Is ancient China perilous?

Actually, IMO, one of the trigger points for the Crusades is probably a culture clash from the exact thing you talked about. To the desert nomads in the Middle East at that time, it was common to collect toll from pilgrims to Jerusalem but to the Europeans who did not have that tradition, it was "Desert bandits preying on pilgrims!!!" though to be fair there always were idiots in any society that didn't get the memo and went too far, wiping out pilgrim caravaans. 

I'm mostly the type that makes sure that my music is set before I put my phone away and start walking. 

There's also an important point that amateur history lovers often forget - not everything written down long ago is actually truth. Again, due to for example Chinas messy political history, a load of past events were rewritten. For example new dynasty will work pretty hard to write down how great famines and war losses were caused by previous vile rulers. Or how virtuous emperor N killed (probably alone) 1000 billion trillions of troops of barbarians that threatened the country. In Europe there were similar cases, for example when calculating troop sizes, it was pretty usual that instead of 1 Knight + a dozen servants things were reported as 1+12 knights. Just to make things look more impressive. 

I wouldn't want to live in any ancient country simply because they lacked medical knowledge. If you aren't starved to death by nature or corrupt politicians, you're dying from small pox, infections, or internal problems that only a surgeon could fix.

I lightly researched corruption in ancient China and all I can say is.... It was pretty bad. Even though corruption is a thing every where you go, the Chinese managed to make it a unspoken tradition. Imagine if you had to bribe the DMV worker to get a new ID? On top of paying the required fee. You couldn't do anything with the government unless you greased someone palms. Justice was essentially non-existent if you were poor, as the person with greater wealth would just give over more money to walk free. That's how officials functioned in ancient China.

At some point an Emperor gave officials an anti-bribe bonus to try and entice them out of the habit. They still accepted bribes AND got the bonus. In fact, the few Emperors that cared about the problem never could figure out how to stop the corruption.

So, yeah, give me modern medicine and modern corruption. At least I don't have to bribe a DMV employee just to renew my license....  

Did you even read what i wrote you dumb cunt? Money?
When did i write that government officials took in money from the peasantry? The only thing they had that possessed any monetary value was their grain. That was taxed. Not money.
"A taxation system was set up to collect a certain percentage of what the farmers produced.The policies regarding storehouses in local and central facilities were set up in order to keep the collected goods safe." - Food Redistribution during China's Qin and Han Periods: Accordance and discordance among ideologies, policies, and their implementation
During the Qin and Han period those storehouses were used by the emperor to feed the populace. But as "(t)he food redistribution system in early imperial China was ideally designed to benefit all people under heaven “equally” within the framework of the social hierarchy, meanwhile providing extra resources to those of lower status and to people in distress. However, the ideology of the regulations and their actual implementation were frequently out of sync,as laws were applied flexibly and human greed worked every possible step of food redistribution."

To feed the populace, officials, soldiers and etc, the taxing and collecting of grains occurred. But when greed and corruption occurs, disaster relief and etc, becomes difficult. So as corruption grows, the people starve while officials fill their pockets.  
So no, agrarian life is not just at the mercy of the elements, but also very much so by the government and their food redistribution policies.  

I said: There were many times in Ancient China that a lack of food for the peasantry was caused by the corruption of several officials as they attempted to squeeze as much they could from them.
You responded: Yeah and I'm sure the "officials" are so well connected with heaven that they can call a drought or flood on demand. Stop trying to perpetuate webnovel stereotypes, they don't reflect reality any more than Rambo or Superman does.
You: You'll see that it is DROUGHT, especially from the cyclic fluctuations over the Pacific Ocean that caused famine, not "government officials".

You said that drought and famines were the killers, not state corruption. I just proved that one, the state took it upon themseves to feed the populace and two that they actively engaged in disaster prevention. Thirdly, that alot of people died not solely because a drought occured and famine followed afterwards, but because officials who stood for the distribution turned corrupt and the famine become widespread. 

It's not a belief. It's fact.

"The Chinese tradition of holding the state responsible for famine relief and water
control was rooted in the Confucian classics. The Confucian philosopher Mencius
(372–289 BCE) insisted that a benevolent ruler should guard against famine by storing
grain during times of plenty and distributing it during times of dearth. Blaming poor harvests
for bringing starvation to the people, taught Mencius, was no less wrongheaded than
“killing a man by running him through, while saying all the time, ‘It is none of my doing. It‘
is the fault of the weapon.’” It was also Mencius who popularized the idea that a ruler’s
Heaven-granted mandate to rule (tianming) was not immutable, and could be revoked if
the ruler ignored Heaven and “lost the people’s hearts” by failing to practice benevolence
(Mencius 1970, I.A.52, IV.A.7–9)."

"
In China the principle that major calamities were connected to the ruler’s conduct
went far beyond the symbolic, and indeed “shaped expectations of imperial and bureaucratic
responsibility” in important ways (Li 2007, 2–3). “In comparative perspective,”
writes J. R. McNeill, the Chinese state “appears remarkable for its ecological role.”
There more than elsewhere “the state took primary responsibility for building and maintaining
many big waterworks” (McNeill 1998, 36–37). In the case of the Yellow River,
erosion and the deposition of sediment caused the bed of the river to rise above the surrounding
plain, so it was necessary to build huge embankments in order to keep the river
in its place. During the period from 1194 to 1852–55 when the Yellow River ran into the
sea south instead of north of the Shandong peninsula (as the strategic breach would force
it to do again from 1938 to 1947), argues Elvin, the scale of the man-made effects that
resulted from the herculean efforts that China’s “river tamers” made to control the
merged flows of the Yellow and Huai rivers “was probably unequalled anywhere in premodern
history” (Elvin 2004, 24, 128, 131–40).
The Chinese state’s commitment to nourishing the people during times of famine
also has a long history. Formative famine-relief measures were codified in China’s first
imperial dynasty, the Qin (221–206 BCE), and the importance assigned to famine
relief increased in the late imperial era (Li 2007, 3). The Qing state in particular
devoted an extraordinary amount of bureaucratic attention and financial resources to
famine relief."

TLDR;
People must be feed to ruler to continue to possess mandate of heaven. Therefore, the various dynasties collected grains and stored them in case of famines or drought. The state therefore feed the populace if their harvest wasn't adequate enough in that regard. The food storage was gathered by the government through the taxation of grains and collection of it. Furthemore, "The importance assigned to famine relief increased in the late imperial era, when a diverse array of local elites worked in tandem with officials to manage and fund relief operations."
The definition of a famine is by the "the United Nations humanitarian criteria, (that) even if there are food shortages with large numbers of people lacking nutrition, a famine is declared only when certain measures of mortality, malnutrition and hunger are met."
So famine did occur a lot yes, but the government actively tried to prevent it to legitimize themselves. Overt corruption and silence during droughts and famine was what caused the destruction of dynasties. And once again to reiterate: So no, agrarian life is not just at the mercy of the elements, but also very much so by the government and their food redistribution policies. "The food redistribution system in early imperial China was ideally designed to benefit all people under heaven “equally” within the framework of the social hierarchy, meanwhile providing extra resources to those of lower status and to people in distress. However, the ideology of the regulations and their actual implementation were frequently out of sync, as laws were applied flexibly and human greed worked every possible step of food redistribution." 

It can't be worse than any other ancient civilisation. Monarchy, social stratification, underdeveloped medicine and wars.