After reading many books on China I learned China values social stability over everything. In its 4,000 year history they have seen the dangers of social instability. We are a very young country and haven't seen what real chaos can look like.
(These ideas are from Henry Kissinger's on China, Destined for War by Graham T. Allison and The China Dream by Liu Mingfu)
I've never understood why people espouse China's "4000 year history". The government purged nearly all aspects of traditional Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. If you want to be reminded of China's history, you travel to Taiwan. Even practitioners of Chinese traditional medicine tend to study overseas in Japan.
> purged nearly all aspects of traditional Chinese society
There has been multiple rounds of racial genocide in China's history, some by internal turmoil, and more by external invasion. Yet the Chinese culture survived.
It might sounds incredible, but so many people in such a huge land, have its own life strength.
If you think a political dictator can purge a nation's history tie, in 10 years, without actually killing all the people, then you are certainly underestimate Chinese people's strength and ernacity...
Plenty of mainlanders can read fanti FYI. Writing is harder as that requires active memory and practice but fanti is perfectly decipherable for a fluent mandarin speaker. And when in doubt using a dictionary is trivial. If the text is digital you can pretty much get a 1-1 mapping 99% of the time. Especially if it is putonghua (as opposed to dialect)
Obviously something as big as the introduction of jianti is quite radical and will have downsides but it's really overplayed by armchair spectators. For a fluent speaker it is at most an inconvenience - like reading chaucer or shakespeare, except the grammar is exactly the same only the spelling differs.
And the ancient characters are different still, they're all wavy and it's a lot of guesswork for people who haven't specifically studied them.
But it's clearly a continuous culture. We don't use a bunch of wacky f's in our writing anymore in America, doesn't mean we're not a continuous culture on our timeframe.
Simplified Chinese characters are just that... simplified versions of the traditional characters. In fact, many don't change at all from the traditional version to the simplified version.
It's a change, and one that history purists tend to not like, but definitely not a culture-breaking change or something that breaks links to the past. There are still a lot of ancient pictograms left in the simplified characters, a lot of connections to concepts, ideas and views from past millennia.
Stonehenge is also between 4 and 5 thousand years old but it's not going to tell you anything about the mystical traditions of the people of the British Isles.
The difference between the West and China is that China has been able to maintain its civilization state and it has a continuous history. The West's history is discontinuous
I noticed that "maintaining civilizational state" is.. to be generous.. simply a state of narrative. The imperial system is definitely over, Xi wears a suit and tie and there are no legions of eunichs running the country.
Though fun fact, Mussolini was pretty big on emphasizing the whole Italy == Rome deal.
And in the US there's only maybe 300 years of serious history to cover so I recall my history class had to reach all the way back to Greece as an idealogical source of American democracy.
> China has been able to maintain its civilization state and it has a continuous history
To check the validity of this statement while neutralizing my own bias, I watched the following video [1] which maps out China’s political borders year by year from 1600 BCE to 2017. Watching at 2x speed on mute took 4 minutes and was quite illuminating.
There have been plenty of rises and falls of civilization in China in the intervening thousands of years. It's way reductionist to claim that this is all the same one unflagging continuous empire.
In a way, you're doing Chinese history a huge disservice by making it a lot less interesting than it actually is when you claim that it's all just one empire persisting steadily through time.
And anyway, "the west" has a continuous history going all the way back through the ancient Greeks. That's at least two and a half millennia. It's not been the same people or the same empire since then, obviously (same for China), but the continuous written history easily goes back at least that far.
While as an island the UK means its borders have mostly been fixed, it has definitely had quite a fluid culture and language history. The romans came and left their mark. Then the Vikings and the normans. We've had a strange love hate relationship with the French forever, branding them frogs while learning French so we can seem sophisticated. So in my mind it does lack that continuity that China has:
For instance the sunzi bingfa (art of war) was written in 500BC and still is mostly understandable today.
On the other hand if I were to drop a reference from Vergil or Homer in latin/greek. I would be branded of being in cahoots with Boris Johnson and very few people would understand it.
Edit: And even that - I don't think Italians really would understand Latin texts (tho will have a better chance than brits). I think ancient greek is a little easier for modern greek speakers tho.
This is excessively cherry-picked, and I’m just going to steal a quote from Wikipedia to illustrate:
> The Chinese have different languages in different provinces, to such an extent that they cannot understand each other.... [They] also have another language which is like a universal and common language; this is the official language of the mandarins and of the court; it is among them like Latin among ourselves....
The idea that you could transplant a peasant between millennia in China or even over any significant distance, and have them remain intelligible is simply untrue. In addition, you could take an educated person in most of Europe in the last 2000 years and expect to be able to communicate with them in Latin — it’s only the last hundred years or so when this has fallen out of favour. So recently in fact that nobody raised an eyebrow about the fact I had mandatory Latin lessons from the age of ten at my school, in the 90s.
Dialects are overplayed outside of china. Most average people can speak 2-3 just as part of growing up. Learning a new dialect is considerably easier than a Spanish person learning Portuguese or the nordics learning the other languages from the region.
For starters the written language is essentially the same between the chinese dialects - so learning a new one is mostly an exercise of mapping sounds and then learning new idioms. Passing as a native speaker though will be harder as the canto/mando split highlights.
You're right - latin's influence is still amongst us. Indeed I believe it was common to teach Germans Latin in the hope it would make them have a stronger technical appreciation of German. And the UK legal system has its roots in the Roman legal system.
That said I assure you Latin the language is far more arcane than the standard Chinese. Meanwhile in China, suntzu bingfa will be learned and referenced in culture and people have statues of zhugeliang and guanyu in their homes displayed at chinese new year. I haven't met a friend yet you has an Aeneas or Caesar displayed in their house.
Maybe Hercules and Zeus as figures are more prominent examples of people we have remembered but they aren't really celebrated in that first hand nature. I don't think Brits identify with Hercules or even Boudica. But I would posit chinese people do identify with the ancient greats like kongzi.
EDIT
I think the idea of identity is key. Interestingly the Chinese people in Singapore and Malaysia diverged from China ~150-200 years ago. But this sense of identity with the old chinese history has been preserved between both of them so you can't just write this off to CCP propaganda.
Perhaps culturally Chinese culture has always sought to unify/assimilate things into its monoculture whereas the history in Western europe has been a more fluid and accepting melting pot.
Dictatorships value stability above anything else. Because once you have absolute control, the only real danger to losing it is civil war. China has had tons of bloody wars just like the West.
And people have been living in Europe for thousands of years too. The "4000 year history" is a CCP thing they sell to the populace to make their dictatorship seem more legitimate. It's pretty stupid, most cultures have been around for at least 1000 years.
I'm sorry you feel offended by these ideas. I suggest you read any of the 3 books I referenced that explain this Chinese principal. The books are by Republican, Democratic and CCP authors.
Differences between civilizations can feel offensive.
Sounds like you're the one offended. Great 4000 year history of China is CCP party line. Reading neutral sources you'll find it's more nuanced than that.
There's some evidence remaining that China was once a collection of societies. Notably language. The CCP insists that all of China speaks Mandarin, but thats only the case since the cultural revolution.
Chinese writing is indeed nearly universal. But spoken language once had many dialects, and still does to an extent. These dialects are sometimes mutually unintelligible. If it wasn't for CCP party line they would be considered different languages, as part of Chinese language family. Much like many of the southern Asian languages are different languages that cluster together.
Yes. As I mentioned these ideas are not mine but advanced by 3 books which explain the Chinese perspective. These books are bipartisan and multinational and explain this principal.
* Henry Kissinger's on China (Republican)
* Destined for War by Graham T. Allison (Democrat - Joe Biden recommended book)
* The China Dream by Liu Mingfu (Chinese PLA General)
That's rather ridiculous. The US has seen massive social instability over the past 400 years. The Revolution, the Civil War, slavery and the Slave Trade, the Great Depression, etc. And the founders of the US, being mostly European, were descended from people who lived through absolutely catastrophic social instability in Europe. Never-ending wars over religion and territory and on and on...
What "real chaos" has "China" (which is, by the way, nowhere homogenous) seen that we have not seen?
EDIT: I suppose the Great Leap Forward was an example of "real chaos", to an extent we haven't seen in the West. But where was China's 4,000 years of history to stop the deaths of millions of their own?
You commented this twice already as some sort of universal truth. But in fact the region known as modern-day China had one major conflict after another like they occurred in any other region in the globe. Also what does it mean to "maintain" civilization when at least 45 million people died under Mao due to famine, overwork and state violence? Is putting Uighurs in concentration camps "maintaining" civilization?
>Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and the author of Mao's Great Famine, estimated that at least 45 million people died from starvation, overwork and state violence during the Great Leap Forward, claiming his findings to be based on access to recently opened local and provincial party archives.
> Also what does it mean to "maintain" civilization when at least 45 million people died under Mao due to famine, overwork and state violence? Is putting Uighurs in concentration camps "maintaining" civilization?
Yes?
I mean, the word "civilization" just makes reference to a complex society with certain societal and governmental structures. A civilization can be peaceful but it can also be brutal. Many (if not all) historical civilizations started wars, took slaves, forced people to adopt certain religions or customs, or made outright genocides, and that doesn't make them less of a civilization.
>What "real chaos" has "China" (which is, by the way, nowhere homogenous) seen that we have not seen?
This is ill-informed and easily proven wrong.
I'm no China apologist, but the Chinese have suffered the worst human disasters in history.
Let's go down the list of top 10 anthropogenic disasters by geometric mean death toll and count the causalities in China [1]:
1. 2nd World War estimated 70 million dead, 17.5 million dead in China [2]
2. Three Kingdom War 38 million dead, all Chinese
3. Mongol Conquests 35 million dead and transition from Song to Yuan. Chinese population registers drop from 140 million to 70 million. [3]
4. European Colonization of the Americas 35 million dead, no Chinese dead
5. Taiping Rebellion 35 million dead, all Chinese
6 Red Eyebrows Rebellion 30 million dead, all Chinese
7. Muslim conquest of India 41 million dead, no Chinese
8. Ming Conquest of Yuan 30 million dead, all Chinese
9. Qing conquest of Ming 25 million dead, all Chinese
10. Second Sino-Japanese War 22 million dead, mostly Chinese
and as a bonus:
11. An Lushan Rebellion 21 million dead, all Chinese
Let's count the bodies.
Total dead in 11 conflicts: about 380 million dead
Chinese dead: about 200-220 million dead.
The Chinese are in a whole other ball park in terms of historical suffering. Nothing in American history compares to even a civil war most Americans have never heard of, like the An Lushan rebellion. For perspective, "only" 700,000 American soldiers died in the US Civil War and there were no accounts of civilian casualties of similar magnitude.
What about them? GP is conveying the scale of just wars, this isn't including natural disasters that have ripped through China. What are some comparable things to happen in europe and the middle east?
>Uhh what about European or the Middle east or any other part of the world
That was a list of top 10 anthropogenic disasters for the whole world. Europe and the Middle East's disasters are listed.
They also undeaded (if that's a word) 650 million humans since 1960. That's 88.4 billion lbs of weight added to earth, yielding a slight gravitational shift. I see that as a net positive for them!
Do you know who else has a 4,000 year history of instability, even greater instability? Europe. The height of centralized political stability in Europe was the Roman Empire, or maybe Napoleon. Yet you don't hear many Europeans saying "We need to bring back the Roman Empire", or "We need to bring back Napoleon". China values social stability because they have a dictatorship for whom social stability is a convenient idea to push. Ironically, the last serious bout of instability was the Cultural Revolution, which was a entirely a product of conflicts within the dictatorship.
Comparing the Roman Empire to Napoleon who lived fifty years and only invaded then briefly ruled neighboring European countries under heavy turmoil is quite a stretch.
(These ideas are from Henry Kissinger's on China, Destined for War by Graham T. Allison and The China Dream by Liu Mingfu)