CHINA e Second Period of Middle Ages (907-1276)

This decline was revealed in one way by the fact that the Chinese empire had no further period of rebirth. It is true that there were still to be occasions when China was again an empire, but it was no longer the work of the Chinese themselves, but rather that of alien conquerors who moulded an empire in which, although China proper was certainly the preponderant part, the Chinese themselves were not the masters. On the other hand, during those brief spells when China was governed by Chinese sovereigns, it was no longer an empire they ruled, but a China in recoil upon itself, a China that had once again become a purely national state, scrupulously abstaining from all conquests and from all forms of imperialism. The aspirations of the poet Du Fu were then fulfilled. In striking contrast with the two great imperial Chinese dynasties of Han and Tang, which marked the first 12 centuries of China’s national history, there were only dynasties of ‘little Chinese’, that of the Song in the eleventh and twelfth centuries during the Middle Ages, and then later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that of the Ming.