This schema, crude as it is, alerts us to two interesting
featurar of
Chinese history. The first is that in China, in marked contrast to
India, political unity is the norm; we can subsume much of the Chinese
past under the rubric of "imperial China," whereas we cannot do the
same for India. The second feature is that over the millennia the
periods of disunity tended to become shorter; China became more, not
less, imperial. But the schema, however useful as a first
approximation, also conceals as much as it reveals, even at the level
of political history. The single most important thing it fails to
register is the watershed in Chinese history represented by the Ch'in
unification of the third century B.C.
