How come China never invented the phalanx? Or something like the mandible system of the romans?

Holy fuck look at that Yank, he's fucking massive, he could break that Jap soldier in half.

>but they could block arrows!!!

He's a robot just look at this

It seems actual sources about Chinese formations and military organisation is incredibly scarce.

However, I find it hard to believe they never realised the advantages of multiple spearmen side-by-side in close combat formation.

>yfw part of beautiful divine Aryan master race

>Why didnt Y come up with specific shit invented by X
I don't know.
How come Greeks couldnt use crossbows en masse despite the existence of such a weapon similar to the Chinese one?
How come Rome can't field cavalry to save its life?
How come Rome & Greece failed to come up with a spear you can hack and slash with?

See the logic?

the Roman bureaucracy was nowhere near as metrocratic as the Chinese one

>It seems actual sources about Chinese formations and military organisation is incredibly scarce.
This.

What the heck is the stuff in the wheel barrels that get dumped on the ground? I have no idea why you would do that?

Literally anyone who employed mass Spearman against cavalry has used the "phalanx". It's just autists who think that a phalanx is something more than a formation of interlocking shields and a rank hedge of spears.

That's like saying Greek civilization is shit because they got rekt by Turks a bajillion years later.

God i hate this retarded board

Probably just wooden wheelbarrows with dried oil soaked wood. To burn and hamper enemy infantry/cavalry advance giving your crossbowmen more time to fire.

I'm actually just guessing.

He played collage football.

who gives a fuck about meritocracy when a system work

Social mobility is important

I'd guess it's just a clever barricade. Gets messy trying to march in an orderly fashion over the wood even after moving the wheelbarrows out of the way. Gives the front lines of crossbows extra time to move out of the way.

I know you are just memeing but a phalanx is immobile, it can't turn. Horses can easily get behind the phalanx and pepper with arrows.

Your meme is a meme of ignorance, try harder, pleb.

not afr of the money really

they were normally filled will oil soaked wood and burnt to create a smokescreen to allow time for units to re deploy/escape or if on a hill pushed towards an enemy to disrupt their advance or disrupt their formation

I'm amazed by the scarcity although it's could be I'm merely looking at English sources.

This then begs the question, with so much Chinese history to go around why are they not translated?

They are, right now. You seem to forget a mere 26 years ago, the country was kinda closed off. While repression of Pre-Imperial Studies died with Mao, it was assumed by the Chinks that only they would study it. And the odd Soviet Orientalist like Mikhail Gorelik, but these cunts learn Chinese anyway.

In addition some can be pretty hard. Classical Chinese is already a bitch to learn and old Chinese texts of ancient, Pre-Imperial times are usually written in poetry and are filled with really ancient metaphors and allusions forever lost to time, making it even harder.

But meme shit like Sima Qian's "Records" and each Dynasty's Official Histories have been translated long ago since the 19th Century. I have seen them in libraries here after all. Problem is translations aren't online.

Pic related. Bretty common in Asian studies really. For example I can't find online translations of the Boxer Codex: a Spanish compendium of Asian Peoples & the Chinese Empire written in the 1570s-80s to aid their rule of the Philippines. But translations of the old Spic text do exist in print.

>Repression of Pre-Republican*

Oh god...

Social mobility and meritocracy do not go hand in hand you silly fuck.

Let me explain how this works to you.

In Rome, a dozen emperors in a row would be bumfuck barely literate peasants from the Balkans. You could rise to becoming the magister militum or praetorian prefect if you were a semi-decent soldier and could rattle off a few lines of Virgil or Homer.

In China, the only way you could even break into the elite was if you passed the imperial exam. The only way to pass that exam, which was solely designed to restrict who could enter the bureaucracy to a small class of people, was to have year available to you to educate yourself by spending vast sums of money on tutors and learning materials.

China had power social mobility because it was less meritocratic. It merely presents the illusion of meritocracy which is believed by tards with no critical eye.

>Hugeass empire which was obsessed with filling its staff of bureaucrats especially by the sui-t'ang period.
>"solely designed to restrict who could enter the bureaucracy to a small class of people."

Also your Roman example happens a lot in Imperial China too. Generally the Chinese "Military" for most of the Imperial times was a small, standing army attached by numerous auxiliary forces: provincial armies, peasant militias, and private military groups. China- after all- relied on its own people helping out authorities in fighting bandits. As such, commoners owned weapons and villages formed posses to go after shitty social elements. Turns out some peasants - young men, failed scholars, disinherited sons, ex-soldiers, and the like- go pro in this kind of job and offer their services as mercenaries. In war time, private military companies like these flock to muster in the hope of getting noticed by the formal military, and acquire rank & officerhood with a nice government salary without having to go through the expensive process of going inna military academy.

Happened quite a lot in Chink history. These three- an impoverished noble, a butcher, and a fugitive- who gathered a private army to answer the Han call-to-arms versus the Yellow Turban Rebels, were perhaps the most famous. Another was Koxinga's father, Zheng Zilong, a competent pirate made admiral by the Late Ming, both to acquire his naval expertise and get him off piracy. A bandit fucker called Liu Yongfu was another, who led a bandit gang *against* the Qing during the Taiping rebellion. Afterwards, he became a general and his gang became a Qing army group and fought the French in Vietnam, and attempted to retain Taiwan versus the Japanese by being sent into the area and create a puppet state Formosan Republic.

Partially because commie China is autistic as fuck and doesn't let anyone study the shit.
Partly because it's super hard to translate.
And partly because there's huge swaths of time where fuck all happened. It'd be like studying the Pax Romana, but instead it lasts 1000 years.

Was the fugitive Guan Yu of Zhang Fei? The latter sure as fuck wouldn't surprise me.

The Brit looks dumb. Especially the hat.
USA looks thicc.
Russia is almost Mexican
India's hat is neat but too big
Germany has BASED pickle
France has too many medals
Austria Hungary looks boring
Italy's hat is dumb
What's that thing around Japan's torso? Lame.

Brother Guan

>I'm amazed by the scarcity although it's could be I'm merely looking at English sources.
No,there's plenty of sources written in Classical Chinese.

The problem with surviving sources is they were written for contemporaries(vagueness of Warring State texts),anachronisms(Sima Qian's labeling Warring States nomads as "Xiongnu") and the original texts they used to compile their information only survives in fragments(no consensus on the Tang Modao for example).

>Generally the Chinese "Military" for most of the Imperial times was a small, standing army attached by numerous auxiliary forces: provincial armies, peasant militias, and private military groups
Chinese armies seemed to alternate between hereditary soldiers(fubing,weisuo,8 banners) during the early parts of the dynasty and professional mercenaries(local militias,former bandits,peasants etc. ) once the system is rendered obsolete(Tang,Ming,Qing).

Warring States-Western Han relied far more on conscription.