Is China just a meme created by Communists?

Is China just a meme created by Communists?

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t. retard

Goetsu, Hokkein, and China are all classical china, those places are all part of the Han patrimony and chinese identity arose with the Han, the other places became chinese due to immigration, conquest, etc.

the only place they have no real claim to is the tebetan plateu, so around 65% of the "tibet" area shouldnt be chinese, east turkestan was Khotan and Yarkand, distinctly interlinked with chinese and mongolian history and not a stretch for being chinese. The people their arnt even turkish nor have they ever been.

Korea was a puppet forever, and half of it still is
Taiwan was a colony, makes sense for it to be independant now because of the whole "colonies breaking off the mother state" thing with every single country in the new world and almost every country in africa

russia stole bits of manchuria btw

It's the oldest meme in the world, older than communism actually.

Actual China

That map is absolutely retarded

Taiwan is already a meme country, Goetsu, Hookien and Cantonia would be even bigger meme countries.

>"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been".

Even when a Chinese dynasty collapsed into several states, one would eventually reunite China instead of remaining independent indefinitely. So no, the idea of China has existed for centuries. What is a meme is all of those fake nations on your map.

What is a meme invented by the Communists however, is their multicultural propaganda of "China is a nation of 56 nationalities living in harmony". For most of Chinese history, Han Chinese wouldn't have considered people who did not follow Han Chinese culture to be "Chinese". And when the CCP ordered Chinese ethnographers to count the number of ethnic minorities in the country they initially found over 200; but that number was considered too high, so they whittled it down to 56.

to this day theirs dozens of ethnicities they blanket under "han" chinese despite not even speaking the same language (but still writing the same characters)

>Han Chinese wouldn't have considered people who did not follow Han Chinese culture to be "Chinese"
Han Chinese is a meme though. Historically so called Han Chinese would identify with their village,geographical area(Shu,Min),fallen kingdom(Zhao,Yan,Chu) or a fallen dynasty(Chen,Tang)

>the only place they have no real claim to is the tebetan plateu

From the looks of things though, that map has Tibet's borders as going beyond the Tibetan plateau.

And honestly, the Tibetan plateau hasn't been under the entire control of one Tibetan state since the end of the Tibetan Empire in the 800s. Even when Tibet declared independence, the Dalai Lama and the Kashag only controlled one region, Ü-Tsang. Outside of Ü-Tsang, the rest of the Tibetan plateau was controlled by Chinese warlords.

Tibetan nationalists will often speak of the "three provinces of Tibet" which are Ü-Tsang, Kham, and Amdo. But these regions are only "Tibet" in a geographic sense since they're all make up the Tibetan plateau, and in an ethnic sense since the indigenous peoples are Tibetans. But a unified Tibetan state still hasn't ruled all three regions for centuries.

Even though the idea of an ethnically homogenous Han population is a meme, there was still a sense for centuries that anyone who followed Chinese culture is 华人.

And maybe Han Chinese identified more with their village, kingdom, or dynasty, but so did Europeans before the rise of nationalism. All nationalism is a meme, but some nationalism has a better historical basis than others. And Chinese nationalism which supports a unified China with Han Chinese as the dominant culture clearly has a historical basis.

Bait thread but there's a grain of truth to it.
Original China was much smaller.

China is like uniting medieval Europe and calling it "Germania" and saying 80% of the population are "Germans" and French and Polish are just very different dialects of the "German" language.

Intelligence is an overrated meme.

>so around 65% of the "tibet" area shouldnt be chinese, east turkestan was Khotan and Yarkand, distinctly interlinked with chinese and mongolian history and not a stretch for being chinese. The people their arnt even turkish nor have they ever been.

East Turkestan is definitely a meme since the two East Turkestan states each only existed for a few years, didn't control all of Xinjiang, and were basically Soviet puppet states.

And Uyghurs claiming all of Xinjiang as East Turkestan is a meme because Uyghurs have historically only inhabited the Tarim Basin in southern Xinjiang and not Dzungaria in northern Xinjiang. So the only place where there could be a viable East Turkestan state by this point is in southern Xinjiang. As the name implies, northern Xinjiang was inhabited by the Dzungars until the Qing wiped them out. Really, Xinjiang is also a meme since the north and south are geographically and ethnically very different, but the Qing grouped them into one province for some reason. There really should be a seperate Beijiang Province and a Nanjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

That being said, Turkish-speaking peoples are not indigenous to southern Xinjiang, but they have still lived there for centuries. There's really no group who can claim to be indigenous to Xinjiang because the region has continuously changed hands between empires for centuries with different ethnic groups moving in and out.

Finally, just because East Turkestan is a meme doesn't mean Uyghur nationalism is illegitimate. All nationalism is a meme. Palestinian nationalism only formed in the 20th century, but that doesn't mean Palestinians don't have a legitimate desire for a state. It's the same thing with Uyghurs.

Hua was synonymous with civilization so non Sinitic rulers would identify with Hua. There were conflicting views on whether Hua should be defined by lineage(Zuo commentary) or acculturation(Gongyang commentary).

Han was introduced as an ethnonym by the Xianbei who needed a term that wasn't so limited in geography(Dai/Zhao ren).

Sinitic speakers that didn't live in the Central Plains weren't considered Han.

>Original China was much smaller.
This guy gets it.

Qin conquered the Rong tribes to the west and seized the Sichuan basin.

Zhao expanded at the expense of the Di.

Yan extinguished Shang loyalists(Guzhu) and assimilated the Shanrong.

Qi destroyed Shang scions as well as taming the native Yi people.

Chu started out as a barbarian polity in the middle Yangtze.

>China is like uniting medieval Europe and calling it "Germania" and saying 80% of the population are "Germans" and French and Polish are just very different dialects of the "German" language.
want

>Sinitic speakers that didn't live in the Central Plains weren't considered Han.

I never heard about this actually. Was this because despite speaking Sinitic languages, people outside the central plains were very different culturally?

#
Chinese history is basically just Chinese conquering barbarians and assimilating them like the Borg. They expanded through right of conquest just like other states.

And your metaphor is poor because Chinese "dialects" are still all in the same language family. German, Polish, and French are all in separate language families with their only similarity being that they're all Indo-European languages. And Indo-European is a much broader category than Sinitic.

The meme started with pic related

>Chiang Kai-shek considered both the Han Chinese and all the minority peoples of China, the Five Races Under One Union, as descendants of Yellow Emperor, the Yellow Emperor and semi mythical founder of the Chinese nation, and belonging to the Chinese Nation Zhonghua Minzu and he introduced this into Kuomintang ideology, which was propagated into the educational system of the Republic of China.

>This principle emphasized the harmony of the five major ethnic groups in China as represented by the colored stripes of the Five-Colored Flag of the Republic: the Han (red); the Manchus (yellow); the Mongols (blue); the "Hui" (Muslim Chinese) (white); and the Tibetans (black).[5]

You might want to check out papers by Shaoyun Yang and Mark Elliot.

Southern Sinitic speakers were considered culturally different and barbaric by northern regimes. Anything south of the Jiankang regimes were retained far more native influence that can be seen in the present day.

I'll definitely check out those papers. Thanks user!

Apparently you can find south east asian like culture in Yunnan

It's less of a meme than USA

>Qin building a giant wall that doesn't even go past the yellow river

The absolute madman

"Goetsu" where the fuck did they even find this name? At least name it Jiangnan.

Manchurians used Mongol and Uyghur soldiers to wipe out Dzungaria which the Uyghur still denies to this day.

seems like OP's map is japanese
goetsu is the japanese reading of 吳越 (Wuyue)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuyue

though i also do not see why it should be separate. if anything that is the heartland of chinese culture

Five Races meme begun under Sun Yat-sen, not Chiang

>From the looks of things though, that map has Tibet's borders as going beyond the Tibetan plateau.

Well he did say 65% of that "Tibet" shouldn't be Chinese. Obviously Yunnan shouldn't be Tibetan.

>if anything that is the heartland of chinese culture
Anything outside northern Henan,southern Shanxi/Shaanxi wasn't originally under Chinese rule.

Though that doesn't rule out some of non Hua polities speaking Sinitic(if Rong is representative of Sino Tibetans or the Yi belonging to the same cultural complex that gave rise to the Shang)

yeah i meant ming dynasty onwards, the time that is still relevant today

>Southwestern China
A smorgasbord of southern Tibeto Burmans,Tai Kadai,Hmong Mien,Austro Asiatic and divergent forms of Sinitic(Waxiang etc.)

If anything native culture survived because Imperial China had to rely on native chieftains to govern in their stead.

Yup, the region is called Xishuangbanna and I've seen that very temple. I highly recommend traveling to there and elsewhere in Yunnan province if you ever go to China.

Xishuangbanna is actually interesting in that in can be viewed as a successful attempt by the PRC to integrate a semi-independent ethnic group into the Chinese nation-state.

Xishuangbanna was basically a semi-independent kingdom for most of its history. The local Dai people had a hereditary king whom they viewed the same way Thais view their king, a landed aristocracy, and they paid tribute to both Burma and China.

When the KMT arrived, they ruled the Dai people so badly that they started rebelling with local hill tribes. But when the Communists took over, they were able to integrate the Dai king and much of the aristocracy into the CCP. The Dai suffered horribly during the Mao era, with the Dai nobles being persecuted as "feudal landlords" and with the Theravada Buddhist monasteries being shut down, but the Dai still never rebelled against the CCP. And the subsequent growth in tourism and the CCP funding the revival of Dai culture means that they don't mind being a part of China.

It's a huge contrast to Tibet where the CCP fucked up so much that they drove thousands of Tibetans into exile where they're able to sustain the Free Tibet movement.

So if it was non-Han soldiers that wiped out the Dzungars, how can Han Chinese claim that they conquered Xinjiang?

Oh, I didn't notice that. Yeah only the very north of Yunnan should be considered part of Tibet. I think whoever drew this map based it on the borders of the Tibetan Empire.

Because Han Chinese were able to forcibly occupy the area afterwards. Rights of Conquest does not extend to just the initial conquering.

Good point, but if Han Chinese only inhabit northern Xinjiang, why can't Uighurs revolt to establish a Uighurstan in southern Xinjiang?

Your wish is granted

Chinese history is so fascinating but so overwhelming.

Is it a good place to visit in terms of history (as a westerner)? Or have the commies erased the past?

"Chinese" is a greater concept, a civic nation, as with other former or contemporary greater powers in Europe (UK, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Russia etc)

It's not a meme just because it doesn't exist as an ethnic nation.

>"Chinese" is a greater concept, a civic nation, as with other former or contemporary greater powers in Europe (UK, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Russia etc)
I never claimed that modern day China is illegitimate.

All I'm stating is Hua,Zhongguo and Han evolved throughout the centuries none of which is synonymous with the PRC.

Those people self identify as han. The provincial dialects are like what appalachia will sound like in a couple hundred years, if not already.

Do you think they deliberately disneyfie the statues to make the case that the religion is not real and only tolerated for the child's sake, like santa claus?

nothing wrong with kawaii gods

That's just the style of the statues mate. But Dai culture has been Disneyfied to a certain extent because of how dependent they are on tourism.

China had always fluent borders. It was surrounded about 1900, expansion was blocked. Commi fixed these borders. It could be as in OP pic without world wars and weak Europe. But could also be much bigger after absorbation by Japan in 1940s.

Spring and Autumn Annals is a good start