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Comment by another_story | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood the fascination with these narratives. Many of my relatives are adamant about China's dynastic streak. Also, the idea that different languages are dialects of Mandarin, when in truth many of them, like Cantonese, developed earlier or in parallel.

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It serves the interests of a political elite to promulgate a feeling of great utility to them that “we’ve always been here, we are ever-present now, and there is no reason to suspect we will always exist into the future”. It serves to bolster legitimacy assertions upon geographic locales, based upon “ancient claims” or at least “claims older than yours”. This continuous-unbroken-culture-thousands-of-years-old notion I find peculiarly culturally specific. It is an amalgamation made up of Confucian respect-to-elders and venerate-the-dead I don’t agree with when the venerate-the-dead aspect comes at the expense of those living in the geographic locale, and those at the top peculiarly benefit in their pocketbooks to enforce this “ancient tradition”.

The US and indeed most major nation states also use this kind of myth making as well, this kind of behavior isn’t specific to China. It’s just not taught in schools.

> the idea that different languages are dialects of Mandarin

I believe most Chinese do think Mandarin and Cantonese are parallel and won't consider Cantonese a dialect of Mandarin. It's better to put it this way: both Mandarin and Cantonese (and many others) are "dialects" of a fictional, idealized language "Chinese". Hence, "dialect" here might be an incorrect translation of "fangyan", which literally just means "regional language".

Colonial Europeans tend to be obsessed with race -- historically it's how they rationalize imperialism and expansionism -- and may project that obsession on other groups that don't even think about race.

Do you think that's unique to Europeans, or do you think other imperialist and expansionist peoples rationalized things in a different way?

Would love to see some comparisons here.

Let me clarify, my relatives are Mainland Chinese.

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