Whenever somebody says that in China the US faces an ancient society with a far longer time horizon and memory than we have, just remind them:

The PRC is as old as the Baby Boomer generation, and is largely interested in destroying Chinese culture.

As a simple matter of facts, the PRC is not a particularly old state. Academic research has confirmed that PRC officials and bureaucracy were a quite "hard break" from ROC or Qing bureaucrats, so it really is a "new state" not a successor state.

There is not really in any meaningful sense any "institutional memory" between the Qing Dynasty and the PRC; there's only *historical* memory. This matters because institutional memory is what we are looking at when we talk about planning horizons.

And since its inception, a very large share of the PRC's history has involved deep and systematic mismanagement, and they have not succeeded in going longer than 15 years without public instances of mass murder/genocide that horrified even many domestic publics.

They have experienced huge rates of net out-migration since Day 1, suggesting large amounts of discontentment. And they have been preoccupied with internal territorial unity *for good reason*: the internal territorial unity of their domain is not assured!

And even the supposedly impressive economic performance of the CCP regime is a bit meh. While China really did have exceptional growth in the 80s and 90s, that's over now.

China's per capita economic growth is lower now than it was for Korea or Singapore when they were at similar income levels. Looking ahead, China looks likely to underperform Japan and Ireland.

That's not like a deeply embarrassing result or anything. Life in Ireland is nice! But we shouldn't exaggerate like China is on track to become some super wealthy place anytime.... ever.

But there's more. There is a long-standing critique of the PRC arguing that it is in fact an imperialist regime acting *against* Chinese culture.

I'm summarizing my understanding of this view here so recognize I'm not the world's best advocate of it.

But the arguments for this view are non-trivial.

Linguistically, the modernizations the CCP favors result in a situation where modern Chinese-speakers and readers will find much writing from the 1900s extremely difficult to read, and any spoken Chinese even moreso.

Historic Chinese culture was bound together by a complex writing system which, while yes complex, had the benefit of being basically *only* a writing system, allowing a lot of different speech patterns around the Sinosphere.

As a result, Chinese characters migrated into Korea and Japan as well, even as Chinese vocabulary migrated into southeast Asia.

This linguistic reach was sharply curtailed by linguistic modernizations in those regions already.

Of course, Mandarinization and Simplification predates the PRC. I mean heck it gets labeled "Mandarin" Chinese because it was spoken by "Mandarins" i.e. court and government officials of the Qing (i.e. Manchu) dynasty, who created the language as a Manchu-Chinese hybrid.

Arguably *formal* Mandarinization began in 1728. As in all modernizing countries, increasingly sophisticated national bureaucracies created a need for a common language. The Qing were no exception to this early modern state reality.

But old Chinese "rhyming dictionaries," which serve as de facto pronunciation guides, show that pre-Qing Chinese was pronounced in a way most similar, not to Mandarin today, but to *Cantonese* today.

Exactly how these shifts occurred is debated. Those who want to promote Mandarinization argue that modernization occurring in the linguistically diverse and northern-centric Qing period led to the natural incorporation of different phonetic structures.

Many would date a lot of this phonetic shift even earlier, pointing to a long history of linguistic porosity in the north.

Those opposed to Mandarinization would tell a story of barbarian invaders conquering China and forcing their language on Chinese people.

Not being a linguist I dunno which of these is actually more correct in terms of mechanism of change before the PRC.

But suffice to say, in the 1950s only about 30-40% of Chinese people could understand the newly-declared "common speech" (putonghwa, what we call Mandarin)

Vietnamese and Cantonese also have a bunch of shared words. https://twitter.com/socio_steve/status/1290350763395473408

Today, something like 90-95% of ethnically Chinese people in China are conversant in "common speech," but many still use regional dialects in daily life.

But it's vital to understand what this "common speech" is. It's not actually a speech that was common in the past. Nor is it an inheritor of the old literary Chinese model. It is simply a modernized Beijing dialect forced on the entire country.

Many other countries have had this happen: every European country has a story of linguistic uniformity being achieved!

The difference is that 1) Chinese dialects already HAD mutually comprehensible WRITING which was basically REPLACED

(with the result that now there is NOT full mutual comprehensibility of writing within the Sinosphere, and former partial comprehensibility with some Japanese and old Korean writing styles is gone)

2) The argument that Cantonese or traditional Chinese was a barrier to learning is kind of a joke now given the existence of Hong Kong.

3) China actually ALLOWS some bilingual education for "minority languages." Or at least historically did. But Chinese dialects aren't "minority languages." They're just seen as uneducated and backwards.

Ergo, what the PRC does is not simply "linguistic unification." They trashed unifying elements they had, imposed a narrow vision of their language, and targeted enforcement of it not on people speaking other languages *but on people speaking other Chinese languages*.

The objective wasn't, at least at first, to break *minority* resistance to *Chinese* projects, but to break *Chinese* cultural resistance to *Communist* projects.

Today, things are changing. The Communist-ification of Chinese being completed, minorities are in the crosshairs.

That's a lot on language. But the point is the PRC is actively engaged in a campaign to *destroy* many Chinese identities, permitting only a narrow version of Chinese-ness which is subordinated to the Communist project.

So you shouldn't say the PRC represents an ancient culture.

The PRC is trying to *end* an ancient culture.

Okay let's keep going!

Remember how the PRC actually had a period called a "Cultural Revolution"? Weird, huh? Almost like the goal was to overthrow the prior culture and establish a new culture. As the name would imply. Seems obvious.

An important part of most cultures is how they bury their dead.

Historic Chinese cultures had variety in this. But widespread systems of honor/reverence/worship of ancestors usually militated in favor of burial over cremation.

*In those communities* where burial was normative, it was a HUGE deal. Elders will work on crafting their coffins for YEARS or even DECADES before their death. Funeral processions are huge affairs. I've actually gotten to see a few in rural parts of Hong Kong.

In fact, funerary rights, for many Chinese communities, were a huge and visible form of public collaboration, public ritual, and shared meaning-making, marking each person's position and duties in society, and manifesting those in a public way.

Which is to say funerals recapitulated unequal relationships.

This is why Mao marked historic Chinese funeral rituals as one of the top five backwards and outdated traditions that had to be destroyed.

The PRC has never fully succeeded in breaking this particular practice. But they are always trying. There's a big ongoing cremation push these days. Here's just one article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/01/outcry-as-coffins-crushed-in-chinese-zero-burial-campaign

Most historic Chinese communities were NOT chill about cremation. But the PRC, as well as the demands of land use and density in Hong Kong and Taiwan, has pushed along a big cultural change.

Okay let's get into serious "pissing off the nationalists" territory:

Tea.

When I moved to Hong Kong I did not like tea. I strongly disliked it. I would avoid drinking it whenever possible.

I now drink it all the time. Ruth had to impose limits on my tea purchasing habits. We have acquired an astonishing array of tea sets.

Which is to say, I have been converted to Chinese tea. HUGE fan of it. No beef with the tea itself.

But let's talk history.

When did tea begin to be drunk in China?

There's debate. We know that tea was used medicinally *at least* by the Han dynasty. But it appears to have been *only* used medicinally.

To the extent tea-drinking has recreational origins, even many Chinese historians locate those origins in non-Chinese peoples. But I won't get into that. Let's stick with Chinese-friendly origin stories.

The issue is that medicinal tea *appears* to have been more-or-less an import; i.e. it came from outlying and tributary regions where it was either wild or cultivated on a very small scale.

Beverage consumption requires a commercial scale.

And the earliest evidence of commercial scale cultivation of tea comes from Meng Ding Mountain, near Chengdu.

In Meng Ding we have actual textual records of commercial-ish tea-growing *and* archaeological records, *and* plant genetic research suggesting a huge share of tea plants have their genetic origin in the region. Yay!

Regardless of if that's ACTUALLY where tea came from, it's a place where a lot of Chinese people THINK it came from, so it's a good contender for dating "When did Chinese people fall in love with tea?"

And if Mengding Shan is the answer, then the answer is "200-600 AD."

But basically only south China fell in love with tea then. Tea rapidly spread through Sichuan, Yunnan, Gungdong, and into Fujian. But it didn't move north.

So tea was a very south-Chinese thing.

It was drunk in various ways. Most common was just boiling the leaves in a pot. But drying, powdering, and foaming matcha-style also occurred pretty early.

And since early Chinese sources are about unanimous in saying that non-Chinese peoples were drinking this stuff earlier, it's worth mentioning that non-Chinese peoples have their own ways of doing tea.

The earliest tea-drinking vessels are almost uniformly *bowls*, and early teapots are basically just pots, maybe with a straining device.

One reason tea doesn't spread widely is because the period of its early commercialization was also a period of war and conflict. It took imperial re-unification for the expense of setting up national distribution to make sense. So under the Sui, Tang, and Song, tea spreads.

But Tang dynasty tea isn't tea as you think of it today. It wasn't cute little teacups and teapots. It's mostly heavy ceramics, bowls, etc. But what DOES happen is FORMALIZATION OF STYLE. Notably, a text called "The Classic of Tea" is written.

The guy who wrote it has now literally been deified and you can find a temple to him.... where?

Why, at Mengding Shan of course!

So arguably, "The Classic of Tea" "invents" tea. It is the first case where we see any idea that tea might be widely consumed as a non-medicinal beverage but in a specific way or style.

"Tea culture" as it is now described begins, therefore, with the Tang Dynasty. That's when tea really starts as a meaningfully Chinese *cultural practice.*

Wow! 1200 years! Much old!

At first glance that's the reaction. WOW this culture is SO OLD.

But hold on.

I sing the Phos Hilaron every night to my daughter as a lullaby and it was written 1,700 years ago.

I recite a creed every Sunday that is older than Chinese tea culture. You think "The Classic of Tea" is an old cultural item?

Wait until I tell you about "The Bible."

If we're going to do a "whose-culture-is-oldest" contest then we really need to consider culture a bit broader than "country" since tea itself originates in non-Chinese people.

And it's not like I'm cheating by picking a religious form. Buddhism arises before Christianity, but doesn't arrive in China until around 200, and isn't widespread until the Tang dynasty either.

Buddhism *becomes* widespread in China partly by *shedding* non-Chinese styles and forms and Sinicizing, which means a lot of Chinese Buddhist practices really don't date from before the advent of Buddhism *in China*.

"The regime maintained internal stability"

lol wut

That's not true at all. https://twitter.com/GreenPlusAnE/status/1290361927877767172

And if we insist on beverage-based comparisons, well, wine as a drink has been drunk in Europe for at least 7,000 years. (China had a rice-and-grape drink earlier, but not quite the same as wine)

And of course if we want to restrict to the current tea ceremony it gets even better: gongfu tea as I learned it isn't really invented until the Qing period, and is invented *by the Manchus*.

The practice of a "tea meal," i.e. small bites with tea (read: dim sum), apparently originates during the Yuan period (i.e. Mongols).

I love doing my gongfu tea. It's relaxing and pleasant to go through the numerous steps and enjoy doing something with some history and consideration behind it.

But the current form of the practice is probably younger than Virginia or Massachusetts.

None of this is to disparage China or Chinese culture. I have enormous admiration for much of Chinese culture! I've internalized a lot of it in my own household! There's some pretty great stuff in there!

All cultures create a sense of antiquity for themselves. But one piece of Chinese culture I don't *necearrily* love is that the importance of this sense of antiquity is ratcheted way up.

The thing to understand is that the culture which exists under the PRC is not in any meaningful sense more ancient than the culture which exists under the USA. The difference is our culture *promotes itself* as young, forward-looking, innovative.

We value these ideas and thus even if they don't apply to us we lay claim to them.

The same is true for the PRC: a sense of antiquity is very valuable to many Chinese people and so the state goes to great lengths to claim antiquity.

But when we interact with apologists for the CCP, we shouldn't accept the argument that China has some ancientness that gives it special powers of foresight.

This thread has #triggered the "I love communism so much I use my VPN to illegally access Twitter and look at Western-produced pornography" segment of very online CCP apologists.