In China too. With the foreign ministry spokespersons repeatedly making US bioweapon suggestions, believing otherwise is more political than just following the rest of weibo.

The media is more than happy to report on early detections out of China, and let suggestions that the vape lung (now linked to vit. E cutting agent) is COVID run free.

We left the realm of rationality long ago, when the government did a tribalism on behalf of all of us.

(Nationalism is a hell of a drug. The govt still funds crackpots to argue against Chinese people originating in africa, to call greco-roman and egyptian history faked, and don't even get me started on their insistence on 5k years.)

> The govt still funds crackpots to argue against Chinese people originating in africa, to call greco-roman and egyptian history faked, and don't even get me started on their insistence on 5k years

Wait what? The Chinese government does this? Who do they claim faked Greco-Roman and Egyptian history, and to what end? And what is 5k years supposed to be? The age of the earth or something?

Chinese propaganda claims 5000 years of unbroken history. One Han people. One language etc. They conveniently ignore when China was ruled by ethnic Khitan-Jurchen-Manchus. The Chinese literary classic On the Water Margin aka All Men Are Brothers is about local heroes of the Song rising up against a corrupt government which was completely ineffective against the Liao.

This is BS. They perfectly acknowledge that some imperial dynasties were not Han and have no problem with it. These 'foreign' dynasties adopted Han culture. Certainly, Chinese culture did not turn Mongol when the Emperor was an ethnic Mongol.

Please don't spread nonsense.

One scholar disagrees with you. "Reenvisioning the Qing: The Significance of the Qing Period in Chinese History" by Evelyn S. Rawski. https://www.history.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Evelyn-Rawsk...

  "'Sinicization' - the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into the Chinese culture--is a twentieth-century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past."

Considering that what you've quoted is making a different point, I am not sure that "one" scholar disagrees with me...

You said the foreign conquerors adopted Han culture.

For all foreigners China has a long and impressive history, for whom is this 5K claim relevant?

Read up on the now closed Confucian Institutes that were operating in the USA and Europe. [1]

  "The online and print cultural materials of the Confucius Institute present a vision of

China with a national history of thousands of years but while these materials note that other ethnicities might rule China the history presented is undoubtedly Han. This can be seen in the association of historical figures like the Yellow Emperor and Liu Bang with the Han identity, while the ethnic identity of non-Han historical figures is presented ambiguously, the ethnic identity of Han historical figures is always clear. Nearly every single historical figure mentioned in the cultural materials was Han Chinese and that fact was prominent in the biography. It is often either included at the beginning of the article next to place of birth, or at the end of the article under a specific section of nationality" [2]

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/why-is-the-us-targeting-chinas-confuci... [2] http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/27901/1/The_Confucius_Institut...

So it is a racist thing? Otherwise I still don’t get the “advantage” or who gains by this spreading it. The CP as heir to the history? Is it about legitimacy?

The CCP gains an advantage. It is a long complicated political story and it touches upon the sore points that the CCP is extremely sensitive to: Tibet, Taiwan etc. I am not a China hater but I know what it is doing.

In the other link I posted from professor Evelyn Rawski of U of Pittsburg, she explained that the last Chinese dynasty was the Qing who were ethnically Manchu. The Qing saw themselves as ruling five peoples, of which China was the most important. The Qing ruled China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Uighurs, and Tibet. When the Qing collapsed, Chinese nationalists, although they detested the Qing who were foreign conquerors, wanted to lay claim to all the territory the Qing ruled. I would do the same thing. But they used this strange construction of "Han Nationalism" and claimed that all the territory was really Han because the Qing was really Han. This is where the 5000 years of unbroken history propaganda comes from. Professor Rawski explains if you read the official Qing records which is in written in Manchu, the Qing did not "sinicize" or adopt Han culture. The Chinese liked to think they did but that is simply not true.

An interesting side note is that this bizarre cultural legitimacy argument cuts both ways. A few years ago, a Korean professor made the argument if you follow this line of thinking... you can argue that China really belongs to Korea. The founder of the Liao dynasty which once ruled Northern China was ethnically Khitan or "Qi Dan" in mandarin. The Khitan lands bordered Korea. There is some obscure record that conflates or can be construed that Yelu Abaoji is Korean... therefore China is really Korean. Bizarre. I don't remember the Korean professor's name but it caused a ruckus at the time.

Not sure about that one but there's similar stuff in the world of archeology (https://www.nature.com/news/how-china-is-rewriting-the-book-...) , a political motivation to say that humans evolved in China and not Africa. It's a shame when there's so much potential for genuinely exciting finds to come out of the country.

> And what is 5k years supposed to be? The age of the earth or something?

I believe it's the claim that China has 5,000 years of written history. I'm not knowledgeable on this however, so this is a vague memory semi-confirmed by a cursory internet search.

I’ve never heard a credible source state 5000 years of written history, just 5000 years of history, where the inference is that the earlier parts were orally transmitted.

This is on par with election fraud. No matter if there is any, one side will downplay while the other screams it’s the tip of the iceberg. Both sides know presidential elections are a zero-sum game and will do whatever it takes to win.

Again, I don’t think there was that much, let alone enough to swing the election, but we can’t even discuss any of it honestly.

We can't discuss it because they side that claims it exists is solely doing so to overturn the election. Don't try to tiptoe the fact that it's their ulterior motives which is why they are met with a tsunami of eye-rolling.

>The prior probability of voter fraud is so low that it demands really incredible evidence.

The prior probability of voter fraud is the number of elections in which actors have engaged in fraud / the total number of elections that taken place. Consider any of the countless elections that have taken place around the world and throughout history. Do you believe that the number of them in which actors engaged in fraud is so low as to be incredible, when you think about countries and time periods that are not the country and time period you presently live in? Peruvian elections in 1960. Scottish elections in 1990. Zimbabwe in 1994. I'm just naming random countries/times here. What percentage of these do you think involved fraud? That's what the prior probability is.

> The prior probability of voter fraud is so low

Why?

I don't know what GP is trying to say, but the problem was that they never provided any actual evidence. Everything was presented on social media was made of videos that might have looked suspicious to someone not familiar with the process, but easily were debunked. For similar reason no viable evidence was provided to courts.

Frankly, I would be glad if we would actually ban electronic voting machines, and use paper ballots. There were some fishy things happening in states[1] that didn't get as much attention. It's much harder to commit fraud on larger scale with paper ballots, since everyone knows how they work and it is much harder to hide things.

[1] https://www.dcreport.org/2020/12/19/mitch-mcconnells-re-elec...

Because close to nobody is ever charged with voter fraud and multiple investigations after 2016 launched by folks at the federal level looking for it, failed to turn up cases. In the recent election, the Trump team has repeatedly alleged voter fraud but not presented any evidence of such in a courtroom.