Chinese history has always been unable to escape from the vicious cycle of conquering the country, sitting on the country, and then conquering the country again. This is the so-called historical cycle rate of "its prosperity is booming" and "its demise is sudden". The opening chapter of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms reads: The general trend of the world is that if we are divided for a long time, we will unite, and if we are united for a long time, we will divide. The gentry group in the Eastern Han Dynasty was very powerful, basically a trinity. They were a collection of powerful landlords, scholarly schools, and bureaucratic groups. The powerful nobles owned land, had tenant farmers who were dependent on the land, had their own manors, and were armed with their own tribes. The powerful nobles monopolized the intellectual world and at the same time monopolized the bureaucracy.
Corresponding to this is the decline of imperial power, the loss of a large number of registered people, a large loss of national tax revenue, and wealth slowly gathering in the hands of the powerful. In order to confront this powerful force, the emperor had to rely on the power of his relatives and eunuchs. From a traditional historical perspective, the crisis in the late Eastern Han Dynasty came from the exclusive power of relatives and eunuchs. In fact, this completely misunderstood the causal relationship.
