There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang
So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously.
But I'll give it credit for hijacking a genuinely interesting scholarly premise: What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed. It is of rather mythic proportions; later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy. And there is very little evidence to support its existence. The Shang Dynasty is also supported by rather scant evidence -- and is also mythic, though obviously less so than the Xia.
Worth noting that both the Xia and Shang are exceedingly ancient -- roughly 2000 BC to 1000 BC between them -- unlike the Tang, which fell around 900 AD and is thus middle-of-the-pack by Chinese dynastic standards.
Yeah. You're probably familiar with the "Hanfu" revival -- a sort of resurgence in people adopting traditional clothing and makeup styles from the Han and Tang dynasties. It's entirely on account of the fact that those two dynasties were remarkably stable, prosperous, and peaceful, so they lend themselves to historical romanticism -- like the Chinese equivalent of the Renaissance Faire. Good vibes. Even popular in Japan, with e.g. The Apothecary Diaries and similar fare.
Shang, and all of the post-dynasty collapse centuries like The Spring and Autumn Period, were not great times to live in. Dismal and evil vibes, for the most part, unless you happen to be a mighty hero or bandit-lord who believes that he can conquer the age. Even so, most of them ended up in soup pots.
And thus for a very long time, and even today to some extent, the Japanese (or their cultural theorists at any rate!) have viewed themselves as the inheritors of "true" Ancient Chinese culture -- unsullied by Mongol/Manchu/Communist influence.
There's some truth to this. The Japanese preserved certain Tang Dynasty customs which were lost to China, and they have some of the best collections of Tang-era artifacts.
This line of thought was, however, used in very unfortunate WWII-era propaganda, like "we have to invade China to rescue its civilization, only we can do this!"
In my experience the Chinese very much think this as well. Though it can be framed in a more derogatory way as "derivative" or "they just copied us"
I'd argue its difficult to find major aspects of Japanese culture that don't trace back to ancient China (maybe the language, eating raw food and sumo)
That’s really interesting. Thanks for sharing. I’m a big fan of clothing and architecture that are appropriate/historic for a given country or area. It’s unfortunate we’ve standardized on 5-over-1s and graphic t-shirts with sweatpants/leggings over time instead of maintaining some of that cultural and location based uniqueness. I understand why we have changed our clothing patterns, but we did lose a little bit of something in that change, in my opinion.
Your comment sent me to Wikipedia and this caught my eye [0], a Late Shang inscribed rhinoceros rib, which then deepened the wikihole [1], it's funny how even though I know of the Indian rhino and Sumatran rhino, it never occurred to me that they were even more widespread...
Not exactly an issue though. Because the following Dynasty Zhou was portrayed as a protagonist, which rebelled against Shang and abolished human sacrifice and established the right Chinese civilization. And all the following dynasties are claiming that Zhou was the good old days and they are following Zhou's tradition.
> later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy
Troy was indeed largely fabricated though! Really I think that's of a piece with stuff being, y'know, really old. There are big holes in Sumerian and Egyption history too (though the latter helped out a ton by digging secret tombs and hiding them really well). Post-classical Mayan history is pretty suspect in a lot of places, etc...
> What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed
There are some nuances about this. We know that there are multiple developed cities (and likely monarchies, given there are palace-like ruins) around or before Xia era. It's just that we don't know which one is so-called Xia Dynasty. But it doesn't meant that there were only small tribes and suddenly Shang came out of nowhere.
Everywhere in the Wikipedia articles is this phrase "had Han ethnic origins". Looks like China Editors are trying to change history. At least that is based upon what the CNN article is saying.
I spotted the same thing, and there's never a source given. Allegedly his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (or 15th great-grandfather for short) was totally Han, the son of the scourge of the Xiongnu - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Guang
>So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously.
There are people who believe that Trump won in 2020, that vaccines cause autism, and that the Holocaust is a hoax. You cannot reason people out of an idea they didn't use reason to arrive at.
Maybe it is healthy for society in the long run to have pockets of divergent belief. Most of the time it is groundless and fades away. Every so often it gains traction. If it is based in reality, we gain a better understanding. If it is misleading, it vitalizes a competing and more correct understanding.
The more interesting phenomenon is that we are able to agree on anything at all, it's not exactly our strongest instinct. Reading through HN, for example, the longest comment chains are a series of disagreements. But we build resources like Wikipedia and science journals, which also use disagreement as an engine for generating a more correct understanding. Its a strange and hopeful aspect of human societies.
How could it be healthy to not even agree on the most basic facts of history like whether hundreds of years actually happened or the shape of the earth?
That’s why I’ve lost much of my optimism regarding U.S. politics.
It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging.
It's a shame people are drifting from vaccines but the unwillingness of the WHO, etc., to backtrack on claims that turned out false with respect to Covid, does not help the cause. The sausage-making history that's coming out from Covid is also making people suspicious and one cannot blame them.
Additionally, they've redefined that a pandemic is (removing severity from the definition), additionally it's expanding way from its traditional geopolitical framework and also what were recommendations are now becoming legally binding mandates that supersede sovereignty.
So, yes, people are overreacting but the WHO and people who suppressed truthful but contrarian claims during the pandemic, share some of the blame.
The version I've had argued to me didn't change any chronology, they just insisted that the Song dynasty started earlier so the Tang shouldn't be counted.
The context was weird, the person pushing it was very passionate about the subject, and since I certainly don't know all that much about Chinese history from the period, I just smiled and nodded. Apparently this is a bigger thing?
Back in the early 2000's, well before most social media sites existed, I had a coworker who shared with me a number of questionable theories, one of which was basically this. He also believed very passionately that plate tectonics was wrong. Unfortunately social media didn't invent brain worms.
I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk!
I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong.
Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard.
Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport
Many of the more esoteric conspiracy theories are hard to debunk. Lets take the earth if round, prove it. You can bring up many cases, sails disappearing behind the horizon, goemetry, etc. but actually doing these measurements and calculations cold is pretty hard. And whenever you bring up a fact, they will dismiss it out of hand. Tectonic plates, I believe they exist, I have seen the evidence in books. But I doubt I could prove it, I've never really studied geology or anything like that. And if I were to debate someone who believes they weren't real, I would probably lose as they would bring up obscure papers, incidents, etc. which I wouldn't be able to refute well.
I was recently in Hawaii on Kauai. I wondered if I could see any of the other Hawaiian islands (besides the small local ones). Can you see Oahu from Kauai (70 miles away)? Rarely, and only if you get to a high enough elevation and even then you can only see the highest peaks. On the other hand, Maui is easily visible from Hawaii from sea level. Simple, practice, repeatable.
Likewise, flying in a plane for any distance and seeing the course is identical to if you pulled a string tight against a globe (give or take). I suppose pilots could choose to fly in an arch to keep the secret, but eventually some capitalist has got to spill the beans to cut costs, right?
You don't particularly need calculations, just have friends around the world or even a couple hundred miles away, get on a video call to prove the world is round. Whatever your pet theory of how the sun moves across the "flat" earth can be contradicted with a couple of facetime calls.
I’ll do you one better, you shouldn’t even spend any time engaging in a debate with people who believe the earth is flat because they don’t want to change their mind.
It doesn’t really matter if the earth is flat or not, for them it’s about being part of a community of people who believe in something that society tells them is wrong. There is no changing minds besides the 1 in a million you hear about and so all the calculations you could do would never work, sadly.
If you're so disinterested why are you talking about it now? Better to focus your attention on something you're not going to be so dismissive and negative about unless your hobby is being an asshole.
I was just browsing comments and read yours and thought it prudent for others to realize what they were dealing with when it came to flat earth theorists so that they protect their time. I’ve probably at this point already saved dozens of seconds for someone.
Social media gave a geographically distributed population of the “quirky” and their natural predators the grifters a chance to mingle on a global scale. It didn’t invent anything, but it’s a vector for the pathogen.
Depending on how much older he was than you at the time, he might genuinely have been taught in high school that this was wrong. Only in the early 1970s did that even start to gain traction. If he was taught by one of the hold-outs that esteemed a pre-tectonics geologist, it'd be pretty natural to think like that I imagine.
oh he understood what plate tectonics was proposing very well, he just completely rejected it in favour of many distributed prehistoric oceans and a lot (a LOT) of erosion. It was weirdly congruent to phantom time theory.
Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) which I thought was the same as this but actually compresses a whole lot more time into less than 1000 years and does word magic to imply that King Solomon = Suleiman the Magnificent.
Yes I was going to point to the Fomenko chonology too. I believe that has adherents in some minor Russian nationalist circles:
> In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society"
"A reliable support for the formation of modern ideology"? That pretty much screams that any connection with the truth is... optional. It's not being considered on grounds of truth, but on grounds of being good for ideology.
That wikipedia page lists four points speaking against the phantom time conspiracy, and in those four points relies on the Tang dynasty twice. Which doesn't exist. Checkmate /s
And it's taken about as seriously as "birds don't exist" or "the earth is flat". CNN is just doing straight up orientalism. Exoticizing a normal aspect of a culture that if you think hard enough happens in western cultures just as often if not more
AIUI the Conspiracy Theory isn't that birds don't exist, but that they are not real. All the birds you've seen were actually government spy cameras.
This feels more plausible if you've only ever encountered pigeons and at some distance. If you've owned a parrot or some chickens, it is very apparent that this is not a spy camera. In fact the word I'd use for chickens is "saurian". They're clearly just lizards with feathers, if I didn't know their evolutionary story it would still scream at me when I see one laying on a rock in the sun that this is a lizard.
If you actually read the article, you'd be directing your vitriol at the Nanjing Daily and "The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government."
The same sort of arguments are playing out in the US, albeit on a shorter timescale. I couldn't say when it started, but it's extremely depressing that the history section in most general bookstores is just a locus for narrative warfare rather than scholarship.
Of course, this phenomenon is by no means unique to these two countries. I know a Japanese author who has a small but dedicated following for his argument that nuclear weapons don't exist: https://books.google.com/books/about/Death_Object.html?id=Mw...
I get what you mean that pop hist. books aren't academic, but "narrative warfare" describes a huge proportion of historical scholarship. Whether or not you agree with it, that's the whole point of Metahistory and the linguistic turn.
I encourage anyone browsing through this to read that link. It gives insight on what many Westerners have no visibility into - how many Chinese view the Qing dynasty, which was romanticized by Spielberg's Last Emperor. More importantly, it's a clue on why China is fervently cracking down on this.
If you search on Google, there's a slew of Chinese restaurants in the US named "Ming Dynasty." If you were in the SF Peninsula in the 80's and 90's, the one on Embarcadero and 101 drew well known chefs from Hong Kong during its heyday. Conversely, Google knows of two "Ching" or "Qin Dynasty" restaurants in the US. Many Han Chinese have always looked down on the Ching Dynasty as illegitimate colonialists.
This particular issue is a sore point with the CCP with respect to Hong Kong. During the crackdowns in 2019, mainland propaganda justified the crackdown as de-colonization. They called the British takeover an invasion to force subjugation through mass drugging (opium).
In response to this, many protestors appealed to Han-centrism. They argued that the Ching were already an illegitimate colonizing force, and blame them for everything that led up to Western colonization. This includes everything from weakened military might to failed trade/war negotiations, to anti-opium crackdowns. If the British broke in, it's because the Manchus left the door open. And by legitimizing the Ching Dynasty, you have an indirect trail of responsibility to the CCP themselves.
This Hong Kong link is why this Tang issue is not a joke to the CCP.
Final note because I have to pre-emptively address this on social media: If you feel like you need to jump in with a generic anti-colonial comment, don't. Hongkongers' views of being British subjects, especially from 1970's on, should absolutely not be seen through Western, especially modern progressive PoV. TL;DR - the majority, often vast majority, of Hongkongers wished to remain under British rule.
"The negationist proposition, in the age in which it is being advanced, cannot therefore be truly denied, since everything, all of us, including those who reject it, have passed over, whether we like it or not, into an age where there is no longer any objective recourse. The proposition, therefore, can be rejected only by a kind of mirror denial. And that is where its victory lies - though in fact it is not its victory, but the victory of real time over the present, over the past, over any form whatsoever of logical articulation of reality." - Jean Baudrillard
I'm currently reading 'There Is No Antimemetics Division' and this news item reminds me of that. Also, 1984, in which the government actively establishes false narratives as actual history and do it so many times that it's impossible to remember what really happened.
What's interesting is that if you read Wikipedia, there are multiple (without sources, mind) sentences going "btw Li Yuan was totally Han via an ancestor 17 generations previously".
So clearly this is rather important to some people.
probably not their actual name. if you need a search term, qiao乔于yu is better than qiao yu. better read chinese. they've long deleted the actual video, of course
Or the whole thing is an "inverse" PR, completely manufacturing the information spread, to get people interested in Tang dynasty.
Conspiracy vs. conspiracy.
> Callum, a 24-year-old Beijing resident, told CNN that questioning the Tang’s existence could be a way to rebel against established wisdom and a way for China’s young – faced with a slowing economy and greater competition for jobs and resources – to criticize authorities.
> “It is a way for people to attack the established authorities. It is almost like saying ‘those so-called experts are nothing special. They have all been misleading people. I am the one who understands the truth, and I have exposed them all.’”
Depends on how much you think people actually believe Qanon. This is "We're going to raise a middle finger to the authorities in a form that's hard for them to come down on us, but it's very deliberately against the authorities." Qanon may have been that, too, but my impression is that at least some people really believed it.
That’s exactly the same as what is happening here. They’re ideas crazy enough that most people react with “you’re fucking with me, right?” And some people definitely are… but there’s always a cross section of people gullible enough to believe it wholeheartedly, and a large grey area in the middle of people who aren’t sure what to believe.
They say a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots. Part of the reason these things are viral is because their ridiculous nature demands attention. And that attention alone is enough to generate influence.
“Many parents say that, thanks to the hoax, their children now feel confused about historical facts, the Nanjing Daily reported”
Great, lets make this useful … this specific nonsense will settle down and be proven to be a hoax and/or misinformation. An important component of parenting today is to raise kids who take claims presented on the internet with a large grain of salt. Rather than contrived examples in critical thinking exercises they might get in class or a textbook, parents now have a perfect, real example here to show their kids that online nonsense can look authoritative and be very widely believed, and yet still be false. Shields up. Less time online for kids. And don’t outsource your critical thinking to the online majority or to AI!
This article still pushes the typical "China bad" narrative, throughout which it attempts to disparage Chinese nationalism.
Take the incident mentioned in the piece: the Xi'an Culture and Tourism Bureau later clarified that no one had actually made such phone calls. The reporter simply cited an unverified online comment without doing any fact-checking.
This is a classic tactic used to smear an opponent—exaggerating their views to an absurd degree to weaponize public disgust against them. In reality, aside from this fabricated "phone call" incident, conspiracy theories claiming the Tang dynasty didn't exist have never received any attention from mainstream media or the general public in China.
Its real-world impact is virtually zero. Following this bizarre logic, the author would be better off reporting on how praise for German Nazism spreads on Chinese social media(but i know CNN dont have the balls).
"Claiming that the 300-year dynasty was actually a myth is akin to saying the American Civil War never happened"
Aren't republicans in Texas trying to rewrite history books to ignore lynchings and burnings of Black Wall Street and claim that slaves were treated pretty well?
Seems like every country has factions who do this - right?
There are cranks who claim that, essentially, the _middle ages_ did not happen. Claiming that things which obviously happened didn’t happen is one of the more common forms of crankery; motives vary (I think the Middle Ages deniers are generally a bit more innocent than the Texas Republicans, say)
My daughter is a tx high school student and the books don’t mention slavery in context of the civil war. It’s framed as only a states rights issue, in which Texas is the honorable fighter of freedoms.
It was a states rights issue...the right of those states to own slaves. If you read the articles of succession for each of the confederate states (the actual words the actual people who decided "screw that Union thing..." put on paper to justify what they are doing and sent to Washinton), every one of them explicitly states "we are doing this because you are threatening our right to own slaves". This is the "well ackshually..." argument used to pretend the Confederates were fighting a noble cause and the rest of the hypocrisy being shoveled about.
In fairness, Texas is a place where they make elementary school kids stand up every morning and say the Pledge of Allegiance...
to the TEXAS flag.
Just pointing out that the educational experience in Texas is not necessarily indicative of what the educational experience in the rest of the US is like.
> Aren't republicans in Texas trying to rewrite history books to ignore lynchings and burnings of Black Wall Street and claim that slaves were treated pretty well?
I don't think that's very much alike at all. Denying the existence of a major dynasty is like declaring that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson didn't exist, and all the historical traditions and documents to the contrary were invented to cover up the two terms Jefferson Davis served in the White House. I've never seen even the most strenuous Lost Cause advocates say something like that, because why in the world would you?
> Denying the existence of a major dynasty is like declaring that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson didn't exist
There's a great difference of scale.
Lincoln died about 150 years ago. There are voluminous primary sources about Lincoln - e.g. photographs of him, original documents that he wrote, firsthand accounts of his actions, etc. We certainly don't know every detail of his life, but we do know a lot of it, and we're quite confident it's true.
The Tang dynasty, by contrast, fell over a thousand years ago. We know of it primarily through second- and third-hand histories and through interpretation of archaeological artifacts - much like our knowledge of Greek and Roman history, for instance. There are a lot of thinly covered areas, and many of the sources are biased; there's a lot more to be uncertain about.
Let's not get started on corners of the American internet... ask your favourite AI about "list of historical denial theories with US subscribers, including religious". No doubt longer and more amusing!
Our politicians and leaders being lizard people absolutely has true believers. Zuckerberg specifically might've taken off as a meme amongst tech critical folk but the core idea comes from genuine conspiracies. Birds are real, I admit, is totally a joke but it flows so well in my comment
I think the bigger point here is that even the CCP, with it’s heavy-handed totalitarian controls on the Chinese web, isn’t able to entirely filter out misinformation.
Not sure why you're getting down voted but this does seem like the key point. There obviously is a major challenge in avoiding conspiratorial nonsense in societies with strong freedom of speech, but in this example we have China facing something similar.
Note the reason of this conspiracy: the founder of Tang dynasty is not of pure Han Chinese ethnicity. In the grand scheme, this is just part of the rise of Han nationalism in recent years, which had its roots in the nationalism rhetorics adopted by the Chinese state under Xi.
I'm sure you can see the parallels of this in the United States and Europe.
"This thing challenges my preexisting biases about the CCP. The only conclusion must be that it is truly exceptional, never that I can eating from the pig trough of my country's propaganda."
Behold, the most educated and intellectually curious American, folks.
In another headline, people under a certain age get most of their news from social media. It 'democratizes' it, said one person quoted.
It is more important than ever that we teach people to think critically and skeptically, and the necessity of empiricism (i.e., publicly verifiable evidence).
There are primary sources. There are archeological sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianling_Mausoleum
There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang
And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sources. Among others, Japanese histories detail the journeys of emissaries to the Tang Court: https://web.archive.org/web/20260315181529/https://japansoci...
So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously.
But I'll give it credit for hijacking a genuinely interesting scholarly premise: What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed. It is of rather mythic proportions; later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy. And there is very little evidence to support its existence. The Shang Dynasty is also supported by rather scant evidence -- and is also mythic, though obviously less so than the Xia.
Worth noting that both the Xia and Shang are exceedingly ancient -- roughly 2000 BC to 1000 BC between them -- unlike the Tang, which fell around 900 AD and is thus middle-of-the-pack by Chinese dynastic standards.
The Shang dynasty is also kind of a propaganda nightmare, with all the archeological evidence for mass human sacrifice.
Yeah. You're probably familiar with the "Hanfu" revival -- a sort of resurgence in people adopting traditional clothing and makeup styles from the Han and Tang dynasties. It's entirely on account of the fact that those two dynasties were remarkably stable, prosperous, and peaceful, so they lend themselves to historical romanticism -- like the Chinese equivalent of the Renaissance Faire. Good vibes. Even popular in Japan, with e.g. The Apothecary Diaries and similar fare.
Shang, and all of the post-dynasty collapse centuries like The Spring and Autumn Period, were not great times to live in. Dismal and evil vibes, for the most part, unless you happen to be a mighty hero or bandit-lord who believes that he can conquer the age. Even so, most of them ended up in soup pots.
> Even popular in Japan, with e.g. The Apothecary Diaries and similar fare.
Notably the Tang Dynasty in China was concurrent with the Taika Reforms, Nara period & beginning of the Heian period in Japan.
And thus for a very long time, and even today to some extent, the Japanese (or their cultural theorists at any rate!) have viewed themselves as the inheritors of "true" Ancient Chinese culture -- unsullied by Mongol/Manchu/Communist influence.
There's some truth to this. The Japanese preserved certain Tang Dynasty customs which were lost to China, and they have some of the best collections of Tang-era artifacts.
This line of thought was, however, used in very unfortunate WWII-era propaganda, like "we have to invade China to rescue its civilization, only we can do this!"
In my experience the Chinese very much think this as well. Though it can be framed in a more derogatory way as "derivative" or "they just copied us"
I'd argue its difficult to find major aspects of Japanese culture that don't trace back to ancient China (maybe the language, eating raw food and sumo)
Shinto is a big one
They resent our freedoms!
That was nice of them. I don't know if everyone would have sent them again!
Even portrayed in Japanese-related games: https://shogun2-encyclopedia.com/techs/gempei_civil_core_tan...
That’s really interesting. Thanks for sharing. I’m a big fan of clothing and architecture that are appropriate/historic for a given country or area. It’s unfortunate we’ve standardized on 5-over-1s and graphic t-shirts with sweatpants/leggings over time instead of maintaining some of that cultural and location based uniqueness. I understand why we have changed our clothing patterns, but we did lose a little bit of something in that change, in my opinion.
Your comment sent me to Wikipedia and this caught my eye [0], a Late Shang inscribed rhinoceros rib, which then deepened the wikihole [1], it's funny how even though I know of the Indian rhino and Sumatran rhino, it never occurred to me that they were even more widespread...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Shang#/media/File:Shang_d...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceroses_in_ancient_China
wait until you find about the Yana River people!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yana_Rhinoceros_Horn_Site
Not exactly an issue though. Because the following Dynasty Zhou was portrayed as a protagonist, which rebelled against Shang and abolished human sacrifice and established the right Chinese civilization. And all the following dynasties are claiming that Zhou was the good old days and they are following Zhou's tradition.
Shang being an villain fits this narrative.
The Aztecs had the same mythical reverence for the Toltecs.
There is a similar theory heavily contested in Indian History that the Vedic period never existed.
>And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sources.
Including a rather unusual battle between the Tang Dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Talas
It's recorded that the Caliph, on hearing of the battle, said "What is this? A crossover episode?"
There are times I’m convinced that promoting the Mandela Effect is to enable stuff like this.
> later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy
Troy was indeed largely fabricated though! Really I think that's of a piece with stuff being, y'know, really old. There are big holes in Sumerian and Egyption history too (though the latter helped out a ton by digging secret tombs and hiding them really well). Post-classical Mayan history is pretty suspect in a lot of places, etc...
> What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed
There are some nuances about this. We know that there are multiple developed cities (and likely monarchies, given there are palace-like ruins) around or before Xia era. It's just that we don't know which one is so-called Xia Dynasty. But it doesn't meant that there were only small tribes and suddenly Shang came out of nowhere.
Every ancient empire did this with their primordial beginnings, from Romulus and Remus to Izanagi and Izanami.
Everywhere in the Wikipedia articles is this phrase "had Han ethnic origins". Looks like China Editors are trying to change history. At least that is based upon what the CNN article is saying.
I spotted the same thing, and there's never a source given. Allegedly his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (or 15th great-grandfather for short) was totally Han, the son of the scourge of the Xiongnu - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Guang
A timely reminder that, damn, China is olllldddd.
>So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously.
There are people who believe that Trump won in 2020, that vaccines cause autism, and that the Holocaust is a hoax. You cannot reason people out of an idea they didn't use reason to arrive at.
The majority of people don't reason themselves into anything, whether it's the mainstream view or the conspiracy.
There's just a substantial bias where people assume all 'new knowledge' is wrong. Probably correct most the time, but still often wrong.
Its a Chinese equivalent of the phantom time theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory
Its just as silly as phantom time and covers almost exactly the same period. The motive is possibly racist which makes it more sinister.
Maybe it is healthy for society in the long run to have pockets of divergent belief. Most of the time it is groundless and fades away. Every so often it gains traction. If it is based in reality, we gain a better understanding. If it is misleading, it vitalizes a competing and more correct understanding.
The more interesting phenomenon is that we are able to agree on anything at all, it's not exactly our strongest instinct. Reading through HN, for example, the longest comment chains are a series of disagreements. But we build resources like Wikipedia and science journals, which also use disagreement as an engine for generating a more correct understanding. Its a strange and hopeful aspect of human societies.
How could it be healthy to not even agree on the most basic facts of history like whether hundreds of years actually happened or the shape of the earth?
That’s why I’ve lost much of my optimism regarding U.S. politics.
It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging.
Does this stuff really matter when you get down to it? How much does it being true or false change the average persons daily life?
One look at what’s happening with vaccines and you’re disabused of healthy. It’s not. it’s insanity
It's a shame people are drifting from vaccines but the unwillingness of the WHO, etc., to backtrack on claims that turned out false with respect to Covid, does not help the cause. The sausage-making history that's coming out from Covid is also making people suspicious and one cannot blame them.
Additionally, they've redefined that a pandemic is (removing severity from the definition), additionally it's expanding way from its traditional geopolitical framework and also what were recommendations are now becoming legally binding mandates that supersede sovereignty.
So, yes, people are overreacting but the WHO and people who suppressed truthful but contrarian claims during the pandemic, share some of the blame.
The version I've had argued to me didn't change any chronology, they just insisted that the Song dynasty started earlier so the Tang shouldn't be counted.
The context was weird, the person pushing it was very passionate about the subject, and since I certainly don't know all that much about Chinese history from the period, I just smiled and nodded. Apparently this is a bigger thing?
Back in the early 2000's, well before most social media sites existed, I had a coworker who shared with me a number of questionable theories, one of which was basically this. He also believed very passionately that plate tectonics was wrong. Unfortunately social media didn't invent brain worms.
Was he reading Neal Adams?
I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk!
I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong.
Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard.
Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport
Many of the more esoteric conspiracy theories are hard to debunk. Lets take the earth if round, prove it. You can bring up many cases, sails disappearing behind the horizon, goemetry, etc. but actually doing these measurements and calculations cold is pretty hard. And whenever you bring up a fact, they will dismiss it out of hand. Tectonic plates, I believe they exist, I have seen the evidence in books. But I doubt I could prove it, I've never really studied geology or anything like that. And if I were to debate someone who believes they weren't real, I would probably lose as they would bring up obscure papers, incidents, etc. which I wouldn't be able to refute well.
I was recently in Hawaii on Kauai. I wondered if I could see any of the other Hawaiian islands (besides the small local ones). Can you see Oahu from Kauai (70 miles away)? Rarely, and only if you get to a high enough elevation and even then you can only see the highest peaks. On the other hand, Maui is easily visible from Hawaii from sea level. Simple, practice, repeatable.
Likewise, flying in a plane for any distance and seeing the course is identical to if you pulled a string tight against a globe (give or take). I suppose pilots could choose to fly in an arch to keep the secret, but eventually some capitalist has got to spill the beans to cut costs, right?
Also: the southern hemisphere.
You don't particularly need calculations, just have friends around the world or even a couple hundred miles away, get on a video call to prove the world is round. Whatever your pet theory of how the sun moves across the "flat" earth can be contradicted with a couple of facetime calls.
I’ll do you one better, you shouldn’t even spend any time engaging in a debate with people who believe the earth is flat because they don’t want to change their mind.
It doesn’t really matter if the earth is flat or not, for them it’s about being part of a community of people who believe in something that society tells them is wrong. There is no changing minds besides the 1 in a million you hear about and so all the calculations you could do would never work, sadly.
If you're so disinterested why are you talking about it now? Better to focus your attention on something you're not going to be so dismissive and negative about unless your hobby is being an asshole.
I was just browsing comments and read yours and thought it prudent for others to realize what they were dealing with when it came to flat earth theorists so that they protect their time. I’ve probably at this point already saved dozens of seconds for someone.
There were plenty of conspiracy sites pre-2000. I think a lot of them shared mindspace with USA late night talk radio. Also, usenet.
Plate tectonics was super controversial at one point. Would be a common one for conspiracy theorists of a certain vintage.
Social media gave a geographically distributed population of the “quirky” and their natural predators the grifters a chance to mingle on a global scale. It didn’t invent anything, but it’s a vector for the pathogen.
Depending on how much older he was than you at the time, he might genuinely have been taught in high school that this was wrong. Only in the early 1970s did that even start to gain traction. If he was taught by one of the hold-outs that esteemed a pre-tectonics geologist, it'd be pretty natural to think like that I imagine.
oh he understood what plate tectonics was proposing very well, he just completely rejected it in favour of many distributed prehistoric oceans and a lot (a LOT) of erosion. It was weirdly congruent to phantom time theory.
Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) which I thought was the same as this but actually compresses a whole lot more time into less than 1000 years and does word magic to imply that King Solomon = Suleiman the Magnificent.
Yes I was going to point to the Fomenko chonology too. I believe that has adherents in some minor Russian nationalist circles:
> In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society"
And related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire
"A reliable support for the formation of modern ideology"? That pretty much screams that any connection with the truth is... optional. It's not being considered on grounds of truth, but on grounds of being good for ideology.
Well... yes.
I mean it's a nationalist ideology - any connection with reality is coincidental.
I was going to say that it seems the equivalent of the "Belgium does not exist" meme (ante litteram) from a few decades ago.
I just read the theory and I’m now a believer.
It’s only 1729! Let’s goo, I mean:
Come on ye lads!
That wikipedia page lists four points speaking against the phantom time conspiracy, and in those four points relies on the Tang dynasty twice. Which doesn't exist. Checkmate /s
And it's taken about as seriously as "birds don't exist" or "the earth is flat". CNN is just doing straight up orientalism. Exoticizing a normal aspect of a culture that if you think hard enough happens in western cultures just as often if not more
AIUI the Conspiracy Theory isn't that birds don't exist, but that they are not real. All the birds you've seen were actually government spy cameras.
This feels more plausible if you've only ever encountered pigeons and at some distance. If you've owned a parrot or some chickens, it is very apparent that this is not a spy camera. In fact the word I'd use for chickens is "saurian". They're clearly just lizards with feathers, if I didn't know their evolutionary story it would still scream at me when I see one laying on a rock in the sun that this is a lizard.
CNN is just doing straight up orientalism
If you actually read the article, you'd be directing your vitriol at the Nanjing Daily and "The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government."
Since it's popular among youth on social media, maybe this is like Helen Keller skepticism?
https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-a...
The video of the girl crying about Hellen Keller being fake was hilarious regardless of how true or not any of it is
The same sort of arguments are playing out in the US, albeit on a shorter timescale. I couldn't say when it started, but it's extremely depressing that the history section in most general bookstores is just a locus for narrative warfare rather than scholarship.
Of course, this phenomenon is by no means unique to these two countries. I know a Japanese author who has a small but dedicated following for his argument that nuclear weapons don't exist: https://books.google.com/books/about/Death_Object.html?id=Mw...
I’ve read plenty of good history/biography publishing in the past 50 years right up to last year. I’m not sure I understand your claim.
Narrative warfare… I guess the question is, what isn’t “narrative warfare”?
No atom bomb. Wow...that some nearly Shockley levels of 'engineers disease' right there.
Edit: clarified which part of the post I was referencing.
I get what you mean that pop hist. books aren't academic, but "narrative warfare" describes a huge proportion of historical scholarship. Whether or not you agree with it, that's the whole point of Metahistory and the linguistic turn.
What's his explanation for what happened? iirc, immediately after Hiroshima the survivors had thought the Allies had used some sort of fuel bomb.
A much better article about the phenomenon: https://open.substack.com/pub/ramble/p/the-tang-dynasty-was-...
Aside from the poor choice of background color. ;)
I encourage anyone browsing through this to read that link. It gives insight on what many Westerners have no visibility into - how many Chinese view the Qing dynasty, which was romanticized by Spielberg's Last Emperor. More importantly, it's a clue on why China is fervently cracking down on this.
If you search on Google, there's a slew of Chinese restaurants in the US named "Ming Dynasty." If you were in the SF Peninsula in the 80's and 90's, the one on Embarcadero and 101 drew well known chefs from Hong Kong during its heyday. Conversely, Google knows of two "Ching" or "Qin Dynasty" restaurants in the US. Many Han Chinese have always looked down on the Ching Dynasty as illegitimate colonialists.
This particular issue is a sore point with the CCP with respect to Hong Kong. During the crackdowns in 2019, mainland propaganda justified the crackdown as de-colonization. They called the British takeover an invasion to force subjugation through mass drugging (opium).
In response to this, many protestors appealed to Han-centrism. They argued that the Ching were already an illegitimate colonizing force, and blame them for everything that led up to Western colonization. This includes everything from weakened military might to failed trade/war negotiations, to anti-opium crackdowns. If the British broke in, it's because the Manchus left the door open. And by legitimizing the Ching Dynasty, you have an indirect trail of responsibility to the CCP themselves.
This Hong Kong link is why this Tang issue is not a joke to the CCP.
Final note because I have to pre-emptively address this on social media: If you feel like you need to jump in with a generic anti-colonial comment, don't. Hongkongers' views of being British subjects, especially from 1970's on, should absolutely not be seen through Western, especially modern progressive PoV. TL;DR - the majority, often vast majority, of Hongkongers wished to remain under British rule.
"The negationist proposition, in the age in which it is being advanced, cannot therefore be truly denied, since everything, all of us, including those who reject it, have passed over, whether we like it or not, into an age where there is no longer any objective recourse. The proposition, therefore, can be rejected only by a kind of mirror denial. And that is where its victory lies - though in fact it is not its victory, but the victory of real time over the present, over the past, over any form whatsoever of logical articulation of reality." - Jean Baudrillard
When was there an age where there was objective recourse? I guess when we could burn people for heresy?
I'm currently reading 'There Is No Antimemetics Division' and this news item reminds me of that. Also, 1984, in which the government actively establishes false narratives as actual history and do it so many times that it's impossible to remember what really happened.
What's interesting is that if you read Wikipedia, there are multiple (without sources, mind) sentences going "btw Li Yuan was totally Han via an ancestor 17 generations previously".
So clearly this is rather important to some people.
Tang Dynasty -- isn't that a band which introduced heavy metal to China in the 90's?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_Dynasty_(band)
They lived the Spinal Tap lifestyle before Spinal Tap.
> a history influencer named Qiao Yu
I assumed that any "influencer" could be easily googled, but I cannot find literally anything. Or Google censors their name?
There's two characters missing from the middle of the name.
Not sure how HN's symbol stripper handles them, but here's a try:
probably not their actual name. if you need a search term, qiao乔于yu is better than qiao yu. better read chinese. they've long deleted the actual video, of course
Or the whole thing is an "inverse" PR, completely manufacturing the information spread, to get people interested in Tang dynasty. Conspiracy vs. conspiracy.
If Tang Dynasties are real, why haven't I seen one?
I had Tang every day with lunch when I was a kid. But it was the seventies so there's that ...
Because they aren't and never have been! This has been scientifically proven from the astrological data according to my sources.
They made orange drink powder for the Apollo Missions. I KID YOU NOT!
Oh so you’re saying that’s what happened to the Tang dynasty and this is just a huge coverup.
The Moon landings invented the Tang dynasty
That thing we don't want you to look at never existed.
> Callum, a 24-year-old Beijing resident, told CNN that questioning the Tang’s existence could be a way to rebel against established wisdom and a way for China’s young – faced with a slowing economy and greater competition for jobs and resources – to criticize authorities.
> “It is a way for people to attack the established authorities. It is almost like saying ‘those so-called experts are nothing special. They have all been misleading people. I am the one who understands the truth, and I have exposed them all.’”
China got it's own form of Qanon.
Historical revisionism, CCP :sakura: :starry_eyed:
Historical revisionism, random people :angry: :barf:
there's something comforting seeing that someone else on the other side of the planet from me has the same troubles.
http://V2ex.com
Depends on how much you think people actually believe Qanon. This is "We're going to raise a middle finger to the authorities in a form that's hard for them to come down on us, but it's very deliberately against the authorities." Qanon may have been that, too, but my impression is that at least some people really believed it.
That’s exactly the same as what is happening here. They’re ideas crazy enough that most people react with “you’re fucking with me, right?” And some people definitely are… but there’s always a cross section of people gullible enough to believe it wholeheartedly, and a large grey area in the middle of people who aren’t sure what to believe.
They say a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots. Part of the reason these things are viral is because their ridiculous nature demands attention. And that attention alone is enough to generate influence.
“Many parents say that, thanks to the hoax, their children now feel confused about historical facts, the Nanjing Daily reported”
Great, lets make this useful … this specific nonsense will settle down and be proven to be a hoax and/or misinformation. An important component of parenting today is to raise kids who take claims presented on the internet with a large grain of salt. Rather than contrived examples in critical thinking exercises they might get in class or a textbook, parents now have a perfect, real example here to show their kids that online nonsense can look authoritative and be very widely believed, and yet still be false. Shields up. Less time online for kids. And don’t outsource your critical thinking to the online majority or to AI!
This article still pushes the typical "China bad" narrative, throughout which it attempts to disparage Chinese nationalism.
Take the incident mentioned in the piece: the Xi'an Culture and Tourism Bureau later clarified that no one had actually made such phone calls. The reporter simply cited an unverified online comment without doing any fact-checking.
This is a classic tactic used to smear an opponent—exaggerating their views to an absurd degree to weaponize public disgust against them. In reality, aside from this fabricated "phone call" incident, conspiracy theories claiming the Tang dynasty didn't exist have never received any attention from mainstream media or the general public in China.
Its real-world impact is virtually zero. Following this bizarre logic, the author would be better off reporting on how praise for German Nazism spreads on Chinese social media(but i know CNN dont have the balls).
"Claiming that the 300-year dynasty was actually a myth is akin to saying the American Civil War never happened"
Aren't republicans in Texas trying to rewrite history books to ignore lynchings and burnings of Black Wall Street and claim that slaves were treated pretty well?
Seems like every country has factions who do this - right?
There are cranks who claim that, essentially, the _middle ages_ did not happen. Claiming that things which obviously happened didn’t happen is one of the more common forms of crankery; motives vary (I think the Middle Ages deniers are generally a bit more innocent than the Texas Republicans, say)
My daughter is a tx high school student and the books don’t mention slavery in context of the civil war. It’s framed as only a states rights issue, in which Texas is the honorable fighter of freedoms.
It was a states rights issue...the right of those states to own slaves. If you read the articles of succession for each of the confederate states (the actual words the actual people who decided "screw that Union thing..." put on paper to justify what they are doing and sent to Washinton), every one of them explicitly states "we are doing this because you are threatening our right to own slaves". This is the "well ackshually..." argument used to pretend the Confederates were fighting a noble cause and the rest of the hypocrisy being shoveled about.
And I am sure there is no mention that Slavery was the # 1 reason for Texas Succeeding from Mexico.
Yet all these educated people keep lauding and moving to Texas?
In fairness, Texas is a place where they make elementary school kids stand up every morning and say the Pledge of Allegiance...
to the TEXAS flag.
Just pointing out that the educational experience in Texas is not necessarily indicative of what the educational experience in the rest of the US is like.
> Aren't republicans in Texas trying to rewrite history books to ignore lynchings and burnings of Black Wall Street and claim that slaves were treated pretty well?
I remember this controversy from a while and IIRC I don't think this is accurate. For one thing, they teach that slavery was a central role. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/16/668557179/texas-students-will...
I remember looking at the actual key points in the Texas curriculum and nothing seems that unusual. Some people we IMO nitpicking.
I don't think that's very much alike at all. Denying the existence of a major dynasty is like declaring that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson didn't exist, and all the historical traditions and documents to the contrary were invented to cover up the two terms Jefferson Davis served in the White House. I've never seen even the most strenuous Lost Cause advocates say something like that, because why in the world would you?
> Denying the existence of a major dynasty is like declaring that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson didn't exist
There's a great difference of scale.
Lincoln died about 150 years ago. There are voluminous primary sources about Lincoln - e.g. photographs of him, original documents that he wrote, firsthand accounts of his actions, etc. We certainly don't know every detail of his life, but we do know a lot of it, and we're quite confident it's true.
The Tang dynasty, by contrast, fell over a thousand years ago. We know of it primarily through second- and third-hand histories and through interpretation of archaeological artifacts - much like our knowledge of Greek and Roman history, for instance. There are a lot of thinly covered areas, and many of the sources are biased; there's a lot more to be uncertain about.
Let's not get started on corners of the American internet... ask your favourite AI about "list of historical denial theories with US subscribers, including religious". No doubt longer and more amusing!
birds aren't real, the earth is flat, jet fuel can't melt steel beams, apollo 11 landed in hollywood, and zuckerberg is a lizard
“Birds aren’t real” is fully and completely a meme for goofs.
Zuck I think is also just for goofs but the others yes indeed have true believers.
Our politicians and leaders being lizard people absolutely has true believers. Zuckerberg specifically might've taken off as a meme amongst tech critical folk but the core idea comes from genuine conspiracies. Birds are real, I admit, is totally a joke but it flows so well in my comment
https://archive.is/qD2nD
I think the bigger point here is that even the CCP, with it’s heavy-handed totalitarian controls on the Chinese web, isn’t able to entirely filter out misinformation.
Not sure why you're getting down voted but this does seem like the key point. There obviously is a major challenge in avoiding conspiratorial nonsense in societies with strong freedom of speech, but in this example we have China facing something similar.
Note the reason of this conspiracy: the founder of Tang dynasty is not of pure Han Chinese ethnicity. In the grand scheme, this is just part of the rise of Han nationalism in recent years, which had its roots in the nationalism rhetorics adopted by the Chinese state under Xi.
I'm sure you can see the parallels of this in the United States and Europe.
"This thing challenges my preexisting biases about the CCP. The only conclusion must be that it is truly exceptional, never that I can eating from the pig trough of my country's propaganda."
Behold, the most educated and intellectually curious American, folks.
...and Han Dynasty only exists in Philadelphia.
In another headline, people under a certain age get most of their news from social media. It 'democratizes' it, said one person quoted.
It is more important than ever that we teach people to think critically and skeptically, and the necessity of empiricism (i.e., publicly verifiable evidence).