The Age of the State

Starting from a crisis-driven anxiety about the moral foundations and value system of contemporary Chinese society, this book proposes to re-examine human civilization as a whole from the standpoint of historical practice, identify the laws governing the rise and fall of state civilizations worldwide as manifested in historical practice, and reveal the historical experience and profound lessons of the rise and fall of great-power civilizations. By contrasting world civilization with Chinese civilization, it seeks to break the mental rigidities imposed on us by the Western view of civilization, explore the true foundations that have enabled China to stand firm throughout 6,000 years of human civilizational history in practice, and identify the core values capable of constituting the spiritual life of our nation. From the standpoint of historical practice, and viewing more than 6,000 years of historical practice, the state, as an "artificial platform" for social development, is an important historical condition for the qualitative transformation, elevation, and rapid development of human civilization. Thus, taking the rise and fall of the "state" as its axis, The Era of States proposes five historical stages of the era of states, spanning from creation myths to contemporary society. While detailing the historical processes of rise and decline across these five historical periods, it attempts, through in-depth longitudinal comparison of history and cross-sectional comparison of different civilizations, to answer why the Chinese national group has been able to become a national group with tenacious state-civilizational vitality for 6,000 years, and where the essence of political thought in Chinese civilization lies that must be fully recognized by contemporary people and can offer reference to the world.