The decline of Henan began with Ming Dynasty.
In the Yuan Dynasty, the top ten cities in the country were: Dadu, Hangzhou, Bianliang, Quanzhou, Nanjing, Xi'an, Yangzhou, Chengdu, Suzhou, Nanchang.
I have told some people who like history before that no one from Henan should become a "famous fan".
In the late Ming Dynasty, Henan suffered the most serious decline.
After the Ming Dynasty, no city in Henan has entered the top ten in the country.
Henan is located in the hinterland of China, with access to the southeast, northwest, and all directions. This determines: the more open the country is, the easier it will be for Henan to develop; the more closed the country is, the harder it will be for Henan to develop.
If you look at the world map from another angle, you will find that China is actually in the sandwich between Eurasia and the Pacific Ocean. It is located in the easternmost section of Eurasia and the westernmost section of the Pacific Ocean. Its location is actually quite occluded.
Especially due to the backward transportation conditions in ancient times, people were unable to cross the Eurasian continent, let alone the Pacific Ocean.
Even if we look at the east coast of Africa where Zheng He's fleet reached in Yongle , it is still about 7,300 kilometers away from the United Kingdom and Ireland in the westernmost part of the Eurasian continent.
In ancient history, the Arabian Peninsula has been the Chinese people's imagination of the westernmost tip of the Eurasian continent. Further west, it’s really unimaginable.
Therefore, since the spread of Western learning to the east in the late Qing Dynasty, Wei Yuan, Lin Zexu, Liang Qichao and other scholars often referred to Europe as "Taixi", which means "further west than the western end".
We often say that China's version image is a rooster, but if we compare the territory of Eurasia, it is not difficult to find that Eurasia is like a dinosaur ready to go, Western Europe is its head, and Russia is the largest. The Aleut people in the east are its tail, the islands in Southeast Asia are the legs of the dinosaur, and China is from the thigh muscles of this big dinosaur to the buttocks.
This is why Brzezinski, in his 1997 book "The Grand Chess Game: American Primacy and Its Geostrategy," argued that the influence of the ancient Chinese empire on the Eurasian continent should not be overestimated, especially By the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the power of the Chinese Empire in Eurasia had actually been greatly weakened.
Although the Qing Dynasty was extremely prosperous in the early stage and conquered many vassal states, these vassal states were almost all small countries in East Asia or Southeast Asia. From Xinjiang to the west, the influence of the Qing Dynasty was almost non-existent. What's more, in the north of the Qing Dynasty, the giant bear of the Russian Empire has always been a strong competitor for the Qing Dynasty's right to speak in East and Northeast Asia.
Even worse in the Ming Dynasty. In the end, the Ming Dynasty did not completely solve the Mongolian problem. In fact, judging from the actual influence and control scope of the Ming Dynasty, it can hardly be called a unified dynasty, but more like a "Northern Yuan Dynasty". -Ming Dynasty” pattern of the Northern and Southern Dynasties.
The actual scope of control of the Ming Dynasty was not much larger than that of the Northern Song Dynasty, and the inheritance of the legacy of the previous dynasty was also lackluster. Apart from driving the Mongols out of the hinterland of the Central Plains, it made little achievements in other aspects.
The decline of the Yuan Dynasty is also related to ill-considered regional policies. This policy is typically reflected in the policy towards Henan.
During the Yuan Dynasty, the economy in the Jiangnan region was already quite prosperous. Since the Jiangnan region has developed productivity and a prosperous economy, it naturally has to shoulder the responsibility of supporting the political center. In ancient times, the fastest and most convenient way to transport materials was water transportation. However, most of China's naturally formed rivers flow from west to east, and there are no north-south rivers.
If we want to transport supplies from the south to Dadu by water, we can only dig artificial canals.
In order to connect the country's political center and economic center of gravity, after completely eliminating the Southern Song Dynasty , the Yuan court began to build a canal connecting Dadu and Jiangnan (the southern section of this canal was mainly built by the previous Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty Grand Canal ).
Since Luoyang and Kaifeng in Henan have declined, the northern section of this canal can only be re-excavated by the Yuan Dynasty. They are the Jeju River from Jeju to Xu'an City, and the Yuhe from Xu'an City. Huitong River and Tonghui River from Tongzhou to mostly . Together with the original canals, these three new canals formed the main artery of the Yuan Dynasty's internal economic and transportation network.
During the Yuan Dynasty, the Yellow River coursed southward after passing through Kaifeng, flowing into Surabaya and Huaihe River , and then the Huaihe River flowed into the sea. The Grand Canal of the Yuan Dynasty flowed through the main trunks of the Yellow River and the Huaihe River.
Once the Yellow River overflows, it will seriously affect the shipping of the Grand Canal. During the reign of the Yuan Dynasty, the Central Plains was in a warm climate (which was very different from the Little Ice Age during the Ming Dynasty), with heavy rainfall, so the Yellow River often flooded in the Yuan Dynasty. When the state machine was still functioning normally, the flooding of the Yellow River was not a big problem. But when there is a problem with the state machinery, it is a different situation.
The so-called "one eye of the stone man stirred up rebellion in the Yellow River" was the beginning of the subsequent flooding of the Yellow River due to climate change in the Central Plains, which affected the internal economic transportation arteries of the entire Yuan Dynasty and led to a series of adverse reactions.
China's decline, to some extent, started precisely from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, especially the Ming Dynasty.
Recently, a research team from the Chinese Academy of History published "A New Exploration on the Issue of "Seclusion" during the Ming and Qing Dynasties" in "Historical Research" (this is the core journal of history ), arguing that "seclusion" was not an existing concept in ancient China, nor It is not the West’s inherent understanding of China, but a historical term derived from the grafting of Chinese and Japanese languages in the late Qing Dynasty. It is not an objective description of the foreign policy of the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
This article believes that during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the imperial court adopted a foreign policy of "limited autonomy" and there was no strict sense of isolation.
"Seclusion" refers more to a situation where a country is unable to make breakthroughs externally, but can only strengthen internal rectification.
This is of course a serious case of internalizing . Just like a company that cannot make breakthroughs in business and market, it will start to strictly inspect check-in, tooling, discipline, etc., and strengthen internal rectification. If it doesn't work, it will deliberately introduce some inexplicable things. The regulations are a disguised form of driving people away.
This is what the most hopeless and incompetent managers like to do most.
Of course, when a company starts doing this, it often means that it is on the road to failure.
A company, a place, a country, its fate is the same. Only by being open can
avoid involution. Even if the openness of
is risky, it is better than the stock fight under involution.
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