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> One country, one cuisine. A professor whose research focused on China (social sciences, not food) told me that Americans also tend to imagine China as simila

• seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  PLA garrisons are still organized mainly inwards. However, the PAP (people’s armed police) has picked up much of the internal security slack after 1989, when China realized tanks weren’t a great way to put down a protest (the PAP actually has riot-gear and riot training that China didn’t have much of in 89).
• suraci 2y ago
  > Holding China together has long been a preoccupation of imperial government > You can see the current regime gradually working to do that, from defeating the Nationalists finally in 1949... these two part is not logically connected, PLA's war with KMT army is not about 'holding China together', since at the begining of the war, communits only had about 1/10 of territory, that was a war of __liberation__, it's the Chinese Civil War, it's like a pubg game, winner winner chicken dinner, there're many players, and the one who wins will be the leader of the whole china > different languages, different cultures, different cuisines that's also not true, since the Qin destiny, languages were unified in writing, for speaking, there are only dialects the Qin destiny is the the crossroad of china history made china very different with europe, and that makes westerners hard to imagine china culture, vice versa > For decades, the People's Liberation Army's main focus was internal, on its own people as in many dictatorships. for most Chinese, this is quite a praise to CCP, but it's also not (entirely) true it's complex, in short, the ruler's main goal is to keep its rule, dictatorships do not necessarily need to focus its own people, A simple counterexample: the dictator of the colony.
  • dmoy 2y ago
    I agree with the general premise that China is way more unified than Europe. In some respects, moreso than the US due to the lack of federalism and the 90%+ Han majority. (In others, not, you know, cus of the much more recent revolution-ing) > languages were unified in writing This is definitely true, and was a major breakthrough > for speaking, there are only dialects This is extremely wrong. The language that my family spoke (taishanese) is not in any way mutually intelligible with the language my wife's family speaks (dongbei dialect of mandarin). Saying various Chinese languages are all dialects is like saying Geordie English and Italian are two dialects of the same language. Actually even farther than that for some Chinese languages. There definitely are some languages that are mostly intelligible dialects - all the Wu for example. But then you've got Mandarin vs Cantonese vs Taishanese which is an ascending level of hellish difficulty in understanding (4->6->9 tones, a little different grammar structure, etc).
    • contrarian1234 2y ago
      Written down Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually intelligible. They have regional grammar and vocabulary, but not excessively so. They're mostly pronouncing words differently
      • BirdieNZ 2y ago
        Maybe formal spoken Cantonese/Mandarin, but colloquial spoken Cantonese for example is very different from formal written Cantonese. It would sound odd to speak the way things are formally written, if that makes sense. Perhaps you could say there's a subset of the languages which can be mostly written in a mutually intelligible way. That sounds more like the similarities between, say, Portuguese and Spanish, though, where you can probably write a subset of the languages that is pretty comprehensible by both language speakers, yet the languages are distinct.
      • deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
        that's because people who speak cantonese use mandarin as their written language. theyre not often writing down cantonese
• contrarian1234 2y ago
  One big difference I've noticed compared to Europe is that while there is a lot of regional pride and differences, there are very few rivalries or animosities for some reason. I couldn't even get people to tell me some negative stereotypes
  • riffraff 2y ago
    Could it be the lack of success in getting negative stereotypes has more to do with what is and isn't "fine to discuss", rather than the absence of them? In Europe stereotypes are not limited to nationality, you have them about one specific part of a country (e.g. scots are stereotypically miserly in UK lore, as are people from Genoa in Italy). Heck we have stereotypes about people from different areas in a single city :)
    • contrarian1234 2y ago
      Like it's a taboo thing? I didn't get that impression. There are definitely stereotypes of big-city vs country-side people for instance I think just till relatively recently people didn't travel too far from their hometowns/villages. So there weren't strong stereotypes about people that were effectively far away Identity is kind of two-tiered. There is a national identity which is strongly tied to history and literature and more "sophisticated" things - and then there is a local identity tied to dialect, food and historically stuff like local opera, music etc. You're typically not in any way interacting with other local cultures other than the one in your vicinity (other than ethnic minorities - for which there are stereotypes a bit) Anyway, I could be wrong. Would be curious to hear from someone who grew up in the environment
      • schneehertz 2y ago
        Stereotypes about regions are not uncommon on the Chinese internet. For example, Henan Province and stealing manhole covers, Chengdu and homosexuality. But in daily life, I have not seen discrimination against specific groups of people. I live in Shenzhen, where there are people from all over China, and everyone is not much different from each other, nor does anyone care where someone comes from.
• moralestapia 2y ago
  Interesting, Which ones would be the most conservative and liberal provinces?
• rfoo 2y ago
  In what respect is US one single large country? Texas and California feels as different as Shandong and Shanghai. And not sure if a flame war will happen if I try to compare Hawaii and Taiwan :p
  • deadfoxygrandpa 2y ago
    the us was settled in the very recent past by people largely from a small number of places. there's a cultural and linguistic homogeneity that does not exist in other large countries. texas and california are close to as different as it gets for US states and yet people from either state will have essentially no problem understanding what each other says at home, they'll eat food that is pretty similar if not the same, etc. compare that to spain and hungary, for the europe example. or tamil nadu and punjab in india. the right comparison for china isnt shandong and shanghai, it's like shanghai and guizhou or something. i promise you the cultural, culinary, and linguistic differences between shanghai and guizhou are WAY bigger than between texas and california. thats the point being made
• ferguess_k 2y ago
  I think it's a bit complicated than that. It's not US or EU but something...different. I actually found it a bit close to the Canadian model. I'm not a sociologist so I don't have the right wording for that, but if you want one Chinese phrase that is 诸侯经济. Here is an article written by someone who was high in the echelon and was sort of the secretary of Qishan Wang back in the 80s/90s and worked a lot in the banking crisis back in the 90s. It is a very rare insight because such persons rarely share their thoughts publicly. Try ChatGPT and maybe it gives a good translation. IMO, people who want to understand modern China needs to understand 诸侯经济, because it dominates the 3 decades after the fateful year of 1976, and the effort to dismantle of it dominates the 4th decade. https://www.douban.com/group/topic/73775950/?_i=2828208KaNEXar https://www.douban.com/group/topic/73775950/?_i=2828208KaNEX...
  • mmooss 2y ago
    Could you translate just 诸侯经济 for us, at least an approximation?
    • roastednugget 2y ago
      [dead]
    • ferguess_k 2y ago
      "Economy of the vassal states" for a straight translation. But "Regional economies that compete against each other" makes more sense. BTW the author provided a simple explanation, I'll quote what ChatGPT translated for me: > The phrase "诸侯经济" was first put forward by Hu Angang. Simply put, it's like siblings starting their own households after a family split. Besides making contributions to the "patriarch" (the amounts and calculation methods vary by province, but each has a fixed value that can be found on the Ministry of Finance's website), they hoard the rest for themselves. The context is that at the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, the leaders gave a lot of autonomy to regional governments. My hunch was that they won through a coup d'état thus lacked legality, so they had to give a way a lot of power to the people who controlled the provinces. Anyway, this created a booming economy (in general) for the next 30 or so years, but brought upon other issues that the Chinese could no longer ignore after the 2008 financial crisis.
• BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
  This wildly misunderstands the US. The US is also like the EU. It is a union of independent states that have different dialects, different cuisines, different cultures, and different governments with different laws and different taxation rules and different resident ID cards, all under a unifying federation government that has overriding power in some areas but not others with a common currency and freedom of interstate transit.
  • hollerith 2y ago
    Have you been to the US? Most Americans can easily make themselves understood (in speech or writing) to most other Americans. They watch the same TV shows and movies.
    • BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
      > Have you been to the US? Every state and then some. > Most Americans can easily make themselves understood (in speech or writing) to most other Americans. They watch the same TV shows and movies. Intelligibility is not a relevant metric for evaluating statehood. By your measure Canada and the US would already be the same country.
      • hollerith 2y ago
        Oh, so now we are talking about levels of political integration? I thought we were talking about cuisines.
        • BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
          > Oh, so now we are talking about levels of political integration? I thought we were talking about cuisines. If you wanted to talk about cuisines you would have been better served to talk about cuisines instead of mutual intelligibility in speech and writing. Maybe next time you should say the thing you want to say instead of something else, I guess.
  • sn9 2y ago
• jiehong 2y ago
  At least China managed to have a single common language spoken by everyone, on top of local weaker dialects. In the EU, local languages are still much stronger than dialects in China. Parts of the Europeans also make do with English, a language that is native to none of the countries in Europe.