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Comment by rackjack | Hacker News Reader

??? The teachings of Confucius, the food, even those big red door decorations with the symbols on them, and so on... are these not things that are still endemic across the mainland? It is simply absurd to claim Chinese culture only survived in "a few small places" in the mainland.

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Some aspects of Chinese culture remained through the cultural revolution, but some previously important cultural features, like those related to music or Buddhism for example, were nearly wiped out. Maybe as a result, to this day some of the biggest hitting Mandarin singers are Taiwanese. In the movie space, HK used to produce lots of great movies, but many of them couldn't be made anymore given the HK takeover and how mainland movie production is now driven by propaganda goals. I hope to see Taiwan pick it up.

It's also pretty hard to claim there is one Chinese culture.

Of course there's not, but actually this is something that the CCP is pushing a lot for as well; to have one nation, one language, one culture. See e.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-accelerates-campaign-of...

Very true. North and South have different food cultures, and dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other, just off the top of my head.

> dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other

That's because they aren't dialects. They are different languages. The CCP has pushed this lie that all Chinese languages are "dialects" instead of separate languages because it aligns with their narrative of a single Chinese people. You can be a single ethnicity and still have differences and different languages, but to the mainland government differences undermine cohesion.

The differences between these so called "dialects" are larger than between the Romance languages to each other. Thus, there is more mutual intelligibility between Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian than between Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. To call them "dialects" is linguistically incorrect. They are separate languages. Someone will always respond that they are mutually intelligible through writing, and that's true. But that's bc the writing system isn't actually portraying the verbal language. It is a pictographic script.

There’s also a ton of lesser known languages in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

> The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. They differ as much from each other morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but meanwhile share the same writing system (Hanzi) and are mutually intelligible in written form. There are in addition approximately 300 minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China. The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.

If you want to nitpick, it's not just different dialects but different languages. Mutual intelligibility is a common line used to split things into separate languages and most of the Sinitic language group "languages" are true languages as they aren't mutually intelligible. It's a bunch of different languages with a shared writing system and more mutual intelligibility in writing than in spoken words.

Where is confucianism taught in modern day China? Don't be tricked by the Communist Party's claim that they endorse his teachings, everything happening in the Mainland today goes completely against confucianist ideas. (Chinese) legalism is much closer to what is taught in China today and the teachings of Carl Schmitt have recently become very popular among party members. Of course it wouldn't look good to the world if they said they endorse and stand for fascism, so they don't say this part out loud.

It's not hard to see some unsettling parallels between the idea of the party and the people being one and the "ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" slogan.

I'm not siding with GP, and I've little to no knowledge of either China or Taiwan, but to say that culture is Confucius, food and decorations doesn't sound right. That's just tradition, culture is more fundamental, in my mind.

If anything tradition is what the CCP succeeded in suppressing during the cultural revolution, not culture. As you said, culture is deeply fundamental and cannot be eliminated in a top-down manner nor in a period of only 10 years.

...and also Chinese Wall and Kung-fu...

CCP did everything it could to wipe out old traditions, and replace them with communism and cult of leaders. Latter they realized it is not enough to keep coherent national identity, and started promoting a few symbols they liked from past. The "big red door decorations" is not Chinese culture, it is a small fragment of it.

> It is simply absurd to claim Chinese culture only survived in "a few small places" in the mainland.

I do not claim that. It did not survived at all on mainland. "A few small places" are outside of mainland: Taiwan, Honk Kong, Macau and perhaps Singapore.

> I do not claim that. It did not survived at all on mainland.

So your claim is even more absurd. I guess that language they're speaking on the mainland must be French then?

Big part of Africa speaks French. Language is not related to culture.

Look what CCP did to languages (other than Mandarin), ethnic identity (other than Han) and writing systems.

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