i've also been watching that han thing though, and i'm reflexively drawing parallels to rome, something the video actually does, as well. this is a crash course in a complicated topic by a westerner that is necessarily approaching it from a distance, but i'm not about to delve into it in too much detail, either - this is an appropriate narration for the audience, insofar as that audience includes myself. as it is, even somebody with only a rough outline of chinese history, such as myself, has delved into this more deeply, already; each of these emperors of course deserves their own feature-length film, and i've already watched a handful of them. so, i'm not learning that much. but, it's useful to have it pieced together, too.

one of the differences seems to be that the northern barbarians of the east seem to have been less primitive and consequently less appealing; the germans, for example, based much of their resistance to roman rule on the rejection of taxation, whereas the huns & mongols were largely just another extractivist force that levelled punitive taxes on their populations to fund their empire - including, in later years, on slavs and germans, themselves. if the purpose of identifying with the germans in their struggle against the romans was that they were defenders of anarchy, freedom & democracy in the face of imperialism and tyranny - even when the resistance necessarily turned vicious and violent in self-preservation  - then no such identification seems apparent with the barbarians of the east, who implemented all of the violence of imperialism without adopting the benefits of settled civilization, and consequently seem to embody the term "barbarian" with a much deeper level of accuracy. but, maybe i shouldn't be trying to understand the han by focusing on the huns - and maybe that's an error the source is making, in presenting it to me that way.

one of the more useful things i'm pulling out of it in regards to the han themselves is how chinese civilization has grappled with religion. i already knew that this wasn't a communist thing, that chinese culture has this conflict between an atheistic/confucianist ruling class that sees superstition as backwards and an ignorant, rural, superstitious peasantry baked into it - that mao was reacting to his own culture, and rather openly so. maoism couldn't make sense anywhere else, and isn't intended to; it was intended as an application of communism to china, rather than the other way around. and, it's a reminder that the ccp is a chinese empire first and a communist state second. so, the narrative presents confucianism first and then taoism later both as disasters that had to be undone. this perception of religion as this kind of dangerous force of ignorance perpetuated by the peasantry is really decidedly unmarxist, but it parallels the kind of thing you heard from the late pagans, like proclus - the difference is that the religionists won in the west, and the atheists seem to have won, in the east. china consequently doesn't go through the kind of internal destruction that rome goes through, or at least not until the mongol invasion, when the society is totally transformed.

i think that reading up on chinese history is probably a good idea right now, however it is that you want to do it.

there's about an hour left on this, and we'll see if i want to post another comment about it or not.