Feudal

You may think my little story in the past four days was exaggerating the fact.

I beg to disagree.

The sobering fact is, the evolution of general medicine in the past 30 years was a close analogy to the history of the Zhou (周) empire 2500 years ago.

When King Wen (文王) first began his campaign, it was meant to be a central government. Nonetheless, it was quite impractical to rule an area of over 1.5 million square kilometer and a population of 30 million; inevitably, it had to resolve to a feudal system (封建制度).

(The same problem remains real nowadays. As I alluded to some months ago, despite the advance of Internet and information technology, you cannot kick the ass of someone on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.)

And, with time, the duke or marquis or count or baron or whoever became the lord of his own land and actual leader of his people. The Zhou emperor became on paper the leader of the country but had little land or people  left to himself. He had not much respect from and even less control on his vassals.

Instead, the order of the empire is maintained by the most powerful duke amongst all feudal states.