Chinese history
Traces of human presence have been in China for almost 2 million years, since the archaeological exploration of China is still relatively recent, one hopes that in the next years new discoveries should arise. The most ancient remains found till now are the called Man of Yuanmou, who lived 1,7 million years ago in the Province of Yunnan, the Man of Lantian, who lived approximately 800.000 years ago in the outskirts of Xi'an, and the Man of Beijing, who lived in the outskirts of this city approximately 400.000 years ago and in whom the basic characteristics of the man are already present: since it is the gait erecto and the use of the fire and hardware.
The human traces multiply in China from approximately 200.000 years ago. Since then there are remains of numerous hominids. Nevertheless, it is considered that the modern Chinese does not descend from any of these hominids, which were exterminated completely by the new homo sapiens proceeding from Africa.
In more recent times, they characterize the neolithic Chinese the remains of the matriarchal culture of Yangshao (of hace 6.000 ó 7.000 years), and the patriarchal one of Longshan, with well established clans, and that of Hemudu, in the outskirts of Hangzhou. All of them were using stone hardware, ceramics, and were practising agriculture and cattle in addition to the hunting and compilation.
A little later, not very much, there is dated the establishment of the first tribes who in the basin of the Yellow river will give birth to the Chinese nation. The ancestors of the current Miao are the times in which Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, supervised by an alliance of tribes, obtains for his people the mastery of the best grounds of the north of China, expelling his opponents, between them. After the Yellow Emperor, the civilizing hero of this tribe, another series of kings arises, today mythologized, that donate the Chinese what will be the base of his culture.
It is said that the first dynasty is the dynasty Xia, of which scarcely news have, although it is possible to affirm that it governed a region of the center of China from the XXIst century B.C. until the XVIth.
The dynasty Shang (XVIth to XIth Century B.C.), his successor, is better enough documented, not only for the ancient Chinese historians, but for the abundant open archaeological remains of his epoch, especially inscriptions in shells of turtle, vessels of bronze of an extraordinary beauty, and the remains his capital Anyang, in the outskirts of the city of Zhengzhou. Where in addition to remains of houses and palaces, there are numerous graves of kings and princes with his wives and living buried servants together with them. Anyang is only one of the capitals of the Shang, since it is said they had 6 more capitals for his 500 years of hegemony. 
The dynasty Zhou of the West (XIth Century B.C.), constructs 770 in the outskirts of Xian the quite developed state, with numerous officials who realize government tasks. The political debates are to the agenda, the Chinese population grows under his government, reaching the country important dimensions. During these years the first literary works appear. But the nomads of the West covet the wealths that accumulate in the Chinese cities, and his constant harassment forces the Zhou to move to the east, to the outskirts of Luoyang, calls her him of that time Zhou of the East. But his power is more nominal than real, and the feudal gentlemen every time have more autonomy, for what although some of them want to date the end of this dynasty in 221 B.C. the reality is that it finishes very much earlier.
The Springs and the Autumns (770-476 B.C.) : The development of the agriculture and the smelting of the iron is transformed by a society of gentlemen and slaves, existing in the previous dynasties into a society more similar to the European Middle Age. There went so far as to be 140 Kingdoms during está epoch. Each one, a center of power. The society experiences a considerable progress, the peasants work for the one who offers them better conditions. The thinkers and philosophers travel from one state to other exhibiting to the princes his theories for a better government. There is a cultural boiling without precedents. There arise important philosophical schools that will mark the history of the later China: especially the school taoísta of Lao Zi, which there proposes a weak government, the school of Confucio, who proposes a strong government, and the jurists of Shang Yang and Han Fei, who proposes an equal government for all. Little by little the power is concentrating concerning the most powerful states in such a way that for 475 B.C. only there stay seven states, which wage war continuously between themselves, it is the called epoch of The Fighting Kingdoms (475-221 B.C.) From 350 B.C. the State of Qin, putting into practice the theories of the legal school, which was supporting that the state had to be ruled by a few equal laws for all, reaches the political and military hegemony. That will make possible that Qin Shi Huang defeats his enemies and unifies China for the first time in 221 B.C.
The dynasty Qin. It is the first dynasty of a China reunified and much bigger than the governed one by the Zhou. The first emperor unified also the currency, the weight and measurements, the written characters, the breadth of the ways and numerous laws more. He constructed enormous palaces in Xianyang to turn his ancient enemies into courtiers, and unified the fragments of wall constructed during the previous centuries in the Big Wall. Since it rose to power it initiated the construction of his mausoleum, a part of the same one, the famous Horses and Warriors of Terracotta, they have been discovered recently. His cruelty and the numerous works that impusó to the village sowed the dissatisfaction, and after his death, the rebels made use of the reign of a weak son, to finish with the dynasty Qin, and to devastate his capital Xianyang.
Liu Bang established the new dynasty. The dynasty They Have. China prospered with rapidity. The agriculture, the industry and the commerce bloomed. General Zhang Qian was sent to the regions of the West to look for such necessary horses in the continuous wars against the Huns, to his return the Route of the Silk was inaugurated. The Chinese silks were selling well in these grounds, from which products were coming till then unknown. The dynasty They Have it extolls the thought of the school confuciana, and begins to give form to the officials' framework that will govern China for centuries. The role is invented, what helps to promote the education, the seismograph and numerous new skills that revolutionize the country. But the ideals that helped to raise the dynasty are disappearing. The grief of the people is on the increase, revolutions arise in different points of the country. That of the Green Woodcutters and the Red Eyebrows have to move the capital from Xi'an to Louyang in the year 25. And that of the Yellow Turbans, in the year 184, will finish with finishing the dynasty.
Three Kingdoms: Wei, Shu and Wu. There are the result of the division of China after the fall of the dynasty They have and the struggles that spread over the country. It is unified briefly under Jin of the East, to be dismembered again in numerous dynasties of brief reign. He emphasizes in this epoch the dynasty Wei of the North (386-534), founded by the Tuoba, a village of the family of the Huns, who from his capitals, first in Datong and then in Luoyang, give a big impulse to the establishment of the Buddhism in China, beginning the construction of the majestic caves that have come to us up to the present: Yunggan, Longmen, Mogao. In the year 581, Yang Jian, prime minister of the last emperor of the Zhou of the North takes the power, and after defeating to the dynasties of the South unifies China again, establishing the dynasty Sui. The reforms with which it tries to improve the situation of the people are betrayed by his son, breaking loose a succession of rural wars that only they were finishing with the capture of the power by Li Yuan, in the year 618, which founds the dynasty Tang, with capital in Xi'an.
The dynasty Tang (618-907) leads to the Chinese culture to his maximum splendor. The arts develop under the patronage of the imperial court. Laws favorable to the well-being of the people give a peace period, the population grows, the Buddhism spreads over China, the commerce with the nearby countries multiplies. The poetry blooms as it had never done it. The Route of the Silk is a big freeway for which new ideas and new thoughts come. The influence of the Tang reaches to the Center of Asia. From Korea and Japan there come to China monks and students fascinated by the nobility of the empire. The emperors prohíben to the local authorities any abuse on the foreigners. They will return to his country like ambassadors of the Chinese culture, with the sciences, the customs, the arts and the religion of China. The rebellions of An Lushan and Shi Siming, in the VIIIth century, although bloody, they are not provided with the support of a satisfied people, and finish with being suffocated by the 
imperial troops. But at the end of the following century the corruption and the injustice believe resentments throughout the country. New raisings finish with the dynasty Tang in the year 907. He is followed by a period of wars and disorders that it lasts 50 years, acquaintance in the Chinese history like: Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-960).
The dynasty Song (960-1279), it unifies again the country. But whipped by the peoples of the North he has to accept humiliating agreements. The pressures on the peasants to be able to pay his tribute to the kingdoms of the North it renews the tension between them. The raisings are frequent. The led one by Song Jiang in Liangshanbo, will be immortalized by the novel "To the shore of the water". The Song finish with being expelled from the North of China, moving his capital to Hangzhou, where the arts and the letters will bloom until the dynasty Yuan, of the Mongols, conquers China.
Gengis Khan, elected chief of all the tribes mongolas in the year 1206 provokes a military movement that in a few years will turn his people into the proprietor of an empire that was spreading from Eastern Europe up to Vietnam. The small dynasties that were governing the North of China are not an opposition for the Mongols, and the resistance of the Song is only effective a few years, until Kubilai, his grandson, finishes with the last generals and establishes the dynasty Yuan (1271-1368) with capital in Beijing. The Mongols design an ethnically stratified society: it arrives the Mongols, in the second term other allied peoples of the steppe, under them the Chinese of the North and to the fund of the social scale the Chinese of the South. The unjust situation did not give big stability to the dynasty, and as soon as the military power of the Mongols was decreasing, the riots became more dangerous. In 1351 there happens the called raising of the Red Turbans, for the color of the cloths with which the infuriated ones were covering the head. A new rebellion in the Nanjing region will finish the dynasty. It was during the dynasty Yuan that the first two of the travelers of Occident, Marco Polo and Ibn Battutah, knew China, staying both deeply impressed therefore they saw.
The instability in the North during the last centuries had moved the economic center of China, from the vale of the Yellow river to that of the Yangtze, to whose shores Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou, little more on the South were flourishing economic centers. The Mongols had repaired the Big Channel, making him come up to Beijing to be able to receive the products of the South. When Zhu Yuanzhang took the power in 1368 and founded the dynasty Ming (1368-1644) it established his capital in Nanjing, a clear reflex of the Chinese reality. The third emperor of the dynasty, Chengzu, nevertheless moved the capital to Beijing, possibly fleeing of the dynastic struggles. This will be fatal at the end of the dynasty, when the overthrow of the Ming for the peasants puts within reach of the manchúes the unarmed capital of the empire
During the dynasty Ming the contacts with the exterior multiply. In the XIVth century, Zheng He, the most famous navigator commands 7 fleets of numerous vessels and thousands of men, covering the archipelagoes of the Asian Southeast, the India, Persia, even Africa and Australia were scales of his trips.
Shortly after the trips of Zheng He, the first Portuguese navigators were doing his appearance on the Chinese coasts. Soon the presence of missionaries and merchants would become a relative in the coastal cities. The emperors Ming did not see with good eyes the missionary desires to penetrate to the interior of the country, the proper San Francisco Javier, one of the most ardent leaders of this task, he was dying opposite to the coasts of China in 1552. Another Spanish, Augustinian Martín de Rada, 
was in Fujian in the year 1575, on his detailed descriptions the Father Mendoza was based, of the same order to write in 1588 his History of China, for many years the most important work published in Europe on the celestial empire. The arrival of the Italian Jesuit Mateo Ricci to Beijing, where it managed to turn some princes and eunuchs, it facilitated the penetration of the missionaries.
But the dynasty Ming was already in his worst moments. The despotic government of the last emperors there joined an every time major participation of the eunuchs in the intrigues of the court, and a popular raising finished with them in the year 1644.
The manchúes, which had established his capital in Shenyang, where from they were whipping the Chinese, saw the open way, and after a military walk on Beijing they restored the last dynasty: The dynasty Qing. As the Mongols a few centuries earlier, practised an ethnic segregation of the population. With two of his emperors Kangxi and Qianlong, his maximum extension reached China. But his nobility based on the military repression of the people, and especially of the ethnic minorities with numerous wars against the Miao, began crumbling as soon as these weakened. It was the epoch in which the European potency began to frequent the port of Canton, where the British ships were trading principally with silk and tea. To fit the trade deficit contracted with the Chinese, who were demanding it will be paid to them in gold, the Englishmen began to introduce in China the opium that they were cultivating in the India. The emperor prohibited this commerce, not only for his harmful effects on the people, but because it was re-spilling the trade balance, now in favor of the Britons, and sent to Canton the commissioner Lin ready to make sure that his orders were fulfilled.
The War of the Opium. The destruction of a shipment of English opium in the Canton port, served as pretext to the Englishmen to attack Canton. It is the one that called herself Shanghai an I War of the Opium, in which the attackers, after an easy victory, imposed on the Chinese the Treaty of Nanking (the first one of the called Unequal Treaties) for which the Chinese government was indemnifying the Englishmen for the destroyed opium and expenses of the war, it was transferring the island of Hong Kong, and was opening another 5 ports for the exterior commerce, between them.
The decline of the dynasty Qing was clear. The peasants every time were poorer and exploited. Numerous riots arose, the most important of which was the led one by Hong Xiuquan in 1851, which initiating his activities between the Zhuang, soon was done under control of big part of the center and south of China establishing the Celestial Kingdom Taiping with capital in Nanjing, who adopted a few measurements revolucionariamente egalitarian. The imperial weakness was made use by France and England that they threw II War of the Opium in 1860, increasing his influence on China. Russia and Japan made use also of the weakness of the Qing, sharpened by the palatial intrigues of Cixi, which from the shade directed last years of empire, and took diverse Chinese territories.
Although the first reform movements arose at the end of last century between a Chinese bourgeoisie that was becoming industrialized, the empress Cixi suppressed them with hardness. In 1899 there arose the patriotic movement Yi He Tuan (acquaintance in Occident as the Boxers for his mastery of the martial arts), ready to finish with the foreign influence. Only it provoked a new invasion and 
plundering of Beijing on the part of Eight Potency, (England, France, Germany, the United States, Russia, Japan, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
China was in boiling, the western ideas had penetrated with his products, and the imperial corruption was coming to his zenith. In the year 1911, the Republicans led by Sun Yatsen managed to finish with the last emperor, scarcely a child, and with her, with the current imperial system for 2.000 years.
China turned out to be again dismembered between the different Masters of the War, authentic kings of the territories that they were controlling. In the middle of this chaos the Chinese Communist Party was founded on July 23, 1921 in Shanghai, between his founders was Mao Zedong. The influence of the communists between a few peasants depauperados grew quickly. In these dates Chiang Kaishek was done under control of the Nationalistic Party, submitting the masters of the war, in such a way that, at the beginning of the 30s, two principal forces of China were these two parties. A nationalistic offensive in 1934 forced the communists to leave his bases in Jiangxi, and realize the Long March, which across 12.000 km would take them to his refuge in Yan'an, close to Xi'an. There blew up the principal military theories that Mao would put into practice to conquer the power. The clashes between communists and nationalists stopped in 1937, before the invasion of Japan. In two years Japan was done under control of the whole coastal line of China, taking Nanjing, where it massacred the civil population, and bombarding the importance areas out of his scope. Not even the nationalists wanted to face the Japanese army, not even the communists could. Japan was defeated by the United States at the end of the Second World war, and only then it left China, in the allied edict. Communists and nationalists faced again until the second ones were defeated sheltering Chiang Kaishek with the remains of his army, in Taiwan.
People's republic China. On October 1, 1949. From the Door of Tian'anmen, in Beijing, Mao Zedong was proclaiming the foundation of the people's republic China. The grounds of the landowners were confiscated distributing them between the lacking peasants. The creation of an industry was promoted, and during 10 following years the situation was improving under the guidance of the Communist Party, which was supporting an iron control on the resources of the state. A relaxation of the control on the mass media, in 1957, led to serious denunciations of the intelligentsia of the corruption in the Party, the censoring, the intellectual isolation of the country. The critics were accused of right-wings and they suffered a hard repression in reeducation fields.
The economy kept on improving the following years, in spite of the serious inudaciones and the retreat of the Soviet help in 1960. Pero Mao seemed to have lost leading role inside the party and in the proper Government. In an attempt of recovering the power, Mao threw in 1966, again from Tian'anmen, the Cultural revolution. It was necessary to return to the country the purity of the communism, and the proper pictures of the Party were purged, many of them suffered in the jail, like Deng Xiao Ping, or they were sent to centers of reeducation in the field. The same luck was continued by the teachers, the directors of companies, medical, engineers, and all that had an out-standing position. It cheered the children to denounce up his parents, the husbands to his wives, and the friends between themselves. The whole China sank in the chaos for some years. The nightmare only finished with the Mao death in 1976.
In the middle of 1977, Deng Xiaoping returned to the power. A leader who had already demonstrated his 
pragmatism in the 60s impelled that in 1978, during the Third Meeting of XI Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party were passed to initiate the politics of reform and opening on the outside.
The reforms started by the peasants. The popular communes restored during the Cultural revolution were abolished, there was promoted the private initiative and the particular use of the ground. The results were spectacular. To the agricultural reform it continued the industrial, financial one, transforming completely the life of the Chinese in a few years.
But not quite it has been good news. The economic reforms came accompanied from good doses of corruption, nepotism and inflation. In 1989, the funerals for the missing leader Hu Yaobang degenerated into a declaration of more than 150.000 persons in favor of the democracy. During the following days the agitation was on the increase. Numerous students and discontented with the step of the modernization they came to Beijing, camping many in Tian'anmen. 3.000 students inciaron a hunger strike asking for democracy. The agitation was on the increase. Numerous sectors of the population were identified by the demands of the students. Hard-working, independent and even the police were supporting his claims. In the night of June 4, units of the army were entering Beijing and were attacking the demonstrators. Did all that die? Hundreds of persons, thousands. Nobody knows it. China shut itself up again if the same during the rest of the year. Then the economic reforms hastened. There keeps on existing corruption and serious social contradictions: unemployment, emigration to the cities, but the socialistic market economy supported in 1993 is raising the standard of living of the Chinese.
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