The Han Chinese Myth | Hacker News Reader

The Han Chinese Myth

rhapsodyinlingo.com

> In May 1899, revolutionary Zhang Binglin began to label and alienate the Manchu rulers and people as foreign barbarians. His writings outlined his definition of ‘ethnic Han’ people, which made him the originator of the clearly delineated Han identity.

This seems to imply that this label was artificial and the rulers at the time were not actually foreign, but from my understanding the Manchurian dynasty came about through conquest, not voluntary cultural assimilation. I recall reading stories where people were forced to cut their hair into queues (before this, long hair in men was the norm, as with many cultures). Granted maybe this is all revolutionary historical revisionism, but either the mainstream story is very far off or the author's take is either very contrived.

I do agree with the author's conclusion that the southern languages should be preserved, a lot of research suggests that Classical Chinese is more similar to modern Cantonese. That Mandarin became the "official" flavor of Chinese is largely a product of history and politics.

> a lot of research suggests that Classical Chinese is more similar to modern Cantonese

This is often claimed, but usually starts by taking Mandarin as given, then adding knowledge of Cantonese and observing that it allows reconstructing more features of Middle Chinese, like the final consonants -p, -t, -k. However, if you take Cantonese as given and then add knowledge of Mandarin, you can also reconstruct more features of Middle Chinese, such as the distinction between alveolar and retroflex initial consonants (s- vs. sh-).

Neither Mandarin nor Cantonese is closer to Classical Chinese, the exact same amount of time has passed for both of them. Only when you combine knowledge from both, you can get closer to their common ancestor.

The game of "my language is the most ancient" is a common pastime among language preservation activists (not just in China, you can also get Romance speakers to argue who is closer to Latin etc.) but I don't think it should be necessary. Languages are preserved by being used, and most people don't choose to speak whatever language they use because of how ancient it is, but because it allows them to communicate with other people.

Absurd conclusions drawn here. Is the author supposing that they conceptually didn't understand different enthicities before Darwin? I highly doubt the basic premise that they are drawing conclusions from.

The concepts of different people being, well, different, existed before Darwin did. The article is confusing semantics with concepts

Yes, but because they talked about it using proxies of ethnicity, such as religion, geography, or nation*, we are to believe they were completely race-blind.

* The word nation came from the Old French [8th-14th century] word nacion – meaning "birth" (naissance), "place of origin" -, which in turn originates from the Latin word natio (nātĭō) literally meaning "birth". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation

How does simply lacking a more exacting term for race mean that they had no concept of people who were different? In historical context is a nation not usually comprised of a phenotype?

They absolutely did have a concept of people who are different, it just did not mean what “race” means today per se. A list of some of the ethnic groups or nationalities can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Chinese_histo.... The authors larger and more interesting point is that the all encompassing “Han” ethnic group that is said to make up a majority of people in mainland China is mostly a myth.

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