Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today we're going to talk about China, which these days is discussed almost constantly on television and in newspapers. Wait, are they still a thing? So we used to print information on thinly sliced trees, and then you would pay someone to take these thinly sliced trees and throw them onto your front lawn, and that's how we received information. No one thought this was weird, by the way. [♪ INTRO MUSIC ♪)] Right, but anyway, you hear a lot about how China's going to overtake the U.S. and bury us under a pile of inexpensive electronics, but I don't want to address those fears today. Instead, I want to talk about how the way you tell a story shapes the story. China was really the first modern state, by which I mean it had a centralized government and a core of bureaucrats who could execute the wishes of that government, and it lasted in pretty much the same form from 150 BCE until 1911 CE, which is technically known as a long-ass time.