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There's a lot of complexities and politically-motivated reasons behind calling various varieties of Chinese "dialects" but this article swings way too far the other direction.
There has been a single lingua franca across all of China since at least the Han Dynasty, perhaps even the Warring States period or earlier. It has variously been called 通語 (the mass/common/omnipresent/intelligible language, 通 is a bit difficult to translate here), 官話 (the official language), potentially 雅言 (elegant speech, this is more controversial and earliest mention) and now 普通话 or 國語.
> Indeed, before the 20th century the idea of a singular, spoken Chinese language was a foreign concept
Matteo Ricci explicitly talks about a single language he can use to talk with everyone in every province (in his time this was the 官話). And indeed he used the same language as he made his way across the entire coast of China. There is an entire Han Dynasty compendium of the vocabulary of various regions that compares it against the official lingua franca. Indeed the title of this work is exactly Fangyan!
> But while Chinese thinkers frequently mentioned ‘official languages’, this was by no means synonymous with a ‘national language’ – a language unified in its sound and script used by and representative of a Chinese nation.
These "official languages" were exactly unified in sound and script and representative of a Chinese nation! The language Ricci encountered was the descendent of one whose pronunciation was explicitly codified (there are some asterisks here I can elaborate on if people are interested) in the 14th century 洪武正韻 (Hongwu Proper Sound), and was passed to neighboring kingdoms as the official language (and is e.g. preserved in Korean rime books on the Chinese language).
The difference in the last 100 years has been a difference in degree rather than kind. With the advent of near-universal education and literacy and the technological tools offered by mass media, the PRC, ROC, and to a lesser extent places like Singapore and Malaysia can more effectively carry out the language programs that have been attempted in the millennia past.
Granted the difference in degree is vast: the tools at the disposal of political regimes today absolutely dwarfs those of the past. This also means the effects of standardization are far more keenly felt. However, the motivation and policy is one with a long and winding history.
It follows a standard story of varying unification and disunity both linguistically and politically that has played out many times in China's history.
> There is an entire Han Dynasty compendium of the vocabulary of various regions that compares it against the official lingua franca. Indeed the title of this work is exactly Fangyan!
I would caution against using the existence of the Fangyan as firm evidence of a single language intelligible across Han China. It's important to remember the political context of the Western Han under which Yang Xiong wrote the Fangyan: a declining central state which was embarking on a project of "soft" power in order to project influence which it didn't really have (e.g, the canonization of many of the early masterworks into the received texts that we have today). Even the received literature of the Han Dynasty and Northern and Southern Dynasties is rich with extremely rare words and hapax legomena which may speak to a great regional diversity of language (there's other reasons for this too of course).
I know significantly less about Tang and post-Tang China, but I think it's probably likely that a stronger central state apparatus and the advent of the printing press may have played a big role in standardizing language at least at the official level.
> I would caution against using the existence of the Fangyan as firm evidence of a single language intelligible across Han China.
This is a good point. In particular it's a bit difficult to evaluate how much of 通語 was aspirational vs reality, especially as we don't have good documents outlining what the process of learning Chinese was like, but it clearly reflects a desire for a lingua franca (rather than it being a completely foreign concept). But it is clear that as soon as we have outside observers who are learning Chinese for the first time (an extremely valuable resource for tracking uniformity of language!), that at various times in China's history there was a single lingua franca.
E.g. Ricci says this, which is pretty much a direct refutation of the original article's point that a unified lingua franca was a 20th century invention,
> The Chinese have different languages in different provinces, to such an extent that they can not understand each other... The Chinese also have another language which is like a universal and common language...[much later] With all the varieties of languages, there is one that we call cuonhoa [官話], that is to say, the forensic language (lingua forense); it is used in audiences and tribunals; and, if one learns this, he could use it in all the provinces; in addition, even the children and women knew enough of it to be able to communicate with the people of another province. [Excerpted and translated by Paul Yang in The Portuguese-Chinese Dictionary of Matteo Ricci: A Historical and Linguistic Tradition, Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Sinology, pg. 198-199]
Even allowing for the fact that Ricci is almost certainly experiencing some sort of selection bias (probably mainly talking to people with a certain amount of educational background), it's a pretty clear statement of a single language used across all of Ming China that superseded regional languages.
> Even the received literature of the Han Dynasty and Northern and Southern Dynasties is rich with extremely rare words and hapax legomena which may speak to a great regional diversity of language (there's other reasons for this too of course).
The whole post-Han pre-Tang time period is a bit of a crazy minefield to get through from a language perspective because of political (and consequently linguistic) disunity. There's also a bit of craziness in the Qing with competing standards (the old Ming Mandarin standard based off the Nanjing standard and the Beijing Mandarin standard, the competition extended up all the way into Beijing itself!) that also lead to a significant amount of fragmentation (and why e.g. there was a perceived need to make what would become the 老國音).
I don't mean to say that there was always a standardized, unified language, but I do mean to say that the idea of having one is very ancient, and convincing evidence that one was created and basically "worked" is also much older than the 20th century.
"against the official lingua franca"
Beautifully put: the official language of the Franks! I'm not joking either. There are some fundamental concepts that get given a particular epithet and gradually it becomes a errr "thing". It doesn't really matter what that epithet is, provided we all agree on what it means. It doesn't really matter which language it is in either. English is particularly flexible in this regard.
The British isles have seen quite a lot of coming and going over the last few thousand years and the locals have always been welcoming of incoming ... income. The mineral wealth is all mined out now but the outward looking attitude that has characterized the place for millennia due to trade links and easy access via longboat and later the Empire thing is still lingering for now. Anyway, English happily appropriates foreign words wholesale.
So we have the Latin phrase: "lingua franca" The language of the Franks. The Franks are roughly France these days. So very old French was the interchange language in Europe for quite a while. Thanks to the invasion of 1066 in England, French really did become the lingua franca hereabouts but as it turns out it largely lost out eventually to a more Saxon (German) language. We ended up with a Germanic language base that had huge dollops of French, pots of Latin and wodges of Greek interspersed with lashings of nearly every other language spoke on the planet.
English is a relative newcomer to the game of communicating what is going on behind your eyes to making the air vibrate and causing tiny hairs on tympanic membranes to vibrate and finally making neurons fire in another brain. I think it is quite good at it.
However, I never want to see the demise of other languages or them becoming secondary or whatever. English is not perfect. Language like all other things needs diversity. English in its current form could not possible exist without all its predecessors and frankly (lol) all other languages. Modern English has a simplicity and fluidity that is probably due to becoming the language of the Franks - the lingua franca.
I suspect that its fluidity is actually due to foreign speakers and not built in. I think that English has been shaped more by foreigners than locals (whatever that means).
EDIT: Removed silly nonsense (sorry).
The lingua franca wasn't "the language of the Franks", it was an elaborate pidgin used for Mediterranean trade that encompassed a lot of broadly Romance features with a vastly simplified grammar and a vocabulary core that could be described as most closely resembling a mixture of Occitan southern France and Savoyard (which are both, admittedly, umbrella terms that incorporate rather a large number of dialects). The term lingua franca has gone on to mean any (usually simplified) language that's used to communicate between groups - like Swahili in large parts of east Africa (it is by far the simplest of the Bantu languages, and has only a relatively small population of native speakers).
Thanks for your's and whakim's thorough conversation about this -- some of the nuance is really hard to articulate without the historical geopolitical context and you summed it up really well!
Nice summary!
As a Chinese native and Han people, I have no idea of these historical records! Just to say how rich and complex the Chinese history is and how profound is this legacy and heritage.
In fact Cantonese preserves the tones (esp. 平仄) of ancient Chinese better than Mandarin, and this shows for example when reading Chinese poems [1].
Cantonese even almost became the official language of China [2].
[1]: https://www.quora.com/Do-most-ancient-Chinese-poems-rhyme-in...
[2]: https://www.scmp.com/article/694592/cantonese-almost-became-...
> Cantonese even almost became the official language of China
X almost became the official language of China is an urban myth that just will not die. There were votes on individual sounds and those either swung one way or another depending on votes.
There was never any doubt that Mandarin would form the foundation of the spoken standard (as had been the case for > 1000 years at this point) or that its Beijing-variety would play an important (but not absolute) part. The votes were over the particulars of individual sounds and pronunciations of single characters.
EDIT: the idea that Cantonese is more faithful to Middle Chinese (itself a weird, amorphous concept) and therefore better for reading ancient poems also is suspect. There are ancient poems that continue to rhyme in modern Mandarin but don't in Cantonese and vice versa. Heck you could make the case that Wu varieties are the most faithful because they preserve the voicing of the Qieyun System (note I don't believe they are the most faithful).
All of these varieties have their own innovations, and there is no clear "most conservative" variety (unlike e.g. Icelandic and Norse).
> Mandarin would form the foundation of the spoken standard (as had been the case for > 1000 years at this point)...
The Old Mandarin had its root from Jin (1115-1234) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties [1], coming from “foreign ethnicity” 外族 (from a Han-centric view point). The history is less than 1000 years, less than the ancient poems (唐詩) that we are discussing.
One main reason for Mandarin to be the standard of Chinese is because of the influence of Mongolia (Yuan) and Manchurian (Qing), that is, non-Han ruling dynasties.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Mandarin
> the idea that Cantonese is more faithful to Middle Chinese ... and therefore better for reading ancient poems also is suspect.
The tones (esp. 平仄) are better preserved in Cantonese than Mandarin, I don’t think this is disputed.
What's the deal with Icelandic and Norse?
Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation.
They sincerely believed that when (e.g.) Cantonese speakers read and wrote, they were not wholesale translating from and to Mandarin, but simply, when writing, transcribing Cantonese using the universal ideographic calligraphy.
In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught. The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.
(Sinitic languages admit about 1200 distinct syllables, but the syllabary writing system uses many times that number, so many necessarily sound alike. Mandarin speakers are taught that the characters are not merely syllables with attached historical rules, but ideograms that represent distinct thoughts. (Numerous just-so examples are used to support the notion.) This has often led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations.)
I'm a native Mandarin speaker. I don't know why you need to stress "taught" or "believe" so much. I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. In writing, we would use either simplified or traditional character sets. Note I'm only talking about modern communication.
> could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations
I don't know who you are talking about. I wouldn't say that at all. Chinese students would spent 1/3 of their high school studying complex ancient Chinese languages (文言文). Nobody would say it's not deep knowledge - it's so damn hard.
> The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.
It can work pretty much the same way, Mandarin isn't special in that regard. The only difference is that the conventions for Mandarin are widely known and have been established for a long time.
But there was a time when writing in Mandarin was a radical new idea and people were unsure how to write many things, e.g. whether to use 的, 底 or 之 for the genitive particle de.
Most Sinitic languages are at a similar stage now: traditionally educated people know the pronunciations of many characters that are used e.g. in Classical Chinese poetry, but some frequently used words may not have any corresponding characters assigned, so people substitute others based on meaning and/or pronunciation, or make up new ones (this is easier when handwriting).
Most likely it will also stay that way for most people, since the benefits of literacy in Sinitic languages other than Mandarin aren't all that great, but there are also quite a few enthusiasts trying to make writing their mother tongues a thing, e.g. by developing input methods: https://hanhngiox.net/
> Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation.
I wonder where they got "taught" such an idea. I'm sure that many "believe" so, but mostly because they never interacted with the Cantonese language, and therefore have a naive misunderstanding. It's certainly not an idea that is taught in the most syllabus; (in fact, Chinese textbooks love to boast about how diverse the Chinese language is, despite not teaching anything specific about "dialects")
> This has often led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations.)
Again, I wonder where they went to school exactly. This is very different from what I experienced growing up (in mainland china). Every single ancient (sometimes not even ancient) passage in textbooks have heavy footnotes, and it is usually an entire independent topic in literature class, from elementary school all the way to college. In fact, from the perspective of most students (and a lot of parents, too), 文言文 (ancient Chinese) is the most impenetrable part of literature class.
I am a foreigner that has learned to speak/read/write Cantonese. I cannot understand most "formal written Chinese", also known as "standard written Chinese" as the characters used are almost entirely the same ones used in Mandarin. Indeed “佢喺邊度呀" (written/spoken Canto) is very different than "他在哪裡嗎" Mandarin/formal Chinese written form. I can read entire books or comics written in vernacular Canto but can't understand even basic stories written in "formal Chinese". The languages are mutually unintelligible and it's wild how different they can be.
You are definitely correct in saying that in general people view it as simply changing the pronunciations.
Though I would also say that people also appreciate the nuances. There are comedic sketches on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK51dlpqpSE (~5.30)
> In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught.
This is actually similar to Western Europe where there was a similar diglossia situation before the Renaissance. All formal writing by the few literate clergy at the time was in Latin, and there wasn't much writing in the vernacular languages spoken day to day.
> often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.
It can and has, even historically (see e.g. the Ming Dynasty Min novel Tale of the Lychee Mirror 荔鏡記). The reason it falls flat is the lack of political willpower to really go for it, not fundamental linguistics ones. This is why calling Chinese characters a simple syllabary is also wrong.
The relationship among different Sinitic varieties is more complex than simply different languages. I've talked about this in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16844074
This is why I think in China the history of the Chinese languages should be taught (I really do not know why some evolutionary tree of Homo sapiens is in the biology curriculum but this is not in some social science one. Seems like an oversight). Even from Chinese people, you still hear all these myth (debunked in some other comment) that X almost became Mandarin.
"Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation."
I am going to take a guess that you do not know many mandarin speakers? if you did, you would know this is utter nonsense.
My ex speaks English/Mandarin/Cantonese. She is well aware these are not "different pronunciations".
Her Cousin speaks Mandarin and Fuzhou dialect. Once we were all out and he bumped into a friend from Fuzhou and they started talking. I asked the ex to translate as I often did, and she turned to me and said she's in the same position as I am, she can't understand any of it.
It isn't a "pronunciation" issue, or she would have been able to guess some of what was being said.
It's a shame that people think that having a common national language has to come at the expense of local languages/dialects.
Compare the language policy of China with that of India, where even though Hindi and English are nominally the languages on a national level and all students are in theory taught at least one of them, the government doesn't try to actively suppress other local languages in schools or media.
As a result, an educated Indian is often trilingual in English, Hindi, and their local language, whereas in mainland China, knowledge of non-Mandarin dialects is decreasing in the younger generations.
> ...at the expense of local languages/dialects.
Worth noting that many Chinese languages are facing extinction, including Mongolian, Manchu, Bouyei [1]. In particular, Manchu, the imperial language a little more than a century ago, was known by less than 100 people and mastered by less than 10 in 2013 [2].
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-languages/chinas-mi... "China's minority languages face threat of extinction"
[2]: https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/once-imp... " Once imperial language, Manchu facing extinction"
Indian language / multiculturalism is exactly the basketcase PRC wants to avoid.
>an educated Indian is often trilingual in English, Hindi, and their local language
An uneducated Chinese is still going to be fluent in mandarin going forward, the national language. 50% of Indian youth are bilingual 20% are trilingual. That's a lingua franca failure.
It is a side effect. You should see that young kids will not speak their local language, but they will be able to speak Mandarin and English so much better than their parents. It is more a natural selection. Why do you want to keep local dialects when no one is going to use it? It is like watching a village living in remote area, romantically we wish they stay that way forever, but they will change, modernize and find a better way for themselves.
I think the written Chinese language is way more flexible than what most people think it can be.
The most extreme example of this is Japanese Kanji, and while Japanese is its own language, native chinese speakers would note the similarities between it and Hainanese/Cantonese dialect, and with some 文言文 knowledge, one can read Japanese without much effort, even if one cannot speak it.
Contemporary Chinese has roots in the version used among the masses, it deliberately eschews the official version used in the palace to make it easier for the masses to understand and learn it. One may notice the difference between Taiwan official language and Mainland official language in official declarations, the Taiwanese one is considerably more ... "poetic" but comes at a cost of understanding for the masses who may not be educated as highly, like most of the villages in Mainland China, likewise for Hong Kong.
However, one might notice how written Chinese has relatively little "hard" grammar rules that must be followed to ensure legibility. As a translator I find it easier sometimes to translate something into Chinese, which is not my first language, and then to the target language, especially for Sinitic languages, because the written language can capture most of the meaning while being flexible enough to be restructured in the target.
The converse, on the other hand may be tougher, for example if Hong Kongers were to use Cantonese as a base to understand other dialects they will face a lot of problems in doing so because its not flexible enough to fit in the quirks of other languages, which is why in this sense written Putonghua is a successful invention because its minimal enough to convey meaning while being able to fit it all the weird quirks for various "dialects", which is why its used widely across the world.
> The most extreme example of this is Japanese Kanji, and while Japanese is its own language, native chinese speakers would note the similarities between it and Hainanese/Cantonese dialect, and with some 文言文 knowledge, one can read Japanese without much effort, even if one cannot speak it.
This is slightly misleading. Kanji (lit. Hanzi i.e. Chinese character(s)) is the Chinese writing system. The native Chinese speaker observes not any similarities in the languages beyond picking out logograms which are familiar and used in the same way. Of course, there are a large amount of logograms which are not used the same way, on top of the divergence caused by the different simplification schemes used in the two countries, so it is by no means straightforward to read Japanese as a Chinese speaker. The existence of languages as diverse as Turkish, Serbian, Finnish and English all using latin script does not imply that "the written Latin language is flexible".
Just as an example, I've taken a paragraph from a recent news article from NHK and converted the kanji to kana. This is of course legible to native Japanese speakers but completely unintelligible to even a scholar in classical Chinese.
そうこ から およそ3 キロ はなれた ばしょ に すんで いる と いう60 だい の ふうふ は「 さくや は すごい あめ と かぜ で、 たつまき を しらせる サイレン が なった の で じたく の ちか-しつ に いそいで ひなん した。 とても こわい おもい を した。 こんな ふう に たてもの を はかい する なんて、 ほんとう に ひどい」 と はなして いました。
With the Kanji in place, a Chinese speaker may pick out individual words but the whole sentence would still be unintelligible. As an analogy, I can replace the kanji with roughly equivalent English words, and what an average English speaker gets out of the sentence is what a Chinese speaker gets out of the original. The English speaker doing this should not be under the illusion of "understanding" the language thus.
Warehouseからおよそ3キロdistanceれたplaceにliveんでいるという60yearsのcoupleは「lastnightはすごいrainとwindで、tornadoをinformationらせるサイレンがsoundったのでhouseのbasementにhurryいでescapeした。とてもscaryいthinkいをした。こんなwindにbuildingをdestroyするなんて、reallyにひどい」とsayしていました。
As someone who speaks Mandarin, my personal experience can attest the difficulty in reading Japanese through many years of learning it.
But I do note that it looks familiar a lot of time. But the meaning often is not what it appears to Mandarin speaker.
> I think the written Chinese language is way more flexible than what most people think it can be.
I wish I had enough time to properly learn a couple of CJK languages.
I find the characters cool, and while I only know a few of them it is really fun to accidentally figure out the meanings of written words without being able to read or speak them.
Like how fire and mountain when written together becomes volcano: 火山
Cantonese is as flexible. But I think Japanese is very flexible. In fact most and still many of the chinese phrases came from japan.
What base you are on?
There are a lot lost in translation. When Chinese people say "fangyan" it could mean anything, as long as it is a language used in specific region, as opposite to Mandarin, which is the official language used in the country. And that's what it is. It does not say a language is close to Mandarin or not. Of course, in translation, everything is lost. I have a lot problem with translations. For example, Chinese "loong" is translated into dragon, which are very different thing. It would be better people do not translate and find a close approximation for words, rather, introduce a new word. Like Banzai, Sushi, those words are good translations. Unfortunately it happened too many times in the history, now we are stuck with many words don't mean the same thing in two cultures.
In Arabic region, news organisations start to use MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) so that news can be broadcast to different regions, and schools are teaching in MSA, so that knowledge can be shared more effectively. There aren't much about which dialect is superior than others, any for or against discussion about these are super political, not about the use of the language at all.
The campaign in Singapore to wipe out 'dialects' is also interesting, as it existed outside the ROC or PRC. Presumably done for ethnic/nation building reasons, to have a dominant chinese majority speaking one language - otherwise you'd have some chinese communities being similar or size or even smaller than the Tamil or Malay speakers.
Though I've also read recently that after stamping out non-Mandarin languages, even proficiency in Mandarin is now fallen behind, as English is more practical.
One final irony in Singapore is that all Chinese are now taught Mandarin as their "mother tongue" (the official term) in school. This is despite virtually all Singaporeans being of southern Chinese descent, meaning they actually spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese etc, but nothing even close to northern Mandarin.
Linguistically, the distinction between languages and dialects is debated; often, reasonably so, all languages are simply dialects of each other. The reason is that if you have two languages which don't understand each other, you can find "intermediary steps" between the two that each understand each other, s.t. you reach the other language. And often, you have two "languages" that are clearly dialects but considered different languages because they each have their own army and navy. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...
As somebody that does not speak or read Chinese I am surprised that a simpler script has not been developed and widely used. Is it fast to read? I can understand to an extent if reading speed is at par with simpler alphabetic or phonetic scripts. But surely writing speed must be slower. How do chinese people even type?
That's a political hornets' nest that you're poking there.
There is Pinyin, the official romanisation of Mandarin Chinese, in which for example "汉语拼音" becomes "hànyǔ pīnyīn". So, one could write using that. The argument typically is that Chinese has too many homonyms to make that practicable. I'm not sure I buy that, as spoken Mandarin is presumably intellegible, despite those homonyms.
There's a lot of info in the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis, and on this website: http://www.pinyin.info
> But surely writing speed must be slower.
I've found that that is not the case. While a typical character is more complex than a typical letter, you need fewer of them. At uni, I tested that with a native Chinese speaker and a native German speaker. We chose several random English sentences, they translated them into their respective language, and then we timed how long they took to write them down (by hand, in Chinese, German, English). It was basically the same, no systematic difference.
> How do chinese people even type?
There are several input systems, some based on pronunciation, some based on the shape or strokes.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...
or https://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-input-methods-a-guide...
> How do chinese people even type?
Emacs has 25 kinds of Chinese input methods.
A speaker at Stanford on the topic of early keyboards used for Chinese noted graph structure such as the one you find in Canjie input method was what they used before soundspelling. Today, hypergraphtext autocompletion influences message contruction on flatscreen devices in a kind of mind-machine blend mode on a massive scale.
A lot of the discussions here seem to forget one thing for the Chinese language. The written and spoken Chinese were different from early on, and the spoken spoken language for the administration or office was not the same as that for locals' chitchat.
As the adage goes, "A language is a dialect with a flag and an army"
The Han script was really a unified VM bytecode and serialization format, not a language spec.
The fangyans are various languages compiles to it.
The Chinese standardized its written form very early, and is the only "language" survived today without an alphabet, many native speakers learn "Chinese" as the text rather than a spoken tone. Even Cantonese and Hakka are really a family of mutually unintelligible dialects clustered by geographic proximity.
Related [1] [2]: the Han race was really only constructed in the last 100 years, along with the national mythos of several millennia of uninterrupted dynastic civilization.
I've never understood the fascination with these narratives. Many of my relatives are adamant about China's dynastic streak. Also, the idea that different languages are dialects of Mandarin, when in truth many of them, like Cantonese, developed earlier or in parallel.
> an ethnically integrated China is, in fact, a modern invention linked to the rise of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century.
This idea is a very sensible one in the context of China being forced to open up to the world. It's like a man, living in wild, has assume he was alone, and have no idea he was actually a male. Until one day he run into a similar creature that is a female.
The undernote of this is that Chinese society is extremely complex. Easily orders of magnitude more complex. Comparing to the US continental, the geographical diversity and the cultural heritage shows such a vast range of changes that one should feel US is probably culturally only equivalent to a typical province in China! They eat differently, speak different in accent and words of expression, have different customs in almost every aspects of the life (child birth, birthdag, marriage, funerals etc etc)...
China is indeed a humongous collective of diverse human communities that defies any singular or universal interpretation.
it's not true. Han Chinese are clearly genetically distinguishable from Yamato Japanese and Koreans, and internally the different Han Chinese subgroups are genetically closer to each other than any of them are to Koreans and Japanese.
Gene doesn't lie
The concept of Chinese medicine was also created and promoted by Mao since they couldn’t afford much real medicine after the revolution. It simply didn’t exist as a unified thing before then.
It's a long story to even make sense of this topic, especially on why Chinese governments (not only CCP, but also KMT, and all previous dynasties) have such an obsession with controlling the Chinese language. But here are some interesting historical topics worth exploring:
First, according to the legend, the Chinese character was created by 仓颉[0] (2667 – 2596 BC, don't you love it when the four-eyed legend even has a birth year...), who is an official work for the ancient Yellow Emperor[1]. But the legends were well known to all the following dynasties, that an official invented the Chinese character, might give later generations the legitimacy and confidence to moderate it.
The Zhou[2] dynasty (1046 – 256 BC), which laid the very foundation of the Chinese culture, occupied the vast fertile land of China, with is on par with the EU in size. It's arguably the only feudal dynasty in Chinese history. The problem of feudalism is subjects would gradually gain power, so the country would break into pieces just like Europe, or the later Eastern Zhou. As China breaks, the need for diplomacy between countless independent Duchies and Counties was booming. On paper, the King of Zhou was still their liege, so it's very natural to leverage the dialect from the capital of Zhou, plus several classics like 诗[3] (the Poetry - the first book of poetry is, of course, called the Poetry). People call it 雅言[4] which means the language of elegance. It's a bit like Latin, which European always learn because of the Vatican, but people don't use it much in real life. If China continued this way it would be more like Europe and there would be many independent languages.
Then there's Qin[5] (221 - 206 BC), which was originally a subject of Zhou, but eventually became too powerful and unified China. Qin was very radical, it killed feudalism, and launched massive standardization like unifying administrative units, all kinds of measurements, and even the wheelbases (there were no train but they did anyway), and of course the Chinese Characters. It's doable because 1) Chinese is hieroglyphic, the character and the sound are not coupled 2) writing was still a practice of elites, and elites are fewer in number and can afford education.
As vast as China is, and as many dialects there are/were, people can always perfectly communicate with the written language throughout most Chinese history. Because of the hieroglyphic nature of the language, most of the characters from the Qin dynasty, still make sense even today if you know modern traditional Chinese and to a lesser extent simplified Chinese. (aka. The single-responsibility principle[6] in software engineering, the pronunciation, and the graphical representation are different reasons to change, so the decoupling makes the characters less screwed when the pronunciation changes). It's so powerful so that Chinese and Japanese may have some quasi-understanding to each other by writing Hanzi/Kanji. To understand what does a regnal year of Japanese Emperor means, people often have to go back to ancient Chinese texts - the most difficult part of the Japanese and Korean for western people, sometimes are easiest for Chinese.
And for the following millenniums, those practices almost became a tradition: the dialect of the capital of that time would be the official language. And from time to time there were attempts to unify the vocal dialects during dynasties, but it was too hard because how people speak was always changing, until modern days that Guoyu[7] and Putonghua[7] could achieve the impossible through technologies.
So: 1) The language is not only seen by governments as a tool of communication but also a tie that binds everything together - loosening that tie might come with risks. 2) It's more or less a tradition so there are substantially fewer pushbacks than other countries, and legitimate Chinese governments throughout history see no reason to not leverage that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry [4] Unfortunately, there's no English translation to this Wiki yet: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9B%85%E9%9F%B3 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-responsibility_principl... [7] & [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese
I percept all these "save muh local dialects" and "dialects are different languages than mandarin" are just cheap attempt at devide et impera.