Part II, Chapters 6-7 Summary and Analysis

Part II is called "State Building" and begins with Chapter 6, entitled "Chinese Tribalism." China has a long recorded history, Fukuyama explains, and since the beginning of that history tribalism has existed there. The number of these tribes was large, with some three thousand during the Xia Dynasty in about 2000 B.C. Through warfare and conquest, the number of political units, called "polities," decreased over time, falling sharply between the Shang and Western Zhao Dynasties between 1500 and 1200 B.C. By the beginning of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C., China had been unified into one state.

The large drop in the number of polities during the Zhao Dynasty was a result of the Zhao tribes' conquest of the Shang tribes. The political structure was still largely kin based, and one of the first acts of the...