Introduction: The New Approaches to the Quantitative Structural Analysis of Chinese History

This essay describes the papers published in this issue as (mostly) belonging to one problematic and methodological field, thus composing one scientific school or tradition. The main traits of this school are briefly outlined in the beginning. The papers written by the founder of the school, D. Deopik and his coauthor B. Ganshin comprise the first part of the issue, together with the papers of A. Andreeva and A. Kozhukhov. These papers are united by the problem of the era names, their functions, and correlation between them and real political process in the history of various empires, which existed on the territory of East Asia. The two papers comprising the second part of the issue, written by V. Bashkeev and V. Glazunova, have a common period of studies, that being the Western Han Empire. The last two papers of the issue are authored by O. Bonch-Osmolovskaya and M. Tseluyko. They deal with the problems of canon studies in China, researching exegetic tradition and the contents of ancient canonical text Shujing, respectively. Each paper presented in this issue either broadens or deepens the field of studies for their common scientific school, meaning that it either includes a new hitherto untouched (in this specific scientific school) problem and proposes a distinct approach to solving it or outlines a complication of the already existing problem, proposing an additional method for solving it. The only exception is the paper of O. Bonch-Osmolovskaya, which does not belong to the same scientific school as other papers on the issue but represents a good point for reflection and comparison.