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Comment by lavishlatern | Hacker News Reader

Imperial China is basically the Greek/Roman empire of East Asia. Both of these civilizations made deep and lasting impact on the culture of East Asia and Europe/North Africa/West Asia respectively.

Confucius is like Chinese Plato/Socrates.

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China only really had a strong impact in China and Korea - though a lot of Chinese people tend to overstate their impact for cultural chauvinism. Outside of possibly the Viet region as well, Chinese culture has had little impact. Imperial Chinese culture has had relatively little impact in the rest of East Asia (Philippines, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia etc...), and most of the Chinese culture in these regions is from recent immigration in the past century or so.

EDIT: not sure why the post is being negged considering it's basically true. I suggest people actually travel around the region and find out how little Chinese culture has impacted East Asia. I am a long term resident of East Asia and I understand the culture more than most Chinese people.

It's easy to come up with many examples of major Chinese cultural elements in the surrounding countries.

I'll give just one obvious example: Kanji. Kanji is obviously a major part of Japanese culture. It literally means "Chinese characters," because that's what it was adapted from.[0]

Or to give you just one more example, because it's incredibly striking: Japan's own name for itself, Nihon/Nippon, is borrowed from Chinese. The same is actually true of "Vietnam," which is also a loanword from Chinese.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

But relative impact is low. Latin and Indian scripts are used throughout Asia as well, including Japan. i.e. to say that it is the "greece of asia" is a bit over-chauvinistic.

Somewhere around half of the words in modern Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese are borrowed from Chinese. The impact of Chinese culture is massive across the board in these countries.

Half the words in modern Japanese is a long stretch. All Japanese words have two readings so obviously you can say that, but only one of those readings is used in daily conversation.

The linguistic influence of Chinese in Japanese is similar to the linguistic influence of Latin and French on English. The more elevated a subject, the higher the percentage of Latin or French borrowings.

Everyday spoken language will have a lower rate of loanwords, but writing about any complex subject will have a higher level.

Once you get into philosophy, politics, literature, etc., you're dealing with a high level of borrowing, both in the case of English and of Japanese.

But regardless of whether the true rate of loanwords from Chinese is 20% or 50%, this is a massive level of linguistic influence. And again, this is just one aspect of China's cultural influence on Japan. I mentioned the Kanji writing system earlier, which is very important in Japanese culture, but I could also point out many other areas where there's significant Chinese influence, such as literature, philosophy or religion, or even more banal things like the game of Go, which is one of the most popular games in China, Korea and Japan.

China's influence on Japan has been huge... It's very odd to read a claim that Chinese culture has had little impact on Japan!

Of course there are specifically Japanese aspects but more often than not there is Chinese influence. Architecture, writing, religion, dress, food, everywhere.

You could argue that other cultures have had similar impacts on Japan as well, including Western and Indian. What I disagree with is the idea that China is the "Greece of Asia" which is laughable at best. How exactly has the Chinese had a major influence on Japanese religion, architecture and dress? Chinese food shares the table with numerous cuisines from across Asia, and Chinese writing is also shared with Japanese, Western and Indian writing influences as well.

This is not a great take.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_influence_on_Japanes...

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