The peoples the Ch'in had incorporated

[samiaseo75]

One case argues that such a fall may not be inevitable. The Han Empire in China, founded in 220 BC, survives in substance to this day. 1100 million Chinese still call themselves "Han", as for a thousand years the Byzantine Greeks and Anatolians called themselves Romaoi, Romans. They live in a state which has again gathered to itself all the Han lands, and in which non-Han, Tibetans and other minorities, in all under 10% of the modern Chinese state's subjects, are systematically being swamped and eliminated.

Into their Han Empire were ethnically and culturally very similar. The early ideological totalitarianism epitomised by Chancellor Li Su's burning of the Confucian Willow Books in 213 BC gave way to a phone number list Confucian-influenced Imperial culture which still underlies today's "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The Empire was also geographically compact, if large, with internal lines of communication. As an ethnic, cultural and geographical unit the Chinese "Rome" never fell, and it could be argued that Chairman Deng still presides over a 2,300-year-old empire - if that, despite its vast area and population, is actually what it is, a point to which we shall return - which seems set fair to become the greatest economic, and therefore probably military, power on Earth some time in the next century.

More modern Empires are in eclipse. The British Empire, the greatest in extent and population the world had ever known, was, like Rome, built by one nation but became imbued with the idea of itself as the light of World Civilization, bearing, as Rudyard Kipling put it, "the White Man's Burden", a burden of bringing civilization to the barbarians for their own good, "Fill full the mouth of Famine; And bid the sickness cease", to "bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need".