COMMENT | Most historians, of any persuasion, would concur readily that China moves forward based on the rise and fall of the dynasties.

Hence, whether it is Wang Gung Wu in the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, Prof Lee Kam Hing who was once at Universiti Malaya, or the late Joseph Needham of the University of Cambridge, they agree in that China’s concept of progress is cyclical.

There is nothing peculiar to this concept of understanding China in more ways than one. Karl Marx, for example, has long argued that all civilisations are material in nature.