A fascinating essay in which John Michael Greer sounds almost scholarly. Usually, he sounds more like a tinfoil hat...or is it a Druid ditto? ;-)
Jokes aside, the blog post below discusses why the high cultures of China, Egypt and Mesopotamia - China in particular - managed to recreate themselves in cyclical fashion after civilizational collapses. The short form is that China had access to abundant supplies of water and a form of agriculture that didn´t deplete the soil of nutrients. This ever-present resource base could be tapped to recreate and sustain the Chinese civilization even after political collapses and military defeats.
The somewhat longer form is that China today no longer has this ability, and will therefore collapse in pretty much the same way as the declining modern West. Most of its population will presumably die off one way or another, and since traditional Chinese culture is long gone, the eventual successor civilization centuries into the future will probably be something entirely different...
In other words: we finally discovered how and when China will fail. May you live in interesting times!
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