was in turmoil, perhaps because things had improve. Just in case the climate was similar to that of Europe for the period.
In case of extreme poverty and hunger, wars decentralize and get small. This is the interpretation I make of the period of the collapse of the Roman Empire. I mean 1100 to 1800 years ago. The hunger was so severe, that the empire was unable to feed their troops. The first part of the crisis resulted in interminable civil wars within the empire. Later, 1600 years ago the Germanic invaders from the north and the east came south and west in search of food in the Roman Empire. There was not any army that could stop them, and the small armies were marching forever devouring all domestic animals, like sheep, cows, goats, pigs., they found. They were like a locust plague and armies had to move, because literally they found not more food after a few months in a place. By chance, some small army could met another one and they clashed, for they were on the same quest for food. Since 1400 to 900 years ago, the Muslims invade Europe, probably for the same reason. A severe drought was lasting too much in the middle East.
This is a theory about how the climate affect history.
I was going to put a link about a German documentary tittled, How Climate Determined History. But someone erased this video from Youtube.
It probably was erased it because the documentary was showing the climate was working on its own, not pushed by human activities.
To some degree, this German documentary was short of contradicting the present climatic alarm. The problems in the past climate were the cold periods and the droughts that could had lasted centuries, or a few decades.
leopoldoperdomo.org 