What was their secret...

"French" before 1960's all considered themselves the same ethnicity even though half didn't speak proper French, had different genetics, and completely different culture.

So the implication is that "Han" was a made up term by the government to unify the people?

Imagine if the Romans conquered all of Europe and then all the Europeans kept claiming 'we wuz romans' and started fighting each other until one faction we wuz' all others and then split apart into new countries again and vice versa.

So Chinese are just like any other group of humans, who would've thought. The same phenomenon is evident in France, Germany, and Italy.

Because China is only a few centuries old. The "ancient" Great Wall, for example, was built to serve as a border with Russia.

Rule of law.

The secret is that you have to reunify constantly to keep the idea of your unity alive. Sounds simple, but China was extremely lucky in that their only real enemies were steppe nomads to the north. Rome couldn't do this, so Europe remained fragmented.

Nobody cared who they were untill tgey put off the economic isolationism

>Implying southern and northern Italians consider each other to be human, let alone Italian

What a waste of quints

"Han" is just the name of the first great dynasty after the Qin and broadly covers where all these different dialect groups were living, although during the Han dynasty the South was still considered a wilderness of barbaric peoples and would not fully Sinicize until the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties.

Another name they use to refer to themselves is "Huaren", meaning the "cultured people". Naturally China was the source and center of culture, so if you were ruled by and followed Chinese culture that made you Chinese.

France, Italy, and Germany are also all a fraction of the size of China. Imagine getting France and Italy and Germany to all consider themselves a single people.

The traditional meaning of Han wasn't an ethnic group but a geopolitical term for the Chinese heartland.

>southern peoples
Polities outside northern China were never considered "Chinese" regardless of their origins of their ruling class or their subjects.

As far as southern China goes,the Wu speaking regions received the bulk of the northern migrants while the rest retained a far larger native component.

>Han dynasty
Han was a hydronym that became a dynastonym under Liu Bang. There were no ethnic,cultural or linguistic connotations.

>Northern dynasties
The Xianbei were the first to use this in an ethnic sense to label Sinitic speaking subjects(who preferred to identify with local polities and toponyms). By the Tang "Han" reverted to a geopolitical label for the ruling regime/northern China.

>Ming
Zhu Yuanzhang was the first to use Han to refer to all Sinitic speakers.

>Hua
Originally an ethno cultural identity ascribed by Zhou aristocrats(didn't apply to Chu,abandoned by the Qin) this was revived several centuries later by Western Jin elites.

Hua became synonymous with Chinese civilization albeit with no linguistic affiliations(Vietnamese and Koreans would be considered Hua but not Han).

t. Merkel

To Merkel they already are all the same

nice quints faggot

I never thought about this but cities like Shenzhen and Hong Kong are on the same latitude as central India and Burma. The distance between them and, say, Beijing about the same as the distance from Berlin to Tunis.

Shouldn't people from southern China therefore look noticeably different than those from northern China? Not drastically but it's pretty easy to tell the difference between sothe average person from Sicily and Denmark for example, and they have clear genetic differences as well.

They do. Southerners are darker and shorter.

>Shouldn't people from southern China therefore look noticeably different than those from northern China? Not drastically but it's pretty easy to tell the difference between sothe average person from Sicily and Denmark for example, and they have clear genetic differences as well.

I'm Chinese and you can tell quite easily. Cantonese especially are easy to tell apart since they resemble Vietnamese.

the bureaucracy, and the yellow and yangtze rivers.

south east china has these two massive rivers that turn the region into a agriculture and trading power.

the bureaucracy efficiently ran things despite whoever was emperor.

>Shouldn't people from southern China therefore look noticeably different than those from northern China?
Well-traveled people can tell them apart the same way you can tell a Sicilian apart from a Swede.

Writing. When the Greeks or Akkadians conquered different people, they had to try to administer them in Greek or Akkadian. When the various Chink dynasties rose to power, they could administer each region using its own language, because Chink glyphs are principally ideograms. This meant that the decrees the Chink Emperor issued were immediately understandable by the people across his Empire, greatly easing the difficulty of ruling a diverse empire. Additionally, Chink literature has always been a body of texts that ANY literate Chink could read "in his own language", which made it easy for the literate elite to identify with a pan-Chink identity. And where the rulers lead, typically the people will follow.

French dialects were all mutually intelligible variants of Latin, Chink languages differ much more dramatically.

Thank you Chinanon.

So if they look different from northerners/central Chinese (closer to Vietnamese apparently), are genetically different, live thousands of miles away and speak a different language, why are for example Cantonese and Hakka lumped into the "Han" ethnic group? I know this isn't just a meme because the Chinese government itself uses that on the census.

Not that slant-eyed faggot but it's for the same reason that pale, blond Scandinavians and swarthy dark-eyed Greeks are both considered the same "European" ethnicity: Politics and history trump genetics.

Greeks and Swedes are not considered the same 'ethnicity' though, while 'Han Chinese' are.

>What was their secret? How did they manage to repeatedly meme together a shitzillion different peoples of entirely different languages, different religions, skin tones, facial features, and cultural practices into believing they were all Chinese
You already answered your question: memes.

Chineseness has always been cultural. Even when you can say that culture is based upon the Han people, the Han itself i more of a collective of a bunch of Northeast People who at times considered themselves different from each other (the Hua Yi Distinction, look it up)

Ergo you can be some brown as shit barbarian or Mongol fucktard but once you're spouting confucius or at least subject to whoever had Mandate of Heaven, you're Chink as fuck.

Protip: "Ethnicity" is an English word. In Chinese, Europeans and Han are both the same category of "thing" ('race', more or less)

>Preserved writings of the first millennium B.C. show that ethnic Chinese already tended then (as many still do today) to feel culturally superior to non-Chinese “barbarians,” while North Chinese tended to regard even South Chinese as barbarians. For example, a late Zhou Dynasty writer of the first millennium B.C. described China’s other peoples as follows: “The people of those five regions—the Middle states and the Rong, Yi, and other wild tribes around them—had all their several natures, which they could not be made to alter. The tribes on the east were called Yi. They had their hair unbound, and tattooed their bodies. Some of them ate their food without its being cooked by fire.” The Zhou author went on to describe wild tribes to the south, west, and north as indulging in equally barbaric practices, such as turning their feet inward, tattooing their foreheads, wearing skins, living in caves, not eating cereals, and, of course, eating their food raw.

>>Preserved writings of the first millennium B.C. show that ethnic Chinese already tended then (as many still do today) to feel culturally superior to non-Chinese “barbarians,”

True of literally all people, everywhere, throughout history. Settled people feel themselves culturally superior to savages, savages consider themselves culturally superior to settled people.

>The Zhou author went on to describe wild tribes to the south, west, and north as indulging in equally barbaric practices, such as turning their feet inward, tattooing their foreheads, wearing skins, living in caves, not eating cereals, and, of course, eating their food raw.

This is literally how the Greeks and Romans described the Germans.

>Shouldn't people from southern China therefore look noticeably different than those from northern China?
Not necessarily,anything below the Huai river was considered southern Chinese.

The historical southern Chinese are people from Anhui/Jiangsu/Zhejiang/Hubei/Sichuan(who backmigrated to Central China). while places like Fujian and Guangdong(overrepresented in the West) were inhabited by non Sinitic barbarians.

There's a gradient from northeastern China to southwestern China in terms of Han Chinese diversity.

> why are for example Cantonese and Hakka lumped into the "Han" ethnic group?
Because Han was first used as a modern ethnicity by late Qing revolutionaries who happened to be southern Han.

The Ming already defined Han as someone who spoke Sinitic.

>Cantonese especially are easy to tell apart since they resemble Vietnamese.
It blows my mind how Cantonese view themselves as the purest Han Chinese when they don't even resemble the ancients.

>It blows my mind how Cantonese view themselves as the purest Han Chinese when they don't even resemble the ancients.
Doesn't Cantonese (and a bunch of other non-Mandarin dialects) retain many features like extra tones and ending consonants that have disappeared in modern Mandarin because of retarded manchus who can't speak properly?

Because they didn't taboo miscegenation
Instead, they out-grew all their neighbors.
They annexed their territory.
And they gave them the option of assimilating into Chinese ethnicity or dying out.

>French dialects were all mutually intelligible variants of Latin,
read a book. a lot of them were mutually unintelligible. same goes for italy, which only saw a truly national language arise in the 1950s with national radio and even then many could understand italian this way but not speak it fluently.

FUCKING QUINTS HOLY SHIT

Sinicized Africa would be better than nigger Africa tbhwy.

Don't do that here user

>retain many features like extra tones and ending consonants
Yes,but they have Tai Kadai/Hmong Mien loanwords and grammatical innovations of their own.

I was referencing how Min/Kejia/Yue speakers try to LARP as ancient northern Chinese while Wu speakers don't(despite having the most northern Chinese ancestry).

WITNESS!!

fuck off newfags, no one cares.

>read a book. a lot of them were mutually unintelligible.

YOU read a book, because no, they weren't.

...

this is the best response in this thread

no arguments, just a "nuh uh"

Maybe they're just overcompensating.

Mongols and Tibetans by force. Hui by virtue of either being part of China or another Central Asian shithole. Manchu because they controlled China and now it's either stay in there or get Jap'd/Russ'd. Southern China because it's better to be part of China than be Indochinese.

unironically this

ITT: people forget that dumb Anglos translate 中國人、漢人、華人 all as "Chinese" even though they don't all mean the same thing.

If you are the only really civilized society around then everyone around you is going to model themselves on you and get absorbed.

dumb anglos don't translate

Dumb chinks translate into english.

WITNESSED

[MULTIPLE CITATIONS NEEDED]

Elohim casted several spells and gives them money every time they want to conquer each other

You mean that Northern Vietnamese look like Southern Chinese since that is where they came from

(It's irrelevant tbf)
"""""Chinese""""

>Wade-Gile system

Why would Chinks have created the English terms?

Confucianism
civil service
and a fuck load of resources

>Wade-Gile system
Was much better than the Pinyin nonsense we have today.

Well Europe is pretty different from the rest of the world. In a Geography and historic sense.

for what purpose?

They only managed that for about half their history.

But the foundations were undoubtedly laid by Qin Shi Huangdi, he established autocracy in the extreme and set a precedent for an Empire that incorporated the whole region, not just the yellow river basin (a la the Duke of Zhou). Of course, it fell apart under his son, and the Han later picked up the Empire idea with slightly less autocracy.

Not really, there were many different ideas of who counted as "civilised" throughout Chinese history. The idea of a Han ethnicity is fairly recent, and is a convenient way to bring many different cultures under one umbrella, the only prerequesite for being Han is essentially being a native speaker of a dialect of Chinese (which is a very varied language, often classified as several different languages).

You need to look a little wider in scope and see how the East as a whole has been able to cope with assimilating and integrating cultures that were different from the native one. Because the Chinese sure af weren't the first and certainly aren't the last.

Eastern syncretism is the greater meme.

How and why was the East like this, but the West was more socially retarded and backwards in this respect?

>how the East as a whole has been able to cope with assimilating and integrating cultures that were different from the native one
Can you expand on this? Who else were able to do this?

geographically isolated.

I'm willing to bet that if Subsaharan Africa were as fertile as China the same thing would have happened. there

but yea, vast mountains to the southwest, steppes and Siberia to the north, and the Tibetan plateau to the weest, and the sea to the east. the only places "China" really COULD rub up against were Vietnam, Korea, and to a lesser extent, Japan; which they did.

There are still signs of their isolated backwardness though from being relatively MORE out of the loop with the rest of the world. Best example being their retarded tense-less language and their halfway cuneiform/ alphabet writing system.

>[Citations needed]

The entire Western translation academia and industry changed to Pinyin for good reasons. They didn't just say HURDUR MIGHT AS WELL RELEARN EVERYTHING LOL

1. It distinguishes tones far better.
2. It stops fucking up names and titles.
3. The pronunciation actually is proper.

The world is a better place because of the Chinese characters system.

If you've seen latinized Vietnamese written and wanted to gouge your eyes out, then imagine 1.5 billion people with far more computers than third-world Vietnam using that bastardized latin script.

The biggest problem with WG is the overreliance on apostrophes. No one outside academia ever used them, so you effectively cut the consonant inventory in half by merging p/b, t/d, etc.

Pinyin is fine for Mandarin learners who are taught its proper use, but for anyone else it's a frankenstein's monstrosity, created by Soviet scholars, whose treatment of e.g. x, z, q, and u are completely unintuitive for anyone who doesn't speak the language and is just trying to pronounce someone's name right. Wade-Giles is more intuitive and achieves more accurate results for these purposes.

>The entire Western translation academia and industry changed to Pinyin
for political reasons, because the Communists told them to.

>intuitive
>tzi
>hsi

>Pinyin is fine for Mandarin learners who are taught its proper use
bopomofo is better as a pronunciation guide since it's compact enough to be used as ruby text.

My ideal world: bopomofo for native/learner transcription, tongyong pinyin for foreign transcription, and moderately reformed hanzi à la Japanese shinjitai.

t. Li Ming