It was necessary to give special attention to the reasons for the downfall of Mongol rule in China, in order to make clear the cause and the character of the Ming epoch that followed it. It is possible that the erroneous impression might be gained that the Mongol epoch in China was entirely without merits, and that the Mongol rule over China differed entirely from the Mongol rule over other countries of Asia. Chinese historians have no good word to say of the Mongol epoch and avoid the subject as far as they can. It is true that the union of the national Mongol culture with Chinese culture, as envisaged by the Mongol rulers, was not a sound conception, and consequently did not endure for long. Nevertheless, the Mongol epoch in China left indelible traces, and without it China's further development would certainly have taken a different course.

The many popular risings during the latter half of the period of Mongol rule in China were all of a purely economic and social character, and at first they were not directed at all against the Mongols as representatives of an alien people. The rising under Chu Yuean-chang, which steadily gained impetus, was at first a purely social movement; indeed, it may fairly be called revolutionary. Chu was of the humblest origin; he became a monk and a peasant leader at one and the same time. Only three times in Chinese history has a man of the peasantry become emperor and founder of a dynasty. The first of these three men founded the Han dynasty; the second founded the first of the so-called "Five Dynasties" in the tenth century; Chu was the third.

Not until the Mongols had answered Chu's rising with a tightening of the nationality laws did the revolutionary movement become a national movement, directed against the foreigners as such. And only when Chu came under the influence of the first people of the gentry who joined him, whether voluntarily or perforce, did what had been a revolutionary movement become a struggle for the substitution of one dynasty for another without interfering with the existing social system. Both these points were of the utmost importance to the whole development of the Ming epoch.

The Mongols were driven out fairly quickly and without great difficulty. The Chinese drew from the ease of their success a sense of superiority and a clear feeling of nationalism. This feeling should not be confounded with the very old feeling of Chinese as a culturally superior group according to which, at least in theory though rarely in practice, every person who assimilated Chinese cultural values and traits was a "Chinese". The roots of nationalism seem to lie in the Southern Sung period, growing up in the course of contacts with the Juchen and Mongols; but the discriminatory laws of the Mongols greatly fostered this feeling. From now on, it was regarded a shame to serve a foreigner as official, even if he was a ruler of China.