In his wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy described it well: “Of all the civilizations of premodern times, none appeared more advanced, none felt more superior than that of China. Its considerable population, 100–130 million compared with Europe’s 50–55 million in the fifteenth century; its remarkable culture; its exceedingly fertile and irrigated plains, linked by a splendid canal system since the eleventh century; and its unified, hierarchic administration run by a well-educated Confucian bureaucracy had given a coherence and sophistication to
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