Lack of resources/Wealth gap etc.
Chinese society was highly rigid and codified for hundreds if not more than a thousand years pre-Qin unification, and the idea that your lot in life is determined since birth was ingrained in their mentality. This changed with this this guy called Chen Sheng, who lead the rebellion that would prove to be beginning of the end of the Qin dynasty, he was a common labourer in state service who incited his colleague to rebel against the draconian rule, saying ‘王侯將相寧有種乎’ (King, marquis, ministers and generals are not born thus). The founder of the Han dynasty who succeeded the Qin, Liu Bang, was himself a commoner, and to put the genie back into the bottle so that every Tom, Dick and Harry who fancied it wouldn’t rebel at will, they developed this concept called ‘tian Ming’ or the Mandate of Heaven, the idea that the winner of civil strifes won because he was bequeathed with authority to rule from celestial forces, legitimising his rule (Divine Right, so to speak, emperor in Chinese is called tianzi - son of heaven). This then is combined with a very rigid legalist framework with Confucian values over it, promoting obedience/deference to authority, elders and public figures of importance (anything to keep the peasants in line), failure to conform is met with social ostracism and often legal repercussions. That’s it for a very crude, rudimentary introduction of their (traditional, dynastic) value system.
Next we have economic issues. Ancient Chinese LOVED land and slaves, the more the merrier. Everyone’s goal in life was to get rich, buy a lot of land and slaves and pass it down to your offsprings. This accepted social mantra leads to a very negative consequence: wealth hoarding. Over generations, you have these super clans who dominate social life and politics at lower administrative levels, and they often compromised the administrative officials sent by imperial court to bend the rules to their will, drive common people into bankruptcy, annexing their land, making them homeless or enslaved. Long term, this means you have a lot of refugees roaming the land, creating public disorder, banditry and instability, and also massively reduce the state coffers since the households previously served as tax base have been turned into landless vagabonds or ‘hidden’ population, decreasing the state capacity to carry out public work projects, respond to natural disasters, keep a standing army to answer foreign threats. As a result, every few hundred years, when this conflict reached a boiling point, often accompanied or accelerated by a series of natural disasters leading to crop failures and plagues, a new Chen Sheng rose up, everything devolved into absolute pandemonium, heaps of people died, then someone won, re-established order, carried out land reform, adopted the same Legalist/Confucian ruling philosophy, and the cycle is renewed.
