Despite that this is a inspired article, this sentence still interrupt my immersive reading. Such claim has always been ridiculous to me, but it is still too often spoken to be ignore. Chinese has unique own point of view to their history, which includes legends and myths. Check this ( http://camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/ ) if you have interests.
When you compare Chinese history to European history, there's a lot more parallelisms than you might expect from the popular conception. The Qin unification in 221BC is fairly contemporaneous with the rise of Rome in the west (who dispatched the Carthaginians in 201BC and the remnants of the Macedonians by 146BC). The Han dynasty collapsed around AD184 (with the Yellow Turban Rebellion), which stabilized into a three-way (later two-way) partition by AD220 that lasted until Sui reunification in 589; this unification persisted until the collapse of the Tang dynasty in 907. Similarly, in the West, the Roman Empire collapses in the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284), and reemerges in a mostly permanent state of division between Western and Eastern Empires. The Eastern Empire persisted until its defeat in 1204, whereas the Western Empire disintegrated over the 4th and 5th centuries but recoalescing into a Merovingian dynasty (Clovis I reunited most of modern France and Germany by his death in 511, although it was promptly divided on his death) and later a unified Carolingian kingdom that became the Holy Roman Empire when crowned by the pope in 800. Although the empire again divided on Charlemagne's death, it did stabilize as a Kingdom of France in the west and a HRE in the east, with a contested bit in the middle.
So I don't think it hash that much parallelisms to European history history
Point being: how much of that trend is real, and how much of it is useful propaganda spread down through the ages.
The parallels aren't perfect, of course. But it should thoroughly dispel the notion that Chinese history is wholly unique and unreplicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Four_Histories
That is the official account of the Chinese history by the succeeding dynasty to record the important personals, their lives and big events from the previous dynasty.
That is a very unique tradition though. The fact that the ancient Chinese does recognize a chain of dynasties and heritage and succession therefore, is unique to China, not by other Western countries.
Maybe it wouldn't be far fetched to argue that Eurasia had only 3 distinct persistent cultures: Romano-Greek, Persian/Islamic/Turkic, and Han. I know this is a gross simplification but it's not a bad framework to begin with.
Modern mens fashion (suits, pants, waistcoats) seem to have come from the Islamic world, especially Iran.
For example: early Roman emperors reseble latin-American caudillos more than they resemble medieval kings. Later emperors however introduced trappings of Royalty that we would still recognize, often in imitation of Iranian models.
1) Confucius, if he existed at all, could have been a contemporary with Herodotus. How many modern statues of Herodotus can you think of? My guess is not many, but statues of Confucius in China abound. The Chinese government draws a certain amount of legitimacy in tying itself to Chinese history. How many Western governments are trying to draw legitimacy from ancient Rome or Greece?
2) Also consider that every Chinese people is at least familiar with a few lines in ancient Chinese books like Art of War, Analects, Dao De Jing and Han/Tang/Song poetry in the written language. Can you think of a comparable piece of Latin or Greek writing that the average Westerner knows by heart? How many people can recite Virgil and Homer? Bonus if they can do it in the original Latin or Greek.
The West has used the aesthetics of the Roman empire as a basis for the trappings of power right through the modern period (see: Napoleon; US civic architecture). The direct reliance on legitimacy as deriving from a historical connection to Rome was basically only broken by the rise of the nation-state idea in the 19th century.
We still hold up the example of (a rather simplified view of) Athenian democracy as an example of the ancient legitimacy of democratic and republican institutions in some schools' civics classes.
Maybe it isn't as specific and concrete as the Chinese use of history for legitimacy, but I think the influence is there.
More fun info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome
This is a taboo subject among Western politicians nowadays. The answer is that Mussolini's fascist Italy and Hitler's Nazi Germany did this all the time.
Also consider that every Chinese people is at least familiar with a few lines in ancient Chinese books like Art of War, Analects, Dao De Jing and Han/Tang/Song poetry in the written language.
I very much doubt that the average Chinese city-dweller, nevermind subsistence farmer, can recite those ancient works by heart.
Furthermore, I doubt any Chinese person, apart from a scholar, could actually write down a few lines from these works in the original seal script. I would even go so far as to say that the average Chinese person would struggle to write anything but the most common characters in modern Chinese without the use of a phone or computer.
If you're looking for a Western text comparable to the Dao De Jing that many Westerners know then look no further than the Bible. There are millions of people who can rattle off Bible quotes by heart.
> There are millions of people who can rattle off Bible quotes by heart.
And how many Western governments claim to derive their legitimacy from biblical prophecy? (Whichever version thereof.) Israel comes to mind.
Talk about the elephant in the room!
They might not know it but its still ingrained, influences their culture and laws.
That's far less strong of a claim. If we're only talking about cultural influences then it's not hard to show how much of an influence the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Homeric Epics, and Plato's dialogues have had on Western cultures. It would be harder to point to a cultural element which had not been influenced by one or more of these ancient works.
Overtly, very few if any. But look at the education curricula of the US--you get a large dose of Roman and Greek history. Discussion of the structure of US government literally drew parallels to the structure of the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy. Our government structures are designed in edifice to be replicas of the ruins of Rome of Athens. Even our math curriculum is derived from Greek mathematicians.
Where the difference exists is that Western countries do not claim to be an unbroken continuation from ancient Rome and Greece as China does.
> Can you think of a comparable piece of Latin or Greek writing that the average Westerner knows by heart?
The New Testament of the Christian Bible, which was written around the height of the Roman Empire after all, certainly before the Tang and Song dynasties you mention. Most people have probably read the Odyssey or the Iliad at some point (and definitely can relate the basic plots of these books). Writings of Plato are also pretty likely to be well-known to most people, but most especially philosophers. And I hear that doctors have to recite a famous passage from Hippocrates as part of their studies...
As for China, there was a concerted and largely successful effort to destroy its cultural heritage during the "Cultural Revolution", by the party that remains in power today. Hardly unbroken.
Let's take religion as an example. In Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore, traditional temples are still "alive" with popular and active ceremonies, while most temples in China I went are just dead buildings: people lived there and do things have nothing to do with divine, CCP-permitted official events, foreign tourists, modern decorations that have no integrity, etc.
It's just sad to see those religious sites dying. The spiritual essence died, during exactly the Cultural Revolution.
If you mean buddhist temples, that's at max 2000 years of history.
I also had this view that buddhism is a faith that promotes peace - which might be true, but you still have the same human beings behind it. History proves my naive idea wrong.
It's technically the same party but the gang of four were thoroughly repudiated by Deng and his successors. 10 years of insanity can't kill a culture.
Its hard to start a society again, if you really had a goverment supported near-anarchy for ten years.
10 years is indeed a long time. It's not enough to break the education-based continuity, but it is absolutely enough to break the personal cultural continuity.
My experience of 15 years living in China is, very few people have experienced that personal continuity, to the point where disciplines like Chinese medicine, taiji, traditional music, etc, are best carried on by people in Taiwan or even the US.
Looking at other ethnic Chinese dominant areas, Hong Kong/Taiwan, which are supposedly unaffected by cultural revolution, I don't think the mainlanders are any way 'less' Chinesey than they are. The young people I met from HK/TW, their lack of understanding/knowledge of ancient Chinese history/literature is really embarrassing, yet they are pretty proud of such.
Not to mention that before KMT takes over, Taiwan had been colonized by Japan for 50 years, and Hong Kong by British for 100 years. If they can retrain/recover their Chineseness shortly after WW2, and being hailed as epitome of Chinese culture, I can't see how mainland China can't sustain its own culture from a 10 year madness.
Only thing I felt is probably I am personally less superstitious, thanks to the on paper atheism from the CCP.
Back to the 5K-year claim. It seems just rhetoric, but it actually enlarges unnecessary national pride, and then rhetoric becomes an unchallengeable truth. The "truth" then sounds so true that foreigners starts to believe it without hesitation.
Once I had a chat with an American friend, about Chinese character system and its ability to maintain information through the past five thousand years. I was astonished that nowadays some foreigners might still view East Asia as the mysterious Far East.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
> In a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science, Wu and his colleagues describe geological evidence for a catastrophic flood on the Yellow River in about 1900 B.C. — right around the time the “Great Flood” was said to have taken place.
There are tons of cases of non-myth non-bullshit sites in China, and yes, unrecorded in traditional history.