Abstract Political dynasties, by limiting political competition, are thought to exacerbate corruption, poverty, and abuse of power. This paper examines the economic effects of the presence of political dynasties in Philippine cities and municipalities, taking into account possible channels in the local dynastic cycle – the framework in which politicians try to balance their goals to perform well for their constituents, to divert resources for personal gain, and to continue to be in power. Due to the lack of extensive income accounts or other economic indicators in finer geographical units (i.e., city or municipality level), we use the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) nighttime light data as our proxy for economic activity. Using a panel of Philippine municipalities and cities, we find that, in general, the relationship of political dynasties on economic performance is weak. However, we find that a higher share of economic expenditures leads to lower economic development in municipalities where the mayor, governor, and congressman belong to the same clan. We see this as an indication of weak institutions of checks and balances in localities with dynasties.

ABSTRACT This paper shows that the political and social upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century also engendered novel ideas and cross-national debates about dynasties in East Asia. The Japanese notion of a ‘line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal’ became the most emblematic provision of the Meiji Constitution. Under the impact of the Japanese model and of modern discourses on constitutional law, the Qing and Korean governments sought to radically transform traditional concepts of dynastic rule by constitutionally perpetuating the ruling dynasties. However, the notion of an unbroken lineage proved to be highly ambiguous outside of the Japanese context. Its adoption in the Qing constitutional outline of 1908 met with considerable resistance and nurtured suspicions that ‘constitutional preparation’ was only serving the Court's selfish interests. But under the surface, the Japanese model of an unbroken ruling dynasty was de-dynasticised and applied to the notion of constitution and even to the State itself. As the Confucian classics were no longer sufficient to legitimise rulership, the new notion of an eternal fundamental law fused with traditional notions of permanent principles of governance and helped establishing written constitutional charters as ineluctable elements of the modern nation-state in East Asia.

In an undergraduate Chinese history course I became fascinated by the theory of dynastic cycle, which charts the rise and fall of empires. Since then I have enjoyed thinking about its applicability to other situations, including relationships.

This paper develops a stochastic growth model that reproduces the main stylized facts of Imperial China's dynastic cycle—in particular, the time path of taxation, public spending, and corruption and their attendant impacts on production and income distribution. In this model, the emperor uses part of his tax income to finance the building of public capital and administrative institutions. This “institutional capital” enhances the productivity of the economy and limits extortion by the county magistrates. The dynastic cycle is driven by random shocks to the authority of the emperor and his central administration, which change the efficiency of institutional capital.

Nomadic conquests have helped shape world history, yet we know little about why they occurred. Using a unique climate and dynastic data set from historical China dating from 221 BCE, this study finds that the likelihood of nomadic conquest increases with less rainfall proxied by drought disasters, which drove pastoral nomads to attack agrarian Chinese for survival. Moreover, consistent with the dynastic cycle hypothesis, the likelihood of China being conquered increases with the number of years earlier that a Chinese dynasty had been established (and hence was weaker, on average) relative to a rival nomadic regime. These results survive a variety of robustness checks.

This paper utilizes the dynastic cycle framework proposed in (K. Saeed & Pavlov, 2008) to explain the role of dissent in universities. By combining the dissent expression framework (Kassing, 2011) and the dynastic cycle structure, we construct a generic model for dissent in organizations. The work is rooted in the literature of organizational communication, research and development, and higher education management. Using system dynamics methodology, we illustrate the dynamic interaction of composition, climate, and performance to simulate and explain how organizations evolve with regard to dissent. This model provides a platform for experimentation with different policy scenarios focusing on growth and productivity. The research suggests that as universities attempt to improve their performance through growth, despite initial short-term performance improvements, they are likely to devolve into low performance institutions with degraded management responsiveness and organizational productivity. Regardless of having high dissent tolerance, they could become dominated by high control and silence climates. When organizations invest in cultivating a dissent aware climate, and strive to improve their dissent processing capability, we suggest that the university and its members will be more productive and engaged.

S. C. M. Paine sets out to show the close linkages among the Chinese civil war, the East Asian regional war (Japan versus both China and Russia), and the global war (World War II). Suggestively, she sees three “levels” of these wars as “nested,” with each being a part of the others and each having many, often tragic, implications for the others (pp. 9–11). Paine's synthesis indeed compels the reader to see these wars in a new light; although there are not many analytical breakthroughs here, the whole seems greater than the sum of its parts. This book is mostly a chronicle that piles fact upon fact, often in an overwhelming degree of detail: battle follows battle follows battle. The author focuses on countries, political leaders and strategies, economic goals, and policies. The “people” receive an occasional nod but are generally bit players, reacting to situations and to their leaders; as a group, they are little differentiated. Two examples make the point. Paine notes that during the “great rebellions” of the nineteenth century, “many Chinese” thought the declining stage of the Qing dynastic cycle was occurring (p. 268). Who is meant by “many Chinese”? How many Chinese conceived of a “dynastic cycle”? How many placed their lives into such a paradigm? Or again, “the masses … concluded that the Communists … held the mandate of Heaven” (p. 268). Were “the masses” really concerned about the mandate of Heaven? Was that conception truly a motivating factor in their political, social, and economic choices?

A generic system embodies basic principles and insights that are common to a set of diverse cases and situations. This paper presents a new generic system that we name the dynastic cycle structure. It is based on a stylized model of events from the Chinese history. The model describes resource allocation between social, asocial and control uses in political economies, markets and firms that experience cyclical behaviour and homeostasis symbolizing low levels of performance. Numerical simulations with the model are used to understand the internal dynamics and to test several policy scenarios.

Ibn Khaldun has been cited as an alternative progenitor of realism and social constructivism in the academic world of international relations. Dr Susan Strange, for example, offers him as an alternative to Machiavelli as an inspirer/foundational text author for the discipline of international relations (1995, ‘Political economy and international relations’, in International relations theory today, K. Booth and S. Smith, eds, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 172). This paper argues that there is great value in re-examining Ibn Khaldun's contribution in terms of his concepts of ‘asabiyah, the dynastic cycle and the relationship between religion and power. A basic re-examination of the concepts reveals that they are the ancestral forms of what is called today identity, the hegemonic cycle and the notion of ‘civilisations’.

Reviewed by: The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures Shana J. Brown (bio) Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott with David Shambaugh. The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures. A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005. xiii, 178 pp. Hardcover $24.95, ISBN 029-598522-4. Vast treasures, whether real or fictional, cast a spell over many of us. The lure of riches and of artifacts of indescribable beauty motivates many escapades, and the treasures of the Chinese imperial houses were even more fabulous than one can imagine. Countless jewels, paintings, jades, bronze vessels, rare books, porcelains of the most varied and opulent kind-imagine the storehouses cluttered to the rafters. Where is all that loot now? This is the central question that Jeannette Shambaugh Elliott sought to answer in The Odyssey of China's Imperial Art Treasures.1 After discussing the history of imperial art collecting in earlier dynasties, Elliott narrates the movement of these treasures over the past century, including the establishment of two rival museums to house the artifacts: the Palace Museum in Beijing-the jewel in the crown of museums in the People's Republic of China-and the similarly exalted National Palace Museum in Taipei, under the control of the Republic of China. As the two regimes have at times claimed political legitimacy over Greater China, they have used their possession and stewardship of the imperial treasures to signify their right to rule-mimicking the earliest Chinese royal houses, who collected bronze vessels because of their "magico-religious power" (p. 10). Although this slim volume references few of the Chinese archival materials that document the formation of the Qing collection, it is a useful and entertaining overview of the modern fate of the dynasty's art objects. Furthermore, this work raises several significant questions, in particular the meaning of "ownership" of these materials-private versus state-and the ongoing political significance of the treasures to the regimes that now possess them. For millennia, Chinese emperors collected objets d'art to establish their education, taste, and political legitimacy. Up to the Qing dynasty (est. 1644), most of the existing collections were destroyed, sold, or stolen upon the turn of each new dynastic cycle. Indeed, the detritus of the imperial collections replenished the national art markets, as looted imperial treasures were sold to private and state collectors, or bartered away by fleeing royalty. As with pharaonic tomb gold in ancient Egypt, treasures of various kinds circulated slowly but consistently within political and cultural circles. Before the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty established his capital in present-day Beijing in the early fifteenth century, he first commanded the building of the enormous walled courtyards of the Imperial City, now the Palace Museum. [End Page 114] Although two centuries later much of the extensive Ming collection was lost even before the conquering Qing established control, still the Manchus inherited the palace and much of its storerooms, which became the basis of their own fabulous collection. Indeed, the Qing emperors were avid (if not particularly sophisti-cated) collectors. Under the Qianlong emperor, the imperial collection came to number some fifteen thousand paintings and works of calligraphy, including over two thousand produced by the emperor's own brush. Not all of these works are esteemed today, however; Elliott quotes Michael Sullivan as calling Qianlong "a niggardly and opinionated connoisseur" (p. 53). When the young Puyi, the last Qing emperor, abdicated the throne in 1912, the collection's ownership became highly contested. The issue, at heart, was whether Puyi actually owned any of the artworks personally. As Elliott explains, the abdication agreement stipulated that "the emperor's private property would be protected by the government of the Republic of China. But it did not specify who actually owned the personal property of the Qing household" (p. 57). This ambiguity enabled both Puyi and various Peking governments to claim legitimate ownership over the artworks. For a decade, Puyi's family and attendants made up shortfalls in his budget by selling choice items from the collection. When the warlord Feng Yuxiang ousted Puyi from his palaces in 1924, he unilaterally declared the "treasures and historical relics" to...

Climate change, social unrest and dynastic transition in ancient China

Peak-to-peak dynamics in the dynastic cycle

Abstract Over the long term, the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song in 1276 was less destructive to members of the local South Chinese elite than was the failure of the Yuan regime to establish strong and durable institutions of dynastic rule. For not long after the elite survivors of the Sino-Mongol wars had returned to a comfortable prosperity under Yuan rule, their children were buffetted by the instability and civil wars that engulfed Yuan society from the late 1330s to the collapse of the dynasty in 1368. The Kongs of Liyang typify many of the most salient features of elite life in South China under the compressed Yuan dynastic cycle: the orphaned son of a minor Song official who immediately capitulated to the Mongols, by the 1320s Kong Wensheng had translated talent, pedigree, and his position as a respected clerk in provincial government into such accoutrements of elite Yuan life as a library, sojourning literati guests, and a steady flow of slaves and bondservants thrown onto the market by penury and natural disaster. The prosperity built up by men like Kong Wensheng unravelled in the last tumultuous decades of the Yuan, an era of chaos that is captured by Wensheng's son Kong Qi in his Frank Recollections of the Zhizheng Era of ca. 1365. Even as it exemplifies many aspects of the compressed Yuan dynastic cycle, this collection of cautionary anecdotes and observations is also colored by Kong Qi's special circumstances as a minor son and a uxorilocal husband, circumstances that incline Kong Qi to blame the perils of his family, his society, and ultimately his dynasty on women's usurpation of male-centered institutions of public authority to create their own private gynarchies. Kong's jeremiads against usurpatious women in turn raise the possibility that during the Yuan, if not at all times, women exercised far more power and autonomy than normative prescriptions would suggest.

There were a couple of typos in our paper on Dynastic Cycles. The purpose of our Sect. V and Appendices 2 and 3 is to illustrate how easily erratic cycles may arise when we manipulate the function characterizing people’s decision interactions. Although this part is not the main focus of our paper, a correct presentation should help the reader understand the role of human interaction on population dynamics. The correct version of Assumption 1 should be:

A nonlinear dynamical model for the dynastic cycle

China’s considerable changes since the early 1980s suggest the need to assess the nature of the post-Mao reform and change. Many scholars on China in recent years have not thought totalitarianism to be a useful term anymore. The article attempts to assess the validity of the totalitarian model, investigate and analyze the major changes in post-Mao China, and evalaute the significance of the changes and the nature of the post-Mao reform, so as to determine whether the post-Mao regime can still be described as totalitarian or has been transformed into something else. The article demonstrates that the dynamic core and essential features of the Chinese communist regime have not fundamentally changed. China has just repeated the “dynastic cycle” of communist totalitarianism from Mao’s regime to Deng’s regime, though Deng’s regime has many differences from Mao’s at the operative level. The paradigm of totalitarianism, rather than outmoded, is still useful and applicable to the study of the Chinese communist regime.

"Historians have long noticed that population declines in ancient China often coincided with dynasty changes, and that most of these declines were the result of internecine wars which, in turn, were often initiated by famine or density pressure. Since the interactions between density pressure, internecine wars, and dynasty changes cannot be explained by the traditional age-specific density-dependent population structure, we propose to use a bandit/peasant/ruler occupation-specific population model to interpret the dynamic socio-economic transitions of ancient Chinese population, and provide econometric support to our model. We also highlight the rich dynamics of the composition of human population, a factor which was often neglected in previous research on general populations."

Ancient Chinese history reveals many examples of a cyclical pattern of social development connected with the rise and the decline of dynasties. In this paper, a possible explanation of the periodic alternation between despotism and anarchy by a dynamic game between the rulers and the bandits is offered. The third part of the society, the farmers, are dealt with as a renewable resource which is exploited by both players in a different manner. It is shown that the Nash solution of this one-state differential game may be a persistent cycle. Although we restrict the analysis to open-loop solutions, this result is of interest for at least two reasons. First, it provides one of the few existing dynamic economic games with periodic solutions. Second, and more important, the model is an example of a three-dimensional canonical system (one state, two costates) with a stable limit cycle as solution. As far as we see, our model provides up to now the simplest (i.e., lowest dimensional) case of a persistent periodic solution of an intertemporal decision problem.

AbstractsThe developmental trajectories of North China and the Southeast Coast during the middle and late imperial periods are surveyed to illustrate the recurrence of regional macrocycles of development and decline and to show that such cycles may be unsynchronized as between regions. These cases provide a basis for arguing that economic macrocycles are a systemic property—not of provinces or of the empire as a whole but of regional economies viewed as internally differentiated and interdependent systems of human interaction. An exploration of the relation between regional developmental cycles and the Chinese dynastic cycle concludes that the latter was mediated by the former. It is suggested that regional developmental cycles are cycles not only of economic prosperity and depression but also of population growth and decline, of social development and devolution, and of peace and disorder. China's historical structure, then, is seen as an internested hierarchy of local and regional histories whose scope in each case is grounded in the spatial patterning of human interaction, and whose critical temporal structures are successive cyclical episodes. The uses of such an historiographic model are briefly explored.

There remains little doubt that the offcial population statistics which indicate the beginning and the end of the most recent down swing in China's “dynastic cycle” of demographic development – 430 million people in 1850 and 582·6 million on 30 June 1953 – are close approximations of the true totals. Detailed scrutiny of all evident irregularities in the reported data is unlikely to suggest corrections by more than five per cent, and such modifications are subject to questions and reservations in turn.