When news from China is totally unforeseen and utterly confusing, your experienced Chi-spert (“China expert”), nothing daunted, falls back on history.

China’s first emperor ended 800 years of feudalism, then the imperial system was replaced in 1912. Political shifts are a constant of history.

That’s been the way China has worked, and malfunctioned, for thousands of years. The CCP is seen as just another dynasty that prospered for a while and then failed. Chinese leaders pay attention to ...

The Uyghur heartland began to fall under formal Chinese control in the mid-18th century—revealingly, the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty named it Xinjiang, meaning “new territory”.

In 1271 Kublai Khan named his dynasty Yuan which means "origin of the universe." The Yuan dynasty in China lasted from 1279 to 1368. Kublai Khan followed a tentative policy of Sinicization, that is, ...

For decades, Chinese scholars have been toiling at the party’s behest to draft an official history of the Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty, which the Manchu ethnic group led for nearly 270 ...