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This paper aims to focus on the rise and decline of the Qing dynasty in Chinese history, and tries to explain the evolutionary phenomenon that when a dynasty became strong, it replaced the former established but deteriorating one, and then at the end of its development, it disappeared eventually by using interest models developed herein.

Systemic interest models are introduced to the study of Chinese history quantitatively. First, by briefly going over the history of Qing, the reasons for its rise and fall are analyzed qualitatively. Second, the concept of interest is generalized under some proper assumptions so that several interest models are established. At the end, intriguing conclusions are drawn by analyzing the numerical solutions of these interest models.

Comparing this paper's results of numerical solutions with the Qing's history, we can see that the stability of a country was essentially an external appearance of the conflict of interests between the ruling and ruled classes. Usually, the eventual social turbulence happened when the balance of interests deteriorated and was tilted excessively to one social class, and ended when the imbalance reached another state of equilibrium. Moreover, the stability of a country always appeared to be a cycle of “turbulence→peace→turbulence→ċ” which is similar to the evolutionary characteristics of general systems indicated by the systemic yoyo model. Furthermore, the cycle can be found in all the feudal dynasties throughout Chinese history.

The interest models presented in this article can be applied to the study of other social problems, such as corporation governance, the analysis of the national economic relationships, and others.

The concept of interest is generalized in this paper, and the relevant interest models provide good conclusions in our analysis of social and historical phenomena.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse international political economy (IPE) thought in Korea during its pre-modern and colonial eras.

It divides these eras into three periods. The first period is the eighteenth century, in which Silhak arose. The second is the mid- and late nineteenth century, a time characterised by conflicts between Wijeong-cheoksa and Gaehwa thoughts. The final period is that of colonial Korea under imperial Japan, and during this time economic nationalist movements were pursued while Marxist theories were also introduced to the country.

This research shows that IPE thoughts analogous to Western economic liberalism and economic nationalism did emerge endogenously in Korea when its environment was similar to those in which these Western thoughts arose, although in ways that reflected Korea’s peculiar situations of the times. This study also demonstrates that the “economic” thoughts of the Koreans in these periods were shaped largely by their political thoughts.

This research contributes to the building of a more “globalised” intellectual history of classical IPE thought.