During the era of third-wave civilizations, China, a massive and powerful civilization, was imitated by adjacent peoples. It gave rise to China-centered "world order" encompassing most of eastern Asia. Its borders extended deep into central Asia while its wealthy and cosmopolitan culture attracted its visitors from all over Eurasia. China's prospering economy and many of its technological innovations affected the Afro-Eurasia world with its ripple effects. The country was involved in international trade which stimulated important social, cultural, and economic changes within China itself.
Reemergence of China
The fall of the Han dynasty around 220 C.E. created more than three centuries' worth of political fragmentation in China and resulted in the rise of powerful and local entrenched aristocratic families. The incursion of northern nomads created the merging of language and families. They learned Chinese, dressed like Chinese, and married into Chinese families and governed northern regions of the country in a Chinese fashion.
China regained its unity under the Sui dynasty (589-618) because its emperors solidified its unity through a vast extension of the country's canal system, which stretched around 1,200 miles in length. The canals linked northern and southern China economically and contributed to the prosperity that soon followed.
China and the Northern Nomads
China had many interactions with the Eurasian world from early times to the nineteenth century. It had its most enduring and intense interaction with foreigners were in the north. It involved many nomadic pastoral or semi-agricultural peoples of the steppes. Even though the Chinese often came with threats, bringing their own military forces deep into the steppes, building the Great Wall to keep the nomads out, and preventing the pastoral people easy access to trading opportunities in China, the Chinese still needed the nomads. The nomads' lands were sources of horses and products such as skins, furs, hides, and amber, which were all valuable to China. The relationship and interaction between China and the northern nomads brought together people occupying different environments, practicing different economics, governing themselves with different institutions, and thinking about the world in very different ways.
China and the Eurasian World Economy
China's incredible economic growth took place during the Tang and Song dynasties and could hardly be contained within China's borders and had a major impact throughout Eurasia. China was both a recipient and donor in the economic interactions of the third-wave era, and its own economic achievements owed something with the larger world.
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