(My answer on Quora)
Actually this isn’t the case.
Within the context of survival as a civilization China has performed remarkably well. Relatively high population numbers and the overwhelming predominance of its Han Chinese core in safeguarding its cultural heritage, have played a significant role for most of its history towards ensuring a residual endurance. However this has been realized at a very great cost.
While the cultural element has taken somewhat of a beating recently under Communist domination, the momentum of centuries of Confucian thought have supplied China with an innate buffering system that has proved largely resilient to radical change (for better or for worse).
More often than not the outsider philosophy or power that has come to dominate China has been forced by necessity to integrate the outside beliefs within the Confucian framework.
The framework tends to stress a necessary meritocracy although this has come at the expense of a tolerance for the type of creative thought that challenges existing orthodoxies. This was reflected in China’s failure to initially grasp the technological drive that defined the First Industrial Revolution. The Japanese to the contrary, during the Meiji Era (1868–1912), did not make the same mistake. Further shortfalls in China were compounded by China’as insularity and top down hierarchy of power.
However the notion of China as a strong political player throughout most of recorded history is one that does mesh with reality. China has on numerous occasions been overrun by foreign invaders. The Yuen dynasty (1271–1368) was set up by the Mongols following a brutal conquest as was the later Qing (1644–1912) who have external Manchurian origins. The latter came at the cost of 25 million lives.
Manchu Conquest source: Historica Wiki Fandom
From 1839 to 1949 China suffered what was called the ‘century of humiliation’. It was defeated in the First and Second Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), lost suzerainty in Vietnam to France as a consequence of the Sino-French war (1884–1885) and had to admit defeat against Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895).
The failure of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1891) further entrenched foreign trade domination. Indeed for the first half of the Twentieth century China was at the receiving end of growing Japanese territorial gains that followed the Treaty of Versailles. This would persist with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931–1932) that in turn was followed by the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).
China would recover all territory lost to Japan by 1945 (although it lost Outer Mongolia) however the war is believed to have resulted in 15–22 million casualties.
It is also important to note that China has often been cursed with deadly civil wars that have produced extremely high death counts and wreaked havoc with its economy for decades afterward.
The threeway struggle between the Han and Wang Mang usurpers and Red Eyebrow rebels likely cost ten million lives between 9 and 24 CE. The later war between the Three Kingdoms (Wu, Wei and Shu) added another 3.4 million to the death count between 189–230 CE, The An Lushan Rebellion (756–763) caused a drop in the population by 36 million souls.
These continued throughout Chinese history with the Fang La Rebellion (1120–1122, 2 million dead) and the Mongol invasion (1162–1227, 40 million death toll).
The Fall of the Yuan Empire between 1340–1370 added 30 million deaths to the dark side of China’s historical ledger. Between 1755–1757 the Central Asian Sino-Dzungar war cost 600,000 lives. However this figure pales in comparison to the mass killings associated with the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864, that ultimately saw the defeat of the Taiping rebels at the hands of the Manchu forces, although not before the loss of a further 20 million lives.
The Taiping Rebellion source: Grunge
The Hui Rebellion (1862–1873), that engulfed Gansu Province between 1862–1873 took 640,000 lives as Han Chinese forces battled Hui Muslims.
To this we can add the mass death tolls suffered under Mao Zedong's CCP regime (Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution) between 1949–1976 whose human toll sits in the neighborhood of 40 million lives. This of course followed the Chinese Civil (1927–1949) where casualty figures likely surpassed the 15 million mark (although there is substantial overlap between the number supplied here and losses incurred in the contemporary Second Sino -Japanese War
So while on the surface China has portrayed a veneer of strength once the curtain of simplicity is removed the history depicts a disturbing timeline of humanitarian and political disasters that demand attention in a deeper analysis.
Source:
Death Toll Numbers
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