[aquila48]

“The upshot of the previous post is that Chinese rulers are always on alert against challenges to their authority.”

Isn’t that true of everybody? The Roman empire was just as full of those sordid events. Yoy either are ruthless against your enemies or soon they will have your head.

[Zhang Fei]

[Isn’t that true of everybody? The Roman empire was just as full of those sordid events. Yoy either are ruthless against your enemies or soon they will have your head.]

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In Rome, they only really had to worry about the elites. Spartacus was the closest anyone low-born came to toppling the ancien regime, and it wasn’t remotely close. In China, they had to worry about the lowliest peasant. 2200 years ago, China had 3 peasant emperors in 400 years, the latter two of which were descended from cadet branches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadet_branch that had devolved all the way back to the soil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Guangwu_of_Han
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Bei

The impressive thing about these men is how resourceful they were in knitting together the coalitions necessary to both stay alive and increase their power base, killing both enemies and former allies without being killed along the way. Gaius Julius Caesar and Gaius Octavius Thurinus both did something similar, but they were high-born, well-educated, and had significant resources as well as family connections to help them with the task of becoming consul.

Their Chinese counterparts were literal peasants. The first man on the above list was an illiterate. The last personally made straw sandals for a living. They were almost the literal dregs of the empire they eventually made their own.