since they did not state the obvious, I will. a stable society is strong, it's stability is founded on contingency planning, which must be backed up with excess reserve capacity, maintaining that capacity requires the will to resist the greed and avarice of those who would steal the reserves required to survive a contingency. The chinese call this "the turning of the wheel", the wheel bieng society/civilisation and loosing "the mandate of heaven" was essentialy a political statement, but there is something much worse they refer to, along with that, when the "princes fail in there duty" and society is no longer maintained, and becomes obsessed with luxury and debauchery, and wild excess, military adventurism, and neurosis. more than 3 millenia of observation is behind what may seem to be simplistic or fatalistic, unrealistic, but anyone who thinks that red button mandarins are gone is fooling them selves. the most devistating thing china has done, is to not vie for the mandate of heaven and accept that final judgement of what is.