Literally no other culture in history is this autistic.
>created primitive writing based on pictographs, then just stuck with it forever even after literally everyone else switched to phonetic writing instead
>created a meritocratic examination system for entering government, and kept the exact same ancient Confucian texts on the curriculum for centuries even after the language they were written in died
>created an entire system of medicine based entirely on making shit up, that people still believe in today, that you can obtain a degree in at a so-called "medical school", and that people prefer over the scientific method-based Western medicine
>created a massive fleet of treasure ships to re-open trade after the Mongol dynasty ended, then scuttled it instead of launching the Age of Exploration a couple of centuries early because the new emperor decided China must look inwards to strengthen itself
>created the Mandate of Heaven as a meme to insist that each dynasty could claim it was a legitimate continuation of the previous one, even though they had different geographic power bases, different cultures, and different languages, and that the constant unification and collapse of the country was somehow a natural cycle dictated by Heaven
>their first true emperor died because he drank shitloads of mercury thinking it would make him immortal
>they randomly discovered gunpowder not by scientific method but because alchemists were doing random shit trying to find an elixir of immortality
>every few decades some dumb shit happens like a Taoist guy tells everyone he can do magic or some dude who failed his exams claims to be the brother of Jesus Christ, and this instantly creates mass chaos that leaves tens of millions dead
Is China history's most autistic civilization?
It's not entirely known why the treasure ships were built but it is clear that trade and profit were NOT one of the reasons. The Yongle emperor's nephew had attempted a coup which failed and he went into hiding. It seems a major part of zheng he's mission was to scour the globe for any information about him and if he was found to kill him. After the coup attempt the emperor also sought to strengthen his legitimacy so he may have been trying to expand the tributary system and look for new allies against the Mongols.
The treasure ships were sent out over the loud objections of the beuaureacratic faction who considered it a waste of money that wasn't doing anything to enhance national defense. When his successor was captured by Mongols while touring the frontier the ransom for his release ruined the nation's finances so there simply wasn't money to continue, and from then on they really got serious about building the great Wall which of course was an unimaginably huge expenditure. That did have the backing of the civil service and was seen as vital to national defense.
>writing
Its called having a relatively stable civilization. This means no foreigners replacing the root language.
>meritocratic
Again related to first point. Relatively stable civilization kept their roots intact. Meanwhile Greeks lost their Plato/Aristotles for thousands of years. The reason for Confucian texts is because it became the gold standard of how a man should live their life and how they should see the role they play in the civilization and the roles of the government. This is basic civics course, this is what most public school teaches these days all around the world. Simple and effective.
>medicine
Some are effective some are not. They're based on old standards that rural chinese and superstitious people believe in. Even the "civilized" world hasn't eliminated delusional people believing in their fathers who live in the sky and punishes people for masturbating or using condoms.
>treasure ships
Meant to display wealth/power of a certain dynasty due to them restoring the proper power to Han China. Became decadant over time due to power/pleasure corrupting people, like everywhere/when else in the world.
>mandate
Sorta like "we wuz romanz" but its "we wuz Han n shiet" Han as in the concept of civilized man.
>mercury immortality
Delusions of an emperor
>accidental discovery of gunpowder
Shit happens. Its not like scientific method was invented in 300 CE. If people waited for scientific method to be invented before inventing anything else, humans would still be in the trees like the monkeys
>cult
Cult
You can't defend the Chinese medical system. There's something wrong if your country is a rising superpower, third biggest economy in the world, and your doctors prescribe tadpole urine capsules and tell you to face the North through a window three times a day.
Do you know what "autistic" means?
lol
I might try this shit just for the lulz
Whenever China adopted some form of Meritocracy it was usually overthrown almost immediately. The great Legalist system of Shang Yang and Hanfeizi that allowed the Qin to conquer the whole of China was replaced soon enough by the same old Confucian garbage of primogeniture, unconditional obedience to princes and ancestor worship.
The Mandate of Heaven is a brilliant idea really though.
I didn't defend the chinese "alternative" medicine shit. I simply re-oriented your statement in context to the current world. The effect is lessened because of normalized nature of superstition around the world. This is not to say its right, but rather its a sad state of the world, not just China.
>>created primitive writing based on pictographs, then just stuck with it forever even after literally everyone else switched to phonetic writing instead
Literally the best thing ever though, kept all those people writing the same shit regardless of what the fuck they spoke.
In China there is no government healthcare and insurance is very expensive. Therefore for the majority of people, they actually have no health care. If they get cancer, they die.
So "traditional" (read: Quack) medicine still makes a killing.
Yes, in Communist China there is no state healthcare, you even have to pay to send your kids to primary school.
That does work nicely. You could theoretically read Chinese by only knowing the character meaning in English.
China had one of the most metrocratic systems in the medieval world. You got high government office by passing tests rather than by blood.
Didn't they get pretty corrupt and nepotism anyway?
That does work nicely. You could theoretically read English by only knowing the character meaning in Chinese.
Most of Chinese achivements are memes. For example, silk worms were in Italy before sea travels to China.
In fact, China of 1600 was bad primeval shit and its development were under huge impact of European colonists - even most of Imperial court ceremonies were copied from France.
[Citations needed]
[Citations needed]
No you couldn't. English doesn't have characters. In any language with an abjad or alphabet, so most, you will read the sound of the word. A Chinese cant read human and read it as Ren, but an english can read 人 and read it as human
Personal and common knowledge. There is no healthcare in China and you must pay for schooling. Ask any Chinese person.
It wasn't the same under Mao but Deng got rid of any spending he deemed unnecessary (such as pesky healthcare) to further the economy.
Now, im no expert on the subject, but im pretty sure japan's writing system is more retarded than china's. It stole the pictorial writing system, made pronunciation different, then made a phonetic system, but only used it for SOME of it's words. Holy shit, if you're going to make a more progressive writing system fuckin use it instead of arbitrarily keeping some of the old one
ok clearly im not one to talk about languages considering i cant type a fuckin number correcly
Writing out sentences in just Hirigana make pretty long in comparison. Once you know what word corresponds to a particular arrangement of kanji, you get the word down a lot easier than just in hirigana.
Yeah, i get that but we use an alphabet in English and that works out just fine, and Hiragana's 2 or 3 Latin characters :/
[Citation needed]
Nigga
en.wikipedia.org
> About 95% of the population has at least basic health insurance coverage. Despite this, public health insurance generally only covers about half of medical costs, with the proportion lower for serious or chronic illnesses
They are finally reforming it but full healthcare is a long way off.
en.wikipedia.org
>Families must supplement money provided to school by government with tuition fees, which means that some children have much less .
>Tuition-free primary education is, despite compulsory education laws, still a target rather than a realized goal throughout China. As many families have difficulty paying school fees, some children are forced to leave school earlier than the nine-year goal.
In fairness its quite cheap and most families can afford it, but some poor families simply cannot, thus their child cannot go to school and so never get out of poverty.
Don't respond to the PRC shill.
Just not worth it.
do they exist? I know a lot of chinese people and they're pretty quick to criticise the government. Patriotic but critical.
Yeah, but to make em look good they take up about the same amount of space as 2 characters, and then there's no spaces inbetween to denote where words end.
Y'know, hirigana was meant as a solution to fill gaps where kanji did not have analogous characters, like for sentence particles. It was never meant to replace, and it is easier than just hirigana. Again, words made of kanji are only a couple or so characters divided by particles, it's not at all perfect but it's not as terrible as it first seems.
Well, I mean I don't want to sugarcoat chinese characters, they're still unwieldy and absurdly difficult for us occidental language students to memorize, that much ought to be said.
I think he's an Australian.
Cant they just literally adopt Latin? it works perfectly for japanese
China should entirely adapt Pinyin as well but of course they never will out of pride
...
adopt
Then every road sign has to be changed, every book rewritten, plus all legal documents, and new school curriculums, and so on.
It's just, y'know, cheaper this way. Same reason the states still uses imperial: they're in too deep to just change over.
Y'know, it can't be helped.
>they randomly discovered gunpowder not by scientific method but because alchemists were doing random shit trying to find an elixir of immortality
That is almost every discovery ever though.
Yes, and they spread their autism to the rest of East Asia. Modern China isn't really autistic, though. It's more retarded in the vein of bleak Eastern European autocracies.
Although East Asian autism is somewhat subdued due to heavy Westernization. Once they go full Tojo 2.0, we will see the autism resurface.
Japanese has so many homophones, that dropping kanji completely and just writing with hiragana can actually make it more difficult to understand.
w-what!
Even with "stability", China has historically had an autistic obsession with looking to the past and keeping things the same that no other civilization has ever matched.
...
And yet they can communicate just fine with their voices, but if you write it suddenly it becomes too difficult.
Han confucianism was still using a legalist system with reduced punishment using a "confucian" cover as legalism had a bad name with peasants due to Qin era overpunishment.
If you don't pass the imperial exams, you cannot become an official. Although if a relative is a high official, you can climb the bureaucracy faster. The hardest part was getting the foot in the door.
Homophones make up the bulk of japanese linguistic comedy situations
so we can assume there is some communication problems
Why do revisionists ruin everything
I mean, it worked for arabs after the mediterranean went to shit, didn't it?
Silk cultivation originated in Neolithic China around 4000 BC.
>China of 1600 was bad primeval shit
>cherrypicking the era of the Ming Dynasty's fall and replacement by the Qing
>still far from primeval nevertheless
>even most of Imperial court ceremonies were copied from France.
literally what
50 cent is supposed to exist, but they're prob not here. just a chink shill (canadian or aus probably)
>canadian or aus
Actually the biggest diaspora Chinese populations are in Thailand and Malaysia
>Whenever China adopted some form of Meritocracy it was usually overthrown almost immediately
Soo...all of the Dynasties?
>>created primitive writing based on pictographs, then just stuck with it forever even after literally everyone else switched to phonetic writing instead
Writing divorced from Phonetics was one of the biggest driving forces why China is such a long lasting meme despite all the periods of divisions it faced.
What we see in China is a Bronze Age civilization that happened to escape the Bronze Age collapse thanks to being on the other side of the continent from the Sea Peoples.
>every few decades some dumb shit happens like a Taoist guy tells everyone he can do magic or some dude who failed his exams claims to be the brother of Jesus Christ, and this instantly creates mass chaos that leaves tens of millions dead
This is my favorite part of Chinese history.
So what?
That if it's also something that would happen in spoken, it's probably for the best to at least preserve the differentiation in written,
When do you suppose it's going to happen again? We seem a bit overdue for another Chinese Happening.
Can you name some examples please I'd like to read more about it
PRC head is declared publicly a god and reestablishes dynasticism and empire only for the party to implode and warlording happens with tanks, aks, and nukes
Not in one go, just whenever a new one is made or replaced, it's in Latin. It would be easy for the Chinese since they all learn Pinyin and all type in Pinyin. The characters are pointless. I repeat, the Chinese literally type out the sounds of the word with our keyboard and then click the correct character that pops up.
>The characters are pointless. I repeat, the Chinese literally type out the sounds of the word with our keyboard and then click the correct character that pops up.
Good luck with the homophones which is even worse than Japanese.
>created primitive writing based on pictographs, then just stuck with it forever even after literally everyone else switched to phonetic writing instead
logographic writing is more efficient to read than phonetic writing. when it comes to pure reading efficiency, kanji based languages are the best in the world. there's a reason chinese/japanese subtitles are on screen for less time than english subtitles.
>they randomly discovered gunpowder not by scientific method but because alchemists were doing random shit trying to find an elixir of immortality
not sure you know what the scientific method is or understand how discoveries are made.
you're confused. they didn't do anything truly autistic compared to the rest of civilization until mao.
All Asians care about is money. Because that's all they have in life. They will always look in the mirror and see a soul less insectoid like being looking back at them.
>Good luck with the homophones which is even worse than Japanese.
Ehh but deal
In English stress is very important too
Yeah that's quite ridiculous and i am familiar with chinese but thousands of characters isn't a good compromise to lots of homophones, just spell them differently or invent more diacritic marks, anything.
The funny thing is that this demonstrates how Mandarin is the retarded stepchild of the Chinese dialects with no consonant endings and only four tones. Other dialects like Cantonese and Hakka which contain elements more similar to Classical Chinese would be more easily understood when used to read this poem.
youtube.com
It's old and mismatched chinese, no one reads or talks like that in real life today.
That it is possible at all is a problem.
>ITT: nobody knows what Autism means
but those usually don't speak english as well as the western diaspora.
Many speak English just fine thanks.
No kidding.
>read all of this no problem
Language is funny. At some point your brain references the structure, not the actual letters, to understand the meaning. Like how you can perfectly understand a horribly mangled sentence so long as the first and last letter of each word are correct.
Also I believe Mao was a big proponent of using traditional medicine despite using western medicine for himself
Mao also wanted farmers to smelt steel in their backyards and for the nation's standing army to be a disorganized guerilla force with no rank system.
>Chinese happening with nukes
Fuck, I didn't even think of that. Jesus Christ that's gonna be a shitshow.
Internet overseas Chinese seem to overidentify with the Chinese state and make absurd statements. The Western media certainly lacks historical context and only highlights negatives, but going full shill in the other direction is almost as bad.
See people with copies of 三國 on a Chinese school bus
Think "well, they're ready".
It's a cycle
I actually have a hypothesis that would trigger the fuck out of /pol/acks:
The ascendance of Europe is due to internal diversity of Europe, and more importantly, the higher average 2d4d and greater 2d4d range. Han Chinese people, according to some studies, have exceptionally low 2d4d's. Low 2d4d is correlated with autism. It means you're more rigid, more prone to violence, etc. Europeans occupy a comfortable medium between extreme masculinity and effeminacy. This means that they're more likely to be creative, to solve issues without violence and communicate. Most of Chinese history is hypermasculine autism in practice. Even now, China is, at face, loaded with all sorts of draconian social rules, and yet, day-to-day, most people live sociopathic rule-breaking lives built on violating the social contract and stomping eachother. That sounds exactly like dysfunctional hypermasculinity to me.
>Childhood is idolizing Lu Bu
>Adulthood is idolizing Liu Bei
>Maturity is realizing that Cao Cao was right
>What are shit that happens in pretty much every civilization
You could of just said you don't like the Chinese instead of this convoluted drivel.
I don't dislike them. They're soaked in testosterone to the point of decay. That's the truth.
>thus their child cannot go to school and so never get out of poverty.
Great way to keep the poor exactly where they are.
The Chinese are far and above most other civilizations in trying to keep things the same forever.
has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
That about sums China up yes.
Tests based on a test of poetry and ethics...
>They were tested on their proficiency in the "Six Arts":
>Scholastic arts: music, arithmetic, writing, and knowledge of the rituals and ceremonies in both public and private life.
>Militaristic: archery and horsemanship
>The curriculum was then expanded to cover the "Five Studies": military strategy, civil law, revenue and taxation, agriculture and geography, and the Confucian classics. In this form, the examinations were institutionalized during the sixth century AD, under the Sui dynasty.
Also, the point of studying Confucian poems and ethics was that they laid down the foundation for how everyone, including government officials, should conduct themselves. We have ethics boards that govern officials even today.
China's downfall was, as OP says, autism.
>While the system could be remarkably meritocratic, it was often attacked for its stultifying emphasis on rote learning. In the Song period, Ye Shi argued that:
>“A healthy society cannot come about when people study not for the purpose of gaining wisdom and knowledge but for the purpose of becoming government officials”.
>In this vein, the Imperial exams have been criticised for stultifying China's intellectual growth. By concentrating intellectual activity on the Confucian Classics, the system limited the possibilities for progress. As Western universities began to move away from their own classical tradition to embrace economics, engineering and natural science, China's scholarly efforts languished in the ancient literary past. It is unsurprising that the ingenuity that produced the “Four Great Inventions” could not flourish in such a backward-looking intellectual environment.
Ordinary mandarins weren't tested for the military arts though, and often they were given a higher command than those that did.
Funnily enough archery remained a part of the Chinese military curriculum until the 20th century.
>>created a meritocratic examination system for entering government, and kept the exact same ancient Confucian texts on the curriculum for centuries even after the language they were written in died
Examinations for bureaucrats across Mesopotamia were in the Sumerian language and based on Akadian literature right down to the Hellenistic period.
Archery in 20th century. Funny. Chinese people know good in jokes.
Why did they stop?
And look what happened to them.