There were only a few main participants in China's ancient political history: emperors, bureaucrats, eunuchs and consorts, which have been the case since Qin and Han Dynasties. Since Qin Shihuang unified the whole country and eliminated the nobles, the imperial power dominated and centralized, and the political pattern of the dynasty evolved into a pattern of competition and interaction between imperial power and agency.

During the Warring States period, the monarch used the professional bureaucrats developed by wanderers to attack the nobles. After the reunification of Qin and Han Dynasties, aristocratic families gradually rose, especially the perennial foreign wars of Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty, which seriously worsened the national finance, and a large number of ordinary people turned to aristocratic families and reversed the balance of political power. The loss of land and civilians further weakened the monarchical power, and the nobles monopolized knowledge through the economic base, gained the right to interpret Confucianism, and then merged with the bureaucratic class, becoming the most important force threatening the imperial power.

Haozu has wealth, people and culture, and the monarch has to rely on consorts and eunuchs to fight against Haozu bureaucrats. Until the turn of the Tang and Song Dynasties, the popularization of papermaking and printing, the reduction and popularization of the cost of knowledge dissemination, and the prosperity of the imperial examination system broke the monopoly of the nobles on the right to interpret knowledge and classics, and the imperial power gradually recovered its advantages. In addition, with the development of the southern economy after the Anshi Rebellion, the economic foundation of the northern haozu was destroyed, and the haozu really weakened and perished. The new civilian professional bureaucrats have become new political forces, and their political power and independence are far from those of the former Haozu bureaucrats.

Understanding history requires grasping key nodes and contexts, such as the changes of Shang, Zhou, Zhou and Qin Dynasties, the aristocratic society after Han Dynasty, and the imperial examination society after Tang and Song Dynasties, which are the main lines of understanding China's history.

The evolution motive force of China's history involves the structure of political relations, the change of external resources and technology, and the interaction between the plain and the sea on the grassland, which are the three major perspectives to explain China's history.