China is one of the earliest developed countries in the world in terms of civilization, with a recorded history of nearly 4,000 years. The ape-man fossils discovered in Yuanmou, Yunnan Province, indicate that the "Yuanmou Man" dating back 1.7 million years was the earliest known primitive human in China. Nearly 600,000 years ago, the "Peking Man" who lived in the Zhoukoudian area of Beijing could walk upright, make and use simple tools, and knew how to use fire. Neolithic sites dating back about 10,000 years are scattered all over China. In the Hemudu site in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province and the Banpo site in Xi 'an, which date back six to seven thousand years, artificially cultivated rice and millet grains as well as farming tools were discovered. The oldest dynasty, the Xia Dynasty, began in 2070 BC. The central region of the Xia Dynasty was located in the western part of present-day Henan Province and the southern part of Shanxi Province. Its power and influence had reached both the north and south of the Yellow River, and it began to enter the slave society. The Shang and Western Zhou dynasties, which emerged after the Xia, further developed the slave system. Then came the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods when the royal power declined and the feudal lords vied for supremacy. This period is regarded as a transitional stage from the slave society to the feudal society. About 5,000 years ago, the Chinese had already known the technology of smelting copper. More than 3,000 years ago during the Shang Dynasty, ironware began to be used. In the field of pottery making, there are white pottery and painted pottery. Silk weaving production was also quite developed, giving rise to the world's earliest jacquard silk weaving technology. By the Spring and Autumn Period, steel-making technology had emerged. During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods, ideological and academic activities were unprecedentedly vigorous, giving rise to renowned philosophers such as Laozi, Confucius, and Mencius, as well as military strategists like Sun Wu, who had a profound influence on later generations.
In 221 BC, Qin Shi Huang Ying Zheng ended the 250-year-long Warring States period of warlord strife and established the first unified, centralized multi-ethnic feudal state in Chinese history - Qin. Qin Shi Huang unified the writing system, weights and measures, currency and established the system of prefectures and counties. The framework of the feudal state established by him has been in use by people for more than 2,000 years since then. Over a period of more than ten years, he organized over 300,000 people to build a 5,000-kilometer-long Great Wall in northern China and began to construct a huge tomb even before his death. The Terracotta Army, discovered in 1974 and guarding the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, shocked the world. Eight thousand life-sized terracotta figurines, horses and chariots are vividly lifelike and are hailed as the "Eighth Wonder of the World".
In 206 BC, Liu Bang established the powerful Han Dynasty. Agriculture, handicrafts and commerce all developed greatly during the Han Dynasty, and the population reached 50 million. During the reign of Emperor Wu of Han, Liu Che (140 BC - 87 BC), it was the most powerful period of the Han Dynasty. He expanded the actual control of the central government from the Central Plains to the Western Regions (present-day Xinjiang and Central Asia). He sent his envoy Zhang Qian on two missions to the Western Regions, opening up a road from Chang 'an (now Xi 'an, Shaanxi Province) through Xinjiang and Central Asia all the way to the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. This road was called the "Silk Road", and China's splendid silk products were transported westward continuously through it. With the closer exchanges between the East and the West, Buddhism was also introduced to China in the first century AD. In 105 AD, CAI Lun, an official, summarized the experience of folk papermaking and invented papermaking, which fundamentally changed the materials for human writing.
After the Han Dynasty, it went through The Three Kingdoms, Jin, Northern and Southern Dynasties, Sui and other dynasties. Li Yuan established the Tang Dynasty in 618 AD. Emperor Taizong of Tang, Li Shimin (reigned 626-649), the son of Li Yuan, implemented a series of enlightened policies, which brought the prosperity of China's feudal period to its peak: there was a developed agriculture, handicrafts and commerce, and technologies such as textile, dyeing, ceramics, smelting and shipbuilding also made further progress. The country's water and land transportation crisscrossed. In the 1760s, China's power was not only firmly rooted in the Tarim Basin, the Junggar Basin and the Ili River Basin, but even expanded to many city-states in Central Asia. China has established extensive economic and cultural ties with many countries such as Japan, North Korea, India, Persia and Arabia.
After the fall of the Tang Dynasty, there was a period of frequent wars during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. In 960 AD, Zhao Kuangyin, a general of the Later Zhou Dynasty, established the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The Song Dynasty was divided into the Northern Song and the Southern Song. During the Southern Song, the regime moved southward, promoting the advanced economy and culture of the north to the south and facilitating the economic development of the region. During the Song Dynasty, astronomy, science and technology, as well as printing techniques were all at the forefront of the world. The movable type printing invented by Bi Sheng can be regarded as a major revolution in the history of human printing.
In 1206, Genghis Khan established the Mongol Khanate. In 1271, his grandson Kublai Khan took over the Central Plains and established the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), making Dadu (now Beijing) his capital. Kublai Khan ended the multi-regime coexistence that had lasted for hundreds of years and achieved the great unification of the country, including Xinjiang, Xizang and Yunnan regions. Papermaking, printing, the compass and gunpowder are the "Four Great Inventions" of ancient Chinese science and technology. They were successively introduced to all over the world during the Song and Yuan Dynasties and made tremendous contributions to world civilization.
In 1368, Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang of the Ming Dynasty established the Ming Dynasty in Nanjing (1368-1644). After his son Zhu Di (1360-1424) ascended the throne, he began large-scale construction of the city walls and palaces of Beijing and officially moved the capital to Beijing in 1421. From 1405 to 1433, he sent eunuch Zheng He to lead a huge fleet on seven large-scale sea voyages, passing through Southeast Asian countries, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Maldives Islands, and reaching as far as Somalia and Kenya on the east coast of Africa. These were the largest and longest sea expeditions in the world before the time of Columbus.
In the late Ming Dynasty, the Jurchen people in northeastern China rose rapidly and established the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in 1644, with Beijing as their capital. The most famous emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Kangxi (reigned from 1661 to 1722), unified Taiwan and curbed the invasion of the Tsarist Russia. He also strengthened his jurisdiction over Xizang and formulated a complete set of rules and regulations under which the central government ultimately determined the local leaders of Xizang. Under his rule, the territory of China exceeded 11 million square kilometers.
A brief table of historical periods in China
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Qing Dynasty declined rapidly. During this period, Britain imported a large amount of opium to China, and the Qing government endeavored to ban opium. In 1840, Britain launched an aggressive war against China to protect its opium trade. Eventually, the Qing government signed the humiliating Treaty of Nanjing with the British government. After the Opium War, countries such as Britain, the United States, France, Russia and Japan constantly forced the Qing government to sign various unequal treaties. From then on, China gradually became a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. The Xinhai Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen in 1911 overthrew the Qing Dynasty's rule of over 200 years and also ended the feudal monarchy that had lasted for more than 2,000 years, establishing the Republic of China. This was one of the greatest events in modern Chinese history.
The May Fourth Movement, which took place in 1919, is regarded as the ideological source of many significant events in modern Chinese history. The direct cause was the unequal terms imposed on China after World War I. Strong patriotism led to this protest movement, which was initiated by students and then spread to all social strata across the country. It simultaneously triggered various new ideological trends to enter China, among which the most notable was the spread of Marxism-Leninism in China. In the process of leading the Chinese people in the New Democratic Revolution, the Communist Party of China It went through four historical stages: the Northern Expedition (1924-1927), the Agrarian Revolutionary War (1927-1937), the Full-scale War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945), the 14-Year War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931-1945), and the National Liberation War (1945-1949). During the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang cooperated to jointly resist the invaders and won the war of Resistance. In 1945, the Kuomintang launched a civil war. After three years of the War of Liberation, the Communist Party of China overthrew the Kuomintang government in 1949.
At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese government successfully carried out land reform in areas accounting for over 90% of the total agricultural population in the country, and about 47 million hectares of land were allocated to 300 million farmers. The first Five-Year Plan implemented from 1953 to 1957 achieved remarkable success: the average annual growth rate of national income exceeded 8.9%. Establish a number of basic industries that are necessary for national industrialization but did not exist before, including aircraft and automotive manufacturing, heavy and precision machinery manufacturing, power generation equipment manufacturing, metallurgical and mining equipment manufacturing, as well as high-grade alloy steel and non-ferrous metal smelting, etc. From 1957 to 1966, it was a period when China carried out large-scale socialist construction. Compared with 1956, the national industrial fixed assets in 1966 increased threefold at their original prices, and the national income increased by 58% at comparable prices. The output of major industrial products has increased several times or even more than ten times. Large-scale basic agricultural construction and technological transformation have been carried out. From May 1966 to October 1976, it was the decade of the "Cultural Revolution", during which the country and its people suffered the most severe setbacks and losses since the founding of the People's Republic of China. In October 1976, the Jiangqing Counter-revolutionary Group was crushed, the "Cultural Revolution" came to an end, and China entered a new historical period. Deng Xiaoping, the former General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, made a comeback and began to implement the "reform and opening-up" policy in 1979, focusing his efforts on modernization. Through reforming the economic and political systems, a path of socialist modernization with Chinese characteristics has been gradually established. Since the reform and opening up, China has undergone profound changes. Its economy has advanced by leaps and bounds, and people's living standards have significantly improved. It is the best period after the founding of the People's Republic of China. In 1992, the 14th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed that the goal of China's economic system reform was to establish a socialist market economy system. On July 1, 1997, the Chinese government resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong. On December 20, 1999, the Chinese government resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Macao. At the beginning of the 21st century, China basically established a socialist market economy system, and the per capita gross national product continued to increase. In 2011, China surpassed Japan to become the world's second-largest economy, second only to the United States. China has achieved remarkable development in many aspects such as economic construction, comprehensive deepening of reform and improvement of people's lives. At the same time, it has also actively contributed Chinese wisdom and solutions to addressing global issues.
(Source: Chinese Government website, China.org.cn)