Page "Chinese historiography" Paragraph 47

The notion of " change within tradition " also been subject to criticism.

The criticism is that the statement that " China has not changed fundamentally " is tautological, that one looks for things that have not changed and then define those as fundamental.

The trouble with doing this is that when one can do this with anything that has lasted for an extended period of time resulting in absurd statements such as " England has not changed fundamentally in the past thousand years because the institution of the monarchy has existed for this long.