Han China And Imperial Rome: A Comparative Analysis

In the time of the ancient world, each government had different ways of thinking and ruling. The Chinese and Romans had profound techniques of imperial administration, but were distinctive to their own empires. While Han China (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) and Imperial Rome (31 B.C.E.-476 C.E.) have many similar qualities of how they run their government such as the structure of government and land control, the social hierarchy and treatment of people are different.
The government structure of the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty are very similar. They both use a bureaucratic system with having one emperor who controls most decisions, and lower groups of men who helped during the process. In China, they called the different groups scholar-gentry. These …show more content…
Each emperor was in charge of all the land, which was difficult to control due to a great deal of expansion. They had long boarders that distanced themselves from the center and experienced aggressive neighbors. Han China dealt with Xiongnu and Rome fought with the Barbarians. Their solution was to build walls to keep them out of their property. China’s wall is known as the Great Wall and Rome’s was called the Servian Wall. They needed their own people to help build the walls fast enough, but this led to loss of loyalty by the people. The military became weak, and eventually the empires both collapsed because of this reason and many others. The emperor’s had trouble controlling their people when they got too wealthy. In China, they had large landowners that would not follow the rules because they had so much land. When it became large enough so that it was sizeable compared to the emperor’s land, it was an issue. Rome had an issue of overpopulation causing difficulty in management. This caused a division in one of the largest provinces, Diocletian, into two different parts. The land control between Imperial Rome and Han China were quite similar in their government, but there are many other differences that should be noted as …show more content…
There is an upper class which is the men who take part in government, own slaves, and are very wealthy, and there is a lower class who are slaves or paid workers who do not have much money. Roman slaves were an immense part of their economy seeing that they made up 33% of the population. They had brutal working conditions, long hard hours, and very little pay compared to the amount of time they worked. The prices of slaves were low, so other people became unemployed due to the fact that they would cost more. On occasion, there would be a slave revolt due to the conditions of their job being to bleak to bear. China, on the other hand, had contracts to fill out so the slaves could not be treated as harsh. They were still slaves and were forced to obey orders, but controlled a small amount of what their owner, or any person in the upper class, did to them. Many officials in China were chosen because they were considered to be the Son of Heaven. The Senate and army in Rome chose who the rulers were. Military was a bigger part of the Roman’s lifestyle than the Chinese. Rome’s army is strictly professionals, whereas China’s army was determined by a draft. The military was important during this era due to many wars and attacks on the

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Han China And Imperial Rome: A Comparative Analysis

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