China's Strange Myth of "Continuous History"

Every Chinese person memorizes the phrase "China has over 5,000 years of history." This stock phrase is used everywhere in China and repeated incessantly by China's many nationalistic Twitter trolls. At its heart, the phrase is a claim to superiority. Chinese nationalists believe that China is superior to countries like the United States that they falsely believe to be younger than China and therefore less stable and permanent. For those of us who have lived in China and studied it, however, we know that the "5,000 year history" claim actually arises from an inferiority complex. China once thought it was the center of the world, but then Western nations arrived and changed China forever. Chinese civilization, after centuries of isolationism, was forced to face global realities it had managed to avoid for a long time: China was not the center of the world, it was not the middle kingdom, the world was actually a sphere (they believed it was flat until encountering Christian missionaries), and China was not the richest nor the most powerful state. These lessons were begrudgingly accepted only after multiple humiliating war losses to a "small" unknown islands on the far side of the planet (Britain).

Chinese supremacists were forced to retreat into history in search of a mythical era in which China was actually superior. If China had been superior in the past, then perhaps it could one day become superior again. However, history didn't help them much. Archeology disproved old myths about China being the oldest civilization. Mesopotamia and Egypt are older than China, and the Greeks were more civilized and scientific 2,500 years ago. China had nothing, it was not superior. The United States, a country founded two centuries ago, had become the center of a global scientific world order while China was an undeveloped backwater with a per-capita-GDP lower than Africa's. Chinese nationalists could not accept this. They had to find something, anything, that proved they were superior. This search eventually pushed them back into a small corner I refer to as "the continuity myth."

The continuity myth is the idea that while Mesopotamia and Egypt are older than China, these other civilizations have been "broken" at some point in history and therefore China is the oldest "continuous" civilization. China is allegedly superior because its civilization has survived intact for longer than any other civilization. This claim sounds weirdly particular to Western ears. Most of the world's people wouldn't understand why anyone would take the effort to make this kind of claim, but we have to realize that this myth is the product of psychological desperation. China's feelings, its "glass heart," relies on this myth because it provides a chance to save its nationalist ego from complete irrelevance. This claim is a final flickering hope of maintaining the old narrow idea of China's supreme importance.

The continuity myth is false. Modern China has almost nothing in common with ancient China. Chinese civilization was broken off in modern history (and even before), and its destruction is well documented and obvious to anyone familiar with modern China. A civilization is defined by numerous things, but the following elements are usually components of that definition: government, religion, writing, technology, art, food, culture, and social customs. I want to briefly discuss how each of these components of ancient Chinese civilization ended and was replaced. If all these elements of ancient China have ended then how can it be said that China is the oldest continuous civilization?

Government. For thousands of years, from the earliest Chinese myths, China has theoretically been ruled by a divinely sanctioned emperor. The last imperial dynasty ended in 1911 when the Qing Dynasty collapsed and was replaced with a republic. In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) overthrew the republic and boisterously condemned all emperors and monarchy. The CCP ascribed, and still ascribes, to a Marxist doctrine imported from the West. Obviously, modern China's government is not continuous with the old imperial order, and the old order has been constantly condemned. 

Religion. China has had several religious breaks in its history. Four thousand years ago, the inhabitants of mainland East Asia were animists. Animism was replaced by Taoism around two and half thousand years ago. Buddhism entered China around two thousand years ago. Finally, the CCP launched numerous cultural revolutions in the twentieth century that destroyed China's temples, desecrated Confucius' tomb, and outlawed all religious practice. Today, China is an officially Marxist atheist state, but Christianity is the largest organized religion in China.

Writing. Chinese writing first appeared around 3,200 years ago when some basic inscriptions were engraved on ceremonial bronzes and oracle bones. The writing system used on those bronzes is less comprehensible to the average Chinese person than Ancient Greek or Latin is comprehensible to the average Westerner. Mao Zedong changed the writing system in the late twentieth century and created "Simplified Chinese." Additionally, the Pinyin Western alphabet system had to be added to Chinese in order to teach Mandarin to peasants because China's population was almost completely illiterate in 1900, the simplification was supposed to make it easier for the common person to interface with modern technology. While some aspects of China's writing system show continuity with ancient Chinese, the continuity is less than what is exhibited by modern Western languages, especially Romance languages, with ancient Latin and Greek.

Technology. Ancient Chinese technology was completely replaced by Western technology starting in the 1800s. Chinese society now relies on Western inventions like trains, cars, planes, construction materials, electricity, nuclear power, modern medicine, cell phones, and the internet. Almost everything related to modern life in China was first imported from the West. 

Art. Public art in China is almost all Soviet Realist or postmodern in style. Modern Chinese architecture looks absolutely nothing like ancient Chinese architecture, and buildings are now designed using Western and international styles. All Chinese people wear Western style clothing: sneakers, jeans, t-shirts, polos, suit jackets, neck ties, skirts, dresses, and athletic wear. Traditional Chinese paintings are primarily limited to museums and private settings. 

Food. Modern Chinese food is heavily reliant on ingredients that were originally imported from America around 350 years ago. Chili peppers, "lajiao," are used to season most Chinese dish. Potatoes, tomatoes, corn, pumpkin, and peanuts are eaten at every meal. It's difficult to imagine what ancient Chinese food tasted like considering how much it was altered after the Colombian discovery of the Americas. 

Social customs and norms. For over a thousand years, Chinese women were forced to mutilate their feet at a young age in the extremely painful ritual of foot binding. Han Chinese men had a fetish for women with small feet, and nearly all girls had the bones in their feet broken in pursuit of a better marriage. Some girls died of infection as their flesh rotted under the cloth bindings. This barbaric practice was finally undermined starting with the protests of Western missionaries. Women had almost no rights in ancient China, and they were often not permitted to leave their homes. They rarely learned to read. The plight of women began changing when Christian missionaries established schools for girls in the 1800s.

There are many other examples of discontinuity between ancient and modern China. China's entire education and university system was imported from the West. China's favorite sport is basketball, which was imported from America. The Chinese military is still organized along Soviet Russian lines. China's economic system is based on both Marxist and capitalist theories. 

China abandoned its old calendar system. Like the rest of the world, China adopted the Christian calendar and now measures time from the birth of Jesus Christ. Public holidays and annual plans are scheduled according to the Western solar calendar rather than the ancient Chinese lunar-solar calendar which is no longer understood by Chinese youths.

Among the most visible refutations of China's continuity myth is the lack of old buildings in China. This shocked me when I first moved to China. I was expecting an ancient landscape with historical sites on every square foot like what I had seen in Europe. Instead, I found that China looked younger than America. My parents' early twentieth century house in the US was older than almost anything still standing in China. The supposedly ancient temples are nearly all reconstructions, most of the Great Wall was completely rebuilt after 1950, and much of the visible building materials in the Forbidden City didn't exist during the Ming Dynasty. The "ancient" stuff is almost all fake.

Western observers often claim that China possesses a Confucian culture. This oft repeated characterization is rarely explained, however, and I don't think modern China is Confucian in any meaningful way. I've read the Confucian classics, and I find no more of that ancient ideology in modern China than could be found in America or Europe. For example, it is often said that Confucian cultures display more respect for elderly people than Western cultures, but this claim is almost never supported with evidence. In China, I've heard pretty consistent ridicule of elderly people as backward, uncultured, and incapable of using technology. Elderly people are looked down upon by young Chinese for spitting and defecating in public and for cutting in front of queue lines because they're too selfish to wait. Chinese politicians dye their hair black to avoid looking old. Meanwhile, Western politicians often enjoy the prestige associated with grey hair, and America recently elected a 78 year old president. 

In conclusion, China's continuity myth is a false claim to superiority. It's a desperate attempt to salvage prestige for a once proud ethnocentric people, but it's not true. Traditional Chinese civilization ended at some point in the twentieth century after more than a century of decline and humiliation. Contemporary China has almost nothing in common with ancient mainland East Asia. The things that remain from China's past are often kitschy and irrelevant to any deep meaning of civilization. The use of chopsticks when eating is not enough to claim one's civilization is older or better than all others. Modern China was founded was founded in 1949 by Mao Zedong, and its contemporary soul is defined by Marxist dialectical materialism. Ironically, the biggest resistance to this atheist version of China is the 100 million Christians now spread across the country. There's still hope for China to become a great nation in the future, but that greatness will not arise from continuity with a now extinct past.