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sbaldrick posted:How involved is the PLA in the day to day running of the country. I've read a few articles that stat that Jiang Zemin kept control of PLA after leaving the Presidency as kind of a back door to power (which he later gave up)? I think the biggest change in the role of the PLA in China was the movement in the 90s to divest the PLA of its enormous commercial and real-estate interests. Before, there was a literal "military-industrial complex" where the PLA directly ran the businesses that supplied it, from military goods to food. It also owned plenty of unrelated real estate and businesses as well. The idea was originally that the PLA would be a somewhat self-funded organization. Of course, in the 90s, people in government and also the military leadership started realizing that this not only bred tons of corruption but was actually kind of scary because it meant that the PLA was becoming a power group highly independent from the Party and from central control, since with independent funding it was a lot harder to twist arms with threats of funding cuts. So they started spinning off lots of these enterprises, usually just having the existing PLA managers "retire" from the military but keeping their positions in the company. Nowadays, the PLA is more or less separated from these businesses, although naturally there are very very strong existing connections because the spin-offs are all run by the same former PLA officers. This old "budget" approach to government, where government organs were expected to self-fund much of their operating costs instead of relying entirely on state funding, is definitely becoming a major problem and is arguably a big part of why the central government is struggling so much with local corruption. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Feb 14, 2012 |
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Feb 14, 2012 21:35
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Fiendish_Ghoul posted:I would say there is a major stigma on marijuana, socially. I mean, when celebrities get caught using marijuana is seems to be a significantly bigger deal there, and a lot of people seem to lump it in with all other drugs. But according to what I just found, if I'm not misreading, you need to be in possession of pretty serious quantities of marijuana (I've already forgotten the amount, but I think it was in the 60-70 lbs. range!) before you start getting into sentences lasting years. Of course, that's only if there is no proof that you're smuggling or selling it, and quantity might be considered proof enough. Keep in mind that the Chinese legal system is radically different from what most Westerners are used to. They don't even need a criminal conviction to send you to jail because reeducation through labor (RTL) is an administrative procedure, not a criminal one and is enough to send you away for a few years of rear end-busting prison labor or other such "treatment". RTL is pretty commonly used for drug cases and other "soft" crimes. It's still pretty terrible, though arguably still not quite as bad as the US criminal system. It's luck of the draw, really. In some areas, they make efforts to have some sort of compulsory treatment instead of or in addition to labor. Hell, if you live in a particularly corrupt area, you can get RTL just for looking like a druggie/homeless person/loser. I don't think it's fair to say that Chinese law enforcement in regards to stuff like weed is really that much different from the US approach. It's super inconsistent and depends heavily on who you are and where you are. Even for capital criminal crimes, cases are handled extremely quickly and with nothing close to what we would consider "due process" in the US. And keep in mind that plenty of drug crimes carry capital penalties. Hell, they executed that one crazy British guy for heroin smuggling. In general, in fact, don't expect legalities to protect you. "Troublemakers should not be able to hide behind the law" is a real opinion held by many levels of the Chinese justice system. I'll write a separate post in the future detailing the Chinese system's stance on judicial review and stuff like that. As with many other Chinese systems, it's focused on "getting results" as defined by semi-arbitrary metrics and competition. The big drugs in China are heroin, crystal meth, ketamine, and ecstasy. I believe ketamine and other "designer drugs" are still particularly popular among cool kids. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 04:44
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DerDestroyer posted:So what's the best way to avoid trouble with the police in China then? It sounds like there are a lot of ways you can get arrested in spite of being mostly harmless to society. Be rich and Han. Being white also works much of the time. If you get arrested, make sure to shout who your dad is. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 05:40
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GlassEye-Boy posted:Glib, generalizations aside, in all reality you'll have more problems with the cops in the US than in China on a every day basis. It's only when things get serious that the troubles with the system pop up. Eh, it depends. In plenty of areas, for natives, you can get shaken down by the cops for bribes, protection, etc. It's certainly no worse than any other developing country with corruption issues, but it's definitely a different sort of interaction than what most Americans are used to. But yeah, they usually don't pick on people just to do it. But god help you if you get in the way of some local party cadre/crooked businessman who wants to steal your land or something. Also, as another poster noted, there's a lot of different police-like institutions in China and they're all sort of different. I will try to find a chart or something because it's pretty drat complicated. As with many other areas of the Chinese government, there's multiple groups with heavily overlapping jurisdiction and powers, and conflicts are handled through negotiation and custom (and plenty of bullshit and dick-waving). For instance, at the national level, the two big ministries under the State Council of the PRC in the law enforcement arena are the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and the Ministry of State Security (MSS), both of which have police powers. Then there's the PLA which also does some law enforcement. And the People's Armed Police (PAP) which is a paramilitary police unit which is technically under the MPS, but also has connections to the PLA. The PAP also handles fire-fighting in many areas. Then there's the provincial public security departments, which are nominally subordinate to the MPS, as are the local PSBs. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 20:07
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Don't worry fellow Americans, we're busy militarizing our police forces, too. We'll be goddamned if we let the Chinese and Europeans beat us. We'll just give machine guns and body armor to local cops, though, so hopefully that doesn't affect your day to day...
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Feb 17, 2012 21:56
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french lies posted:I also think you're being uncharitable by interpreting the previous comment in a literal sense. To me, it doesn't seem like he's talking about Potemkin villages, but rather that the modern consumer economy in China is largely isolated to first-tier cities and the kind of places that westerners are likely to visit. So a lot of times, you'll have people like Thomas Friedman going to Shanghai, seeing iPhones, and writing enthusiastic op-eds on the importance of Chinese consumers, all while ignoring the fact that the economy is still largely an agrarian and developing economy. Yeah, fooling Thomas Friedman is no evidence of deception. Dude's been a credulous dum-dum since forever. You could tell him the moon was made of cheese if you took him out for golf first and talked about how a cheesemoon economy would globalize our paradigm shifts.
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Feb 18, 2012 18:38
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Hong XiuQuan posted:I do think that the biggest problem facing Chinese democracy will be keeping all the provinces a part of China. Big city chauvinism is already a huge problem and may become worse in a democratic system - by worse I mean the government will have bigger problems quashing resentment and calls to carve out new states. Yeah, China is such a big country that it's always close to busting apart at the seams. I honestly think this might actually be better for the Chinese people, but that will never, ever be allowed to happen. Fundamentally, I don't think we will see meaningful national-level democratic processes so long as there's any ability for the "wrong choice" to be made. Of course, China is already making huge strides in things like local transparency and the like, so the actual freedom of life and individual democratic influence at a local level will probably improve, but these will either be informal or else tightly imposed by the central government. But this is just my extremely vague opinion that predicts nothing.
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Feb 21, 2012 19:19
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Yeah it's not racism. It's most definitely classism, though. If you really want to make it about American stuff, you could sort of sort of maybe talk about the growing social divide in the Civil War era between urban and rural peoples. Maybe. Suzhi is a pretty lovely term, honestly. It's monstrously vague. A western argument would be about, say, the cultural values system and things like civic/social consciousness needed to support a democracy (well, maybe those examples are almost as vague). But instead it's just about "suzhi" which is "quality" or "character", and paints things like it's an inborn trait or something. It's a term that was used in a eugenics context not too long ago, after all. It all comes down to a lack of faith in the disgusting rabble of poors you see in any anti-democratic society. How real are these concerns? Unknown. Honestly, they're not utterly without merit. It's worth consideration. But then again, to play advocate, revolutionary era America wasn't that much better. Literacy was about even with what China claims (70-99% for 1700s US), education rates were worse, there were plenty of weirdo religious fanatics, the keeping of slaves was an accepted part of society, and genocide of natives was pretty A-OK, too. Of course, this still leaves that big intangible of culture and social/civic values. Arguably, the Cultural Revolution and ensuing crises, as well as the sudden and highly unequal development of the past few decades, has had a terribly destructive effect on Chinese society. I think famous China blogger Han Han touched on this in his rather infamous post on democracy made some argument about not turning your high-beams off or something. Dunno how convinced I am by this, though. Of course, American democracy has been commandeered many times throughout our history, too. See stuff like the political machines of the Boss Tweed era. But then, that same era led to anti-immigrants talking about how filthy foreign papists with no native democratic values were easily manipulated by the political machines to fill out the voter rolls and connive elections away from Real Americans. Basically the same argument we're getting here, but with the uniquely American racial/immigrant spin. Honestly, I see democracy as a distraction from the bigger and more immediate issue in China, which is the actual abuse and exploitation of the common people and minorities by the state and by the powerful. I do believe in democracy, but at the same time basic human rights and civil protections come first. The Western democracy straw man is being debated but meanwhile, the local or possibly even central government is disappearing citizens and torturing them in secret prisons and other such heinous poo poo. If anything, the new American experience shows that a democracy is no proof against such abuses (although obviously they are far less prevalent). But maybe the civic "suzhi" of our own citizens is also in decline. Regardless, I see democracy as something to think about for the future. The more immediate problem is stuff like basic civil rights, a real legal system, and some sort of handle on the rampant corruption and abuses of power. I know central government has been working on this, with their massive task-force style regional crackdown initiatives and such, but honestly there are deeper social and institutional issues at work here. Cultural problems, too. How to fix? Absolutely no idea. I don't even know how to fix our own society, let alone one I barely understand. Also, not trying to destroy minority cultures in a fit of separatist paranoia would be nice, but I doubt that will ever happen, either. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Feb 22, 2012 |
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Feb 22, 2012 08:10
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Throatwarbler posted:I don't understand what problem converting to an alphabet based writing system is supposed to solve. If you want to raise literacy rates wouldn't it be easier to spend more money on teachers and paying the parents of poor children more than $1 a day so the kids can stay in school instead of making the rest of the country adopt a different language? It boggles the mind that there are actually people seriously arguing for this. It's an idea that has been seriously considered by plenty of prominent Chinese figures for a very long time. I wouldn't go so far as to call it facially ridiculous. Phonetic scripts have plenty of advantages to consider. I think it's also debatably true that the gap between writing and pronunciation is pretty pronounced in Chinese compared to other languages with more phonetic scripts, that basic reading/writing proficiency requires somewhat more memorization in Chinese, and that bad spelling in a phonetic language like English is marginally less catastrophic than it is in Chinese. How important this is is questionable but certainly not at all a well settled matter. The arguments presented so far tend to focus far too much, in my opinion, on the specific orthographic weaknesses of simple pinyin and not as much on the more far-reaching cultural implications. For example, Classical Chinese would already be borderline unintelligible to most modern Chinese speakers if it wasn't taught as a separate unit at the middle-school/high-school level with tons of reference materials and commentary.
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Feb 24, 2012 01:11
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Al-Saqr posted:Do Chinese textbooks and media mention any Muslim contributors to Chinese history (such as the Kansu Braves in the boxer rebellion and the Generals who led the fight against the japanese) or are they swept under the rug? "Han-washing" history is definitely a thing, to some extent. Your examples of the Boxer Rebellion are one of them. I will drag up a pretty good article if I can. China's policy towards Uighurs is definitely similar to their policy towards Tibet, and it's arguably based on the same basic paranoia about separatist movements.
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Feb 24, 2012 01:13
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Brennanite posted:The biggest obstacle is the high degree of homophony in modern Mandarin. Pinyin even with tones simply isn't specific enough. The number of dialect speakers is a problem as well. You'd just use characters or situational parentheticals for the most common or confusing homophones, just like plenty of other sinosphere countries do like Japan or Korea. Hell, languages like Korean don't use tones at all when they transliterate Chinese and end up with like 4-5 common words at a time that all sound and are spelled exactly the same. The point would be to reduce the need to memorize particularly rarely used or weird characters to make the language easier to learn quickly. Dunno how useful that would be, but I think the general idea has some merit to it. Also, gently caress Chinese transliterations of foreign names. That poo poo is impenetrable and awful, especially if you don't know exactly who they're talking about. Far worse than the reverse situation with pinyin Chinese names, which is for the most part intelligible and doesn't break down as badly. "Gee, I wonder what this '梅德韦杰夫' thing is..."
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Feb 24, 2012 02:16
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Arglebargle III posted:You're asking him to prove that something doesn't exist or won't work, which is kind of hard regardless of his position. Do you have an example of a large scale implementation of pinyin that intentionally displaced characters and worked?  Arglebargle III posted:Ugh, yes. But how would you spell foreign names in pinyin? If you just spell them in their native language that's not really any different from writing them in Roman characters amid characters. Either way Chinese people will have a hard time pronouncing them. If pinyin was more commonly used they'd just be more familiar with roman script, not with foreign languages or names.
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Feb 24, 2012 03:12
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In part, the argument is about people in the PRC who are technically "literate" but who nonetheless have a lot of difficulty reading anything beyond really basic vocabulary because, unlike in phonetic languages, advanced vocabulary has to be learned first as speech and then again in written form instead of in a phonetic system where after the initial investment of time learning the alphabet and spelling conventions, so long as you know how to say a more difficult word you can at least sound it out and recognize it when reading as well as write it (though not necessarily properly due to the vagaries of spelling.)
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Feb 24, 2012 18:48
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Arakan posted:I don't know if this is true though. As a foreigner, when I study Chinese on my own I pretty much always learn the meanings of the written forms first and then learn how to say them in the correct tone. Maybe it is completely different for native speakers where they learn how to say the character first, then learn how to read/write it, but I find it hard to believe this is always the case, especially for a native speaker who starts learning characters at a young(ish) age. Yeah, I can't actually speak for native Chinese speakers, but it seems reasonable to say that it's pretty common for people who've graduated from school/stopped school early to pick up new vocabulary orally or by other means beyond formal study. The kind of people who we're talking about, who have had limited formal schooling, end up more trapped at that level of education and discourse because learning new vocabulary contextually through the process of living your life is arguably easier and more common than sitting there and learning new words from a list like most of us foreign students do. Naturally this is changing, especially now that even some native Chinese speakers have become used to pinyin inputs in computers and such. I once tried to figure out the Wubei system for typing, and was left utterly mystified, so there's that, too. I wonder if anyone has statistics on the comparative popularity of Wubei and other visual input methods versus pinyin-based input methods for computers in the PRC, as well as whatever the character-based system they use in Taiwan is. BTW, with respect to the OP rules, we can say Taiwan, right? Just not the other three-letter acronym? Or is it Chinese Taipei all the way?
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Feb 24, 2012 19:12
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Wubi input is more or less what anyone who does a lot of typing will use. An average user can get 100 characters per minute without any real effort. Any use in official capacity and you're looking at 200+ required. But 500+ characters per minute is not really that uncommon at all. The learning curve, of course is higher and you have to know the characters you are typing quite intimately. Boy, I sure do miss the days when typing was considered a valuable and fairly uncommon technical skill instead of a basic communication ability that all working adults have.
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Feb 25, 2012 19:17
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Inu posted:I think you may be missing my point, though I'm not quite sure. It doesn't matter if you pronounce the characters differently from language to language. By using the same chinese characters in all languages, you have a visual connection that transcends those languages. 人 will be read "ren2" in Mandarin and "hito" or "jin" in Japanese, but have the same meaning regardless of the pronunciation. Why not use the character also in English and pronounce it "person"? Because if it takes 7-8 years to gain mastery of just the written language, you might as well just learn a whole 'nother language, both spoken and written, in the same amount of time. Simply using English grammar to write in Chinese would be absolutely unintelligible, and when you learn written Chinese you're also learning the Chinese language except that your efforts are useless for actual speaking. I do feel that Chinese has one niche use where it might be useful - user interface icons for software or consumer goods. If you're going to tell me that a little abstract mercury thermometer with a big dark line is "warmer" and one with a little dark line is "cooler" on the fridge, or that the little half moon is "standby," you might as well just use Chinese because it's almost as unintelligible and arbitrary anyway. Either that or just develop a decently clear basic lexicon for stuff like that. Ronald Spiers posted:I have studied Chinese for over five years and I feel I am near-native in my ability. I just started studying Korean this past year. Being able to rely on my knowledge of Mandarin pronunciation that I have from Mandarin has really helped me to learn Korean. I have an established set of knowledge (the sounds of the words in Mandarin) that I can easily connect to my new Korean vocabulary. In my personal anecdote, we should all first learn oral Mandarin and then learn Korean and use Han'gŭl script. I mean if it's working out for you that's fine, but I don't see how learning Mandarin would benefit your learning spoken Korean in any way. Korean, to my knowledge, is not tonal and doesn't share that much phonetically with Chinese at all. Hangul script is very good for Korean but it's structured entirely around the traits of that language and would be worthless for Mandarin. The concept of breaking apart and visually distinguishing each phoneme is a pretty good idea. However, it also makes things like typewriters, typography, or computer input incredibly complicated.
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Feb 26, 2012 01:37
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Inu posted:Just to be clear, I'm totally divorcing the characters from their Mandarin pronunciation. There would be no need to learn any spoken Chinese. But that doesn't make any sense. You can't write an English phrase in Chinese without translating. They have different grammar. Really basic stuff like word order and sentence structure are radically different. Making languages share vocabulary also doesn't work because different languages have fundamentally different approaches to vocabulary. Even basic stuff like colors are spoken of differently. How would you represent really common words in English that have no equivalent in Chinese? What about subtleties like articles and the like? How would you have a native English speaker write a sentence in your proposed system? How the hell would you expect someone to write their own name? A well-written English sentence, when read aloud, is highly similar to normal speech. This is usually the standard used for prose. You can reproduce normal spoken English with a high degree of precision in written English. You can even try to replicate a particular non-standard dialect like Faulkner or something, and you can also accurately describe newly coined phrases as well as non-standard terms and foreign vocabulary. You can't do that if you're writing English in Chinese. Making someone learn a fundamentally and radically different language just so they can read and write is a terrible, terrible idea unless you're trying to make a social system that restricts literacy to a select few. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Feb 26, 2012 |
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Feb 26, 2012 02:49
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Farecoal posted:Oh god, the Politburo are all cyborgs? Worse: they're engineers.
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Mar 25, 2012 00:37
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french lies posted:In other news, The Economist (which I usually hate) had a pretty decent long article on China's military build-up and what it means for the region and the world at large. On the other hand, Chinese military cyber-warfare and cyber-espionage is a big, big concern, especially since unlike conventional weapons they have few reservations at deploying it. Ditto for trade wars and "economic warfare." The only people who should truly worry about conventional Chinese military hardware is the Chinese people themselves (e.g., protesters and minorities) and maybe a few neighboring countries with ongoing territorial disputes. Also, Macau is basically the Monaco of Asia.
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Apr 5, 2012 22:35
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DaiJiaTeng posted:I'm curious about this statement. Arguably, the American name for a fictional ethnicity is "race." "White" is a made up ethnicity that's made up of many lineages and national/regional cultures. Han Chinese is in practice mostly a racial classification, and it exists for the same reason other racial classifications exist - to promote national unity and help single out and suppress troublesome outgroups (e.g., blacks in the US). OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Jul 7, 2013 |
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Jul 7, 2013 15:01
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GuestBob posted:Do you consider imagined communities of race to be totally negative then? Well arguably the distinction has been made important - being made-up doesn't make something less impactful considering the kind of work and influence it takes to create a new identity classification like that. But I feel that Han/non-Han in modern times is, like many other racial systems, an attempt to try and establish something that crosses social lines in order to unite people against racial minorities or other ethnic groups that are considered politically troublesome by dint of being insufficiently assimilated (i.e. existing and not destroyed or rendered politically powerless), in addition to the general benefits to nationalism, etc. Being a people and not just a nation is more powerful, so starting from the 19th century nationalist movements there's this myth of Han Chinese being a single ethnic group that's always ruled China with common origins, shared history, and ancestral territory that they must rightfully rule. It makes being Chinese not just a stamp on a passport or one of any competing identity allegiances but something that you physically are - something immediately visible and immutable. See, for instance, people who say that non-Han Chinese citizens whose families lived in the area longer than the modern nation has existed are "not Chinese" but ABC Chinese-Americans who only speak English "are Chinese" and, hell, even the differing legal treatment and standards for foreign workers who are ethnically Chinese looking versus white looking. Also, the degree of history manipulation this takes is honestly far more than even that found in American race classifications. The same goes for lots of other things. "Dialects" that are mutually unintelligible and often structurally distinct are called "languages" in the rest of the world, considering how similar the romance languages are to each other. I think manufactured identities like this are often harmful because usually they've been manufactured for a purpose, and usually those purposes are all about building power and crushing other identities. Being Han Chinese doesn't really say a whole lot about you, and the only shared interests that really exist are the privilege created that is reserved only for other Han Chinese. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jul 7, 2013 |
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Jul 7, 2013 16:14
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MeramJert posted:What about all the almost but not quite Han groups, like the Zhuang? Most of the time you wouldn't even know they're not Han unless they tell you. I guess they're sort of like white hispanics. Culturally, ethnically, and linguistically distinct but often accepted as white because they can physically pass for white. Or else groups like irish-americans or italian-americans were they were once not considered white and considered physically distinct but are now considered within the range of acceptable whiteness, now that they're no longer a group with a strong identity that's considered a threat to the state or the primacy of the majority ethnic group. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jul 7, 2013 |
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Jul 7, 2013 16:22
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GuestBob posted:Everyone else got to wear their snazzy costumes during shi ba da, but not the Han. The Han have no colourful clothes, or traditional songs, or dances: they are the adults, the minorities are the patronized children. GuestBob posted:Speaking of the Guardian, here's a thing: Yeah I've always wondered what was up with this obsession with overseas campuses. It sounds like a dumb way to dilute your reputation while losing money. Which, in other words, makes it extremely appealing to higher education management, who are insanely trend and fad driven. There was the claim that the NYU Shanghai venture had something to do with Chen Guangcheng leaving NYU, but it's hard to get a handle on that. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Jul 8, 2013 |
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Jul 8, 2013 14:25
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pairofdimes posted:Somewhere earlier in the thread there were comments from someone about how the only thing the various minorities in China are known for is dancing and costumes. That may be what you're remembering. Ah okay, I thought it might be an in-joke/thread meme referencing some blogger or Global Times editorial or something. Which I guess is a compliment because it sums up the attitude very well.
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Jul 9, 2013 04:07
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Fist of Foucault posted:The debate is academic anyway given that the idea of China being a "civilization state" as distinct to a nation state is nonsense in the first place Yeah, even in English the term is disingenuous bullshit so whether that's amplified by the translation is secondary to the main source of bullshit.
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Jul 9, 2013 18:17
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I think a lot of it is just ignorance because lot of people have a weirdly fractured and inaccurate view of both Chinese history and Western history. Like this guy talking about how China 2000 years ago didn't think of itself as a nation state missing the fact that nobody thought of themselves as a nation state 2000 years ago because the term didn't exist and only makes sense in the context of relatively recent developments in western philosophy and governance. The other thing, of course, is the long-standing idea of orientalism. Orientalism was originally characterized as a tool of imperialism because it sort of de facto assumes an otherization. In part, it basically says that these other peoples are slaves to culture and tradition, a bunch of superstitious savages who are inherently inferior to freethinking, rational westerners and who cannot be understood or engaged as peers by the analytic tools of the western mindset. Often with the implication that they must be rescued and saved from their wretchedness. The new expressions of this movement seem to try to do away with the implicit superiority by claiming that it is the west that is close-minded and thus unable to fully appreciate or judge the east. Still the same differentiation exists, except now it's being used to imply that the speaker is simply more broad-minded and freethinking than his cultural peers, and that any attempt to actually understand the east is doomed to failure without his guidance and expertise. Orientalism becomes individualized as a tool for advancing one's social status by claiming access to something beyond the reach of the ordinary person. Or, in the case of the Chinese government, it becomes a tool to deflect criticism and recruit greedy or credulous foreigners eager to look smart and tolerant. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Jul 9, 2013 |
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Jul 9, 2013 19:48
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Also, plenty of historical and even modern European states self-consciously aped the Roman empire and Greek thought, and considered themselves part of "Western civilization" and/or "the Christian world" descended from those origins, often with the stated goal of preserving Western civilization or restoring it back to its glory days. They used the latin alphabet and spoke latin as a court/religious language. Hell, the Holy Roman Empire had an unbroken line of imperial succession for over eight centuries starting with Otto I, longer than any Chinese dynasty, and it only ended in the 1800s with the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of the modern nation-states, which just happened to be followed fairly quickly by the establishment of the first Chinese nation-states because east and west actually did interact and only interacted more as technologies improved. Not to say that the HRE was really directly comparable to Imperial China or anything, but I'm not being any sloppier than Jacques when I talk like this. Meanwhile, half the stuff he lists as critical components of "Chinese civilization" don't even exist in the modern Chinese state and were often actively stamped out by that state. I mean China is a big place and it's impressive they were able to unite it the degree that they did intermittently throughout history, but the rule of China was never that continuous. When some other ethnic group that doesn't even speak the same language or have the same social structure comes in and conquers your empire, that really shouldn't count as continuity of rule unless you define "Chinese" to be whoever happens to live in China. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Jul 10, 2013 |
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Jul 10, 2013 03:18
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Bloodnose posted:Can you source that? I learned from video games that the Holy Roman Emperor was an elective monarchy and I also remember like Salians, Carolingians and Habsburgs. Just a warning, I'm no expert on this area and I had to do some cursory research to support this claim that might not be very authoritative. But I know the Carolingians predate Otto. The other successor houses were I believe all or nearly all patrilineally descended from Otto I in some way, just from different branches of his lineage. Though the degree to which most of European royalty became related to each other might complicate this. And I think succession became elective around the 13th century, but it still remained unbroken until the last of the Hapsburgs. Obviously, this was in part because the HRE was relatively stable and managed to not disintegrate instantly into warring rivals during power transitions or be invaded by various foreign powers like in China. But still. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Emperor
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Jul 10, 2013 04:02
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tractor fanatic posted:That criticism seems unfair because WE say that Historic Figure X did both good and bad things at the same time. You're complaining that they're not viewing the past like children, with people either perfectly good or perfectly evil. It also presupposes a single historiography when what culture doesn't have a dozen conflicting ways of looking at its past? All very true, but the core of that criticism is that often the past is presented by the Chinese as if it is for children, and historiographical perspectives are chosen based on whatever is most convenient for the modern interests of the state with little interest in consistency or an honest examination of historical China and its relation to the modern Chinese state, which is undeniably far more tenuous than it's made out to be. Obviously, all mainstream historiography serves the state, but as with many other aspects of state control in China, it's the lack of finesse and general shamelessness that attracts criticism and not just the mere fact that they do it.
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Jul 10, 2013 04:12
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VideoTapir posted:This is true of the US, too. And Japan to some extent. And though Korea hardly ever invented anything and surely didn't invent this practice, they embrace it so wholeheartedly I'm willing to credit it to them. Media control isn't uniquely Chinese, but the heavy-handed and often inept way it's implemented in China is pretty distinct. State monitoring and suppression of domestic dissidents isn't uniquely Chinese but the way the FBI does it and the way the Chinese do it are pretty different and arguably one is more heavy-handed, abusive, and occasionally more lethal than the other. Similarly, the way the Chinese state goes about presenting and rewriting history to suit its interests is arguably more harmful and worse than the way other nations do the same thing. All mainstream historiography tends to serve the interests of those in power (such as the state), but some is still better than others. And ultimately, China's practices harm not only the study and understanding of its own history but also the education of its people and the credibility of the state, both internationally and domestically.
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Jul 10, 2013 15:08
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GuestBob posted:Hmm. I am pretty sure a Roman would never have said this: I'm not sure what you're getting at exactly, but as the empire emerged, Romans were plenty happy to integrate cultural features and people from other cultures into their own. Chieftains from Gaul were members of the senate as early as the days of Claudius. Jews, Greeks, Spaniards, etc., pretty commonly held military commands or became wealthy romans. Many of the later emperors were celtic, syrian, or gallic in ethnicity. Want to worship your old god? Okay, integrate him into the roman state system somehow and it's all good. Even public inscriptions and legal oaths were usually presented bilingually or translated to local languages. More generally, the idea of "romanness" (romanitas) in the later empire was arguably not considered a matter of lineage, ethnicity, or language as it was in, say, the Greek world. Instead it was more about politics, religion, and customs. It was specifically an identity based on cultural and institutional factors like common values, morality, and lifestyle. Definitely still imperialist, but pretty different from the racialized modern version of imperialism from the late 19th century and seemingly more in line with the quote you have there.
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Jul 10, 2013 15:44
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Arglebargle III posted:Europe's tradition of rule by law really is an anomaly, the Greeks and Romans were somewhat obsessed with legislation but it really exploded in the medieval period under the Church, which acted as a sort of quasi-supernational authority, and Salic law, so you end up with wars not over who gets to be the next ruler like you do everywhere, but you get wars over legal interpretations. They may be realistically fighting over the same thing, but in Europe legalistic arguments become the key to legitimacy by the High Middle Ages. My favorite new thing from the medieval history thread was all the trials they had for animals and stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial GuestBob posted:Unless you happened to be an antisocial middle aged lesbian who liked cats. I was under the impression that witch trials were usually illegal and condemned by the church.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:53
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To be fair, a decent chunk of the US GDP might be accounting bullshit on paper from the finance sector and not "real" production.
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Jul 25, 2013 14:28
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Ardennes posted:Granted, I think the more important military comparison isn't between the US and China, but between Japan/Taiwan/Vietnam/Russia versus China. Yeah I'd anticipate at worst a bloody proxy war in central Africa or the mid-east or something.
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Jul 26, 2013 22:54
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Gail Wynand posted:The other thing with breast feeding is that with the rest of the Chinese food supply also hosed up, who knows what is in people's breast milk..(likely all kinds of heavy metals at least) Environmental chemical exposure through breast milk is a major concern, but the consensus seems to be that the benefits still outweigh the risks, especially since heavy metal contamination is just as likely to be found in the formula or water anyway, especially if the whole food supply is screwed up anyway. See: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2569122/ And the specific danger they're worried about of melamine is something that can be entirely avoided by breast-feeding. Of course, the reasons most people feed formula is usually some combination of advertising and thinking 'it's modern' plus the fact that formula is more convenient and makes it easier for women to go back to work.
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Jul 27, 2013 01:39
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Fojar38 posted:This is something that should be noted. There will not be any direct conflict between the United States and China (unless China does something stupid like attacking Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan) because any such conflict would immediately become an existential threat for China, giving them no reason not to simply launch nukes, similarly to how the US would if suddenly a hostile Russian fleet appeared on their coast like so many video games, movies, and books have portrayed occurring yet for some reason lacking the logical followup of the fleet being nuked. This will never happen because access to the Chinese market is pure gold to any media company.
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Jul 27, 2013 02:14
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hailthefish posted:Doubt it, since such a game wouldn't be able to be sold in China. China has shipped tons of arms to extremely suspect regimes like Zimbabwe and Sudan before, so it's not that far-fetched at all. Though the most likely opponent might not be the US.
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Jul 27, 2013 02:22
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MJ12 posted:The Operation Flashpoint game involving America fighting the Chinese wasn't banned. Turns out that if you don't portray the Chinese as Evil Yellow Bogeymen Out To Eat Your Souls portraying a war between them and another nation doesn't immediately get you banned. I thought Operation Flashpoint and Battlefield both got banned for this. As well as any game which portrays Tibet or Manchuria as independent of China, even historical ones like Hearts of Iron. I don't know where there's an actual list, but a cursory search reveals this rumor: http://www.ali213.net/news/html/2012-7/46455.html
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Jul 27, 2013 02:48
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Fojar38 posted:This makes me curious if these games even sold well enough in China to justify compromising their artistic integrity. The key is that their publishers are afraid of getting blacklisted, not the developers themselves. The same goes for movies - only a handful of foreign films get approved every year and almost all of them pull in a ton of cash, so there's huge financial incentives to play ball or else see every movie you're distributing mysteriously not get approved because you sold a film somewhere in the world mentioning Tibet.
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Jul 27, 2013 04:54
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Also the discussion was clearly about the humanities and things like historical research, not science or engineering as in patents. The US government doesn't command historians to "find" research that, for instance, indicates that Native American tribes all left on their own or freely gave their lands to white settlers. You can talk about the effects of ideology in terms of framing and biasing research, but this is very very different from literally making poo poo up.
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Jul 29, 2013 01:59
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