Qing Ming Quotes

..." said Feng Xin. "..." said Mu Qing. "...?" said Quan Yizhen. "Ho ho," said Pei Ming.

Qing Ming, the festival of the dead,

He whipped his head around. Hua Cheng was standing so close behind him, like he was about to reach out. Xie Lian stopped caring about anything else and went right for it—he pounced on Hua Cheng, cupped his cheeks with his hands, and then, getting up on his toes slightly to reach, he closed his eyes and pressed their lips together. “…” said Feng Xin. “…” said Mu Qing. “…?” said Quan Yizhen. “Ho ho,” said Pei Ming.

The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without that assumption, the entire field would collapse. There isn’t any fundamental axiom for sociology yet, but it might be even darker than economics. The truth always picks up dust. A small number of people could fly off into space, but if we knew it would come to that, why would we have bothered in the first place?” “Bothered with what?” “Why would we have had the Renaissance? Why the Magna Carta? Why the French Revolution? If humanity had stayed divided into classes, kept in place by the law’s iron rule, then when the time came, the ones who needed to leave would leave, and the ones who had to stay behind would stay. If this took place in the Ming or Qing Dynasties, then I’d leave, of course, and you’d stay behind. But that’s not possible now.

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern. Under the Song dynasty, between 960 and 1279, China led the world in many technological innovations. The Chinese invented clocks, the compass, gunpowder, paper and paper money, porcelain, and blast furnaces to make cast iron before Europe did. They independently developed spinning wheels and waterpower at more or less the same time that these emerged at the other end of Eurasia. In consequence, in 1500 standards of living were probably at least as high in China as they were in Europe. For centuries China also had a centralized state with a meritocratically recruited civil service. Yet

Absolutism reigned not just in much of Europe but also in Asia, and similarly prevented industrialization during the critical juncture created by the Industrial Revolution. The Ming and Qing dynasties of China and the absolutism of the Ottoman Empire illustrate this pattern.

The reasoning of the Ming and Qing states for opposing international trade is by now familiar: the fear of creative destruction.

What is curious about Chinese expansionism compared with the other four permanent members of the Security Council is that China’s enlargement since the Mongol invasion has been driven primarily by the non-Chinese who conquered it. China became a mega-state not by conquering others so much as by being conquered by others. What the Mongols and Manchu ruling families of the Yuan and Qing Great States wrought, the Chinese ruling families of the Ming, the Republic and the People’s Republic have chosen to perpetuate.

The Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) came to power when the neighboring Manchu people capitalized on instability and rebellions in Ming China to challenge it.

Having reviewed diverse theories and hypotheses on the waning of the Age of Enlightenment in Central Asia, it is now time to step back and raise a larger question: does it really require an explanation? The assumption behind our search for causes is that if one or another factor had not come into play, the movement of thought would have continued. But that great period of intense cerebration, that age of inquiry and innovation, had lasted for more than four centuries. If more information on the centuries preceding the Arab invasion had survived, we might confidently extend that period of flowering even further back in time. Even without this addition, the Age of Enlightenment was five times longer than the lifetime of Periclean Athens; a century longer than the entire history of the intellectual center of Alexandria from its foundation to the destruction of its library; only slightly shorter than the entire life span of the Roman Republic; longer than the Ming or Qing dynasties in China and the same length as the Han; about the same length as the history of Japan from the founding of the Tokugawa dynasty to the present; and of England from the age of Shakespeare to our own day. As they say in the theater world, it had a long run. It is well and good to speak of causes of the decline of the passion for inquiry and innovation, or of some supposed exhaustion of creative energies. But just as we feel little need to discover the cause of a nonagenarian’s death, we need not inquire too urgently into the cause of the waning of this remarkable age. Of course, the question of why the region as a whole remained in a state of backwardness from the end of the Age of Enlightenment down to recent times is vitally important, but it involves many factors besides those that came into play in the intellectual decline. It should form the subject of another book.