These are in line with what I was asking for, thank you for providing! On reading this list, I realized what I was envisioning was more like an internal revolution or government takeover by a homegrown grassroots militaristic organization. Something that started like one of our current social movements here in the USA that developed into a power akin to the Cultural Revolution.
It’s worth noting that the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution was official government policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Chairman Mao Zedong and (for our purposes here) represented neither a transfer of power nor a bottom-up social movement. The transfer of power which put Mao and the CCP in charge was the 1927-1949 Chinese Civil War. But the concept of a “1927-1949 Chinese Civil War” is an anachronism. China: A History by John Keay describes China as more-or-less in a state of civil war from the fall of the Qing Dynasty (well before 1927) until its domination by the CCP.
In other words, the first domino was “civil war”, not “Maoism”. The CCP didn’t even come into existence until years after the fall of the Qing Dynasty
If you want to use modern Chinese history as a model for predicting political catastrophe then the place to look is for indicators of the breakdown of the Qing Dynasty. The obvious place to begin an examination for that would be the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion, both of which are out-of-scope of “the last century”.
If our goal is to specifically look for “a transfer of power from democracy to non-democracy in China” then that happened when Yuan Shikai took power from Sun Yat-sen. But to emphasize that particular transfer of power is to examine history through a narrow, biased lens. After all, the Kuomintang lost the war. Rather than look for situations where democracy turned into non-democracy, I think we can get a better understanding of historical forces by looking for indicators of a transfer of power more generally, and then applying these general indicators to the specific places we care about.
These are in line with what I was asking for, thank you for providing! On reading this list, I realized what I was envisioning was more like an internal revolution or government takeover by a homegrown grassroots militaristic organization. Something that started like one of our current social movements here in the USA that developed into a power akin to the Cultural Revolution.
It’s worth noting that the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution was official government policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Chairman Mao Zedong and (for our purposes here) represented neither a transfer of power nor a bottom-up social movement. The transfer of power which put Mao and the CCP in charge was the 1927-1949 Chinese Civil War. But the concept of a “1927-1949 Chinese Civil War” is an anachronism. China: A History by John Keay describes China as more-or-less in a state of civil war from the fall of the Qing Dynasty (well before 1927) until its domination by the CCP.
In other words, the first domino was “civil war”, not “Maoism”. The CCP didn’t even come into existence until years after the fall of the Qing Dynasty
If you want to use modern Chinese history as a model for predicting political catastrophe then the place to look is for indicators of the breakdown of the Qing Dynasty. The obvious place to begin an examination for that would be the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion, both of which are out-of-scope of “the last century”.
If our goal is to specifically look for “a transfer of power from democracy to non-democracy in China” then that happened when Yuan Shikai took power from Sun Yat-sen. But to emphasize that particular transfer of power is to examine history through a narrow, biased lens. After all, the Kuomintang lost the war. Rather than look for situations where democracy turned into non-democracy, I think we can get a better understanding of historical forces by looking for indicators of a transfer of power more generally, and then applying these general indicators to the specific places we care about.
That’s not a bad idea, though I already know that it’s beyond me to execute such a synthesis. It’s one I would read with great interest, however.