Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2016)

Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by runeblaze on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @07:55PM (#18604901)

Even in Chinese schools we are told in history classes that we really don't have five thousands years of real history. It is just an often used, maybe canonized, phrase to emphasize our long history. I really would not get distracted over it.

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Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by qlk1123 on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:43PM (#18605127)

I totally understand that situation because I have been through similar education in Taiwan about twenty years ago as well. Thankfully the history education here is saner now.

Back to the 5K-year claim. It seems just rhetoric, but it actually enlarges unnecessary national pride, and then rhetoric becomes an unchallengeable truth. The "truth" then sounds so true that foreigners starts to believe it without hesitation.

Once I had a chat with an American friend, about Chinese character system and its ability to maintain information through the past five thousand years. I was astonished that nowadays some foreigners might still view East Asia as the mysterious Far East.

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Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by est on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @09:48PM (#18605332)

The truth is China has at least 4000 years of history

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...

> In a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science, Wu and his colleagues describe geological evidence for a catastrophic flood on the Yellow River in about 1900 B.C. — right around the time the “Great Flood” was said to have taken place.

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Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by jcranmer on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @10:14PM (#18605434)

Archaeology is easy to do badly. It is usually the case that the same evidence fits multiple interpretations. The proper way to do it is to treat archaeology as a process of winnowing out theories as they are found to be inconsistent with evidence. The wrong way to do it is to pick a theory you want to be true and to show how to fit the evidence into that theory (especially because the temptation is strong to discard evidence that is inconvenient for the theory, hoping no one will notice).

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Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by est on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @10:34PM (#18605501)

https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5805/

There are tons of cases of non-myth non-bullshit sites in China, and yes, unrecorded in traditional history.

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Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by wavefunction on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @03:40AM (#18606608)

I imagine the Yellow River has suffered numerous catastrophic floods in its history, and some must certainly 'line up' with various other historical and ahistorical events.

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Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by starbeast on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:39PM (#18605105)

On the other hand, the Kurds who run the phone shop up the road from where I used to live, can lay claim to about 7000 years of continuous recorded history, as they are Erbil locals.

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Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by adrianratnapala on Sunday December 09, 2018 @08:30PM (#18644519)

Yes it's astonishing how Alexander and people had dealings with Kurds who seemed to interact politically with the rest of Mesopotamia much as they do today.

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Re:Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2... by bordercases on Tuesday December 04, 2018 @08:00PM (#18604918)

It's rhetoric, then.

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