Written by Kerry Brown.
One thing that the importation of the body of ideas associated with Marxism Leninism into China in the early part of the twentieth century did was to also introduce a new kind of historiography. This showed history not as a series of tragic cycles of rising and falling of dynasties and their territories – something envisaged famously in the great Ming classic from the 14thcentury, `Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ which talks of the coming together and falling apart of empires over the long sweep of Chinese history. Instead, it brought the idea of ever onward dynamic progress, with events being propelled through thesis and antithesis into improving synthesis before the process started again.
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