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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

I mean, strictly speaking everywhere has exactly as much history as everywhere else.

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.

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Are you saying the Cultural Revolution has largely destroyed China's cultural heritage? If so I'll have to disagree with you.

China did lose many.

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.

> traditional temples

If you mean buddhist temples, that's at max 2000 years of history.

I am happy to call something that has been going on for 2000 years “traditional”

Why, was Buddha around after Jesus then?

Isn't religion looked at as a possible source of dissent against the government in China?

Since state atheism is the order of the day, of course.

Prevents organization or association other than the party

Why is that a bad thing? Religion has been the cause of much strife. Sure, you miss the nice parts when it’s gone. But I take one look at other societies that still fight over this arbitrary “faiths” which make no scientific sense and it makes me wonder if it isn’t a simpler world to not believe in the superstition of religion ( or at least treat it that way legally)

Its interesting that Buddist religions don’t appear to encourage strife per se, my knowledge of asian religions is very spotty, but I don’t think they have the same wars and justification for violence as the western religions do.

The current anti-Muslim pogroms in Myanmar (incited by the Buddhist clergy) would seem to provide a counter-example.

Look at Sri Lanka, very bloody civil war between Buddhist majority and Hinduist minority. Atrocities done on both sides, ie at the end when rebels were losing and surrounded, state army was shelling civilians left and right. Another example - history of Ladakh province in northern India - conquered by buddhist armies some +-1000 years ago. Buddhist army, interesting term.

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.

They were pointing out that this was a loss of cultural heritage. Personally, I'm not one to find much value in cultural heritage in the first place, but religious culture seems like a pretty clear example of culture that was stamped out.

That take is pretty wrong. The current government is really heavy on emphasizing tradition, to the point of hamfisted revisionism about how the original communists behaved.

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.

My grandfather had a intern - a old former professor of radioactive chemistry who hole-hearted disagrees with your attitude. 10 years is a long time, ten years after a civil war after a world war is a eternity. People do not get education in that time, the whole hierarchys of institutions have allmost disappeared and all the knowledge is dated (one of the reasons those professors - who where send to pig-farms, had to reeducate in the west). Also the remnant of the rampage remains- aka, a youth who learned that in great masses- they can get away with anything, and have to bow to no rule.

Its hard to start a society again, if you really had a goverment supported near-anarchy for ten years.

Right, I think there's a distinction to be made between education-based cultural continuity ("we all learn Tang poetry in school") and personal cultural continuity ("I learned this knowledge/value/principle from my grandma/village elder/apprenticeship").

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.

I am curious about what exactly do you think culture revolution had broken.

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.

Not really, or I should say it's hard to get rid of. Every educated Chinese will learn an amazing amount of traditional culture (commonly referred as poem of Tang dynasty and the verse of Song dynasty LOL) and also many articles of Classical Chinese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese). Damn I could still recite many of them after years. It's mandatory and counts a significant portion in most exams. When one got intrigued by the traditional culture, nothing basically stops him from dig in the history.

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