Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept. This is far from what the historical sources reveal. Many of the dynastic histories of China r

Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept. This is far from what the historical sources reveal. Many of the dynastic histories of China recount conquest of neighboring territories, and no one who has read those in the original literary Chinese (as I have, in excerpts) can doubt that there has been an imperialistic, expansionist drive in Chinese history that made China an expanding empire at least as much as in Rome or in Persia. There is no evidence that traditional Chinese medicine, and especially nonscientific concepts like 氣 qi, have anything to say to improve medical practice in any country. More references about that can be found at the Science-Based Medicine group blog. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=qi http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=qi Responding also to the blog post kindly submitted here as well as to the comment above, let me disagree in part with the statement "China led the world in political organization as well. No other ruler's writ ran a third as far or has even a third as large a chance of being obeyed as that of China's emperor. Tang Dynasty cavalry skirmished with Persians on the shores of the Aral Sea. The Sung Dynasty river navy was the only military force to even temporarily stymie Chingis Khan's Mongols, before his descendants took to fighting each other rather than expanding the empire. No pre-industrial central government anywhere ever managed to match the reach, extent, and power of the landlord-scholar-bureaucracy mode of domination invented under the Tang and developed under the Sung." No, China didn't really lead the world in political organization, because China's theory of human nature and thus its theory of politics didn't take enough account of the reality of human greed. China's political philosophy (which I have read extensively in the original writings of Confucius and Mencius that were the state ideology for a long time) is based on finding a virtuous ruler, and (as the blog post correctly points out) giving that ruler unchallenged power. China had an ideal of rule by men rather than rule by laws, but the Roman ideal of rule by laws rather than by men (so that in principle anyone, even the ruler, is subject to law) has proven to be a more durable principle for prevention of corruption and abuse of power. Medieval Europe, even in that harsh era, had more day-by-day personal freedom than China at its height, and that laid the foundation for technological and scientific and economic innovation in the West that helped the West thrive while China stagnated.