It’s so real, especially in the Middle-Age.

One time this Taiwanese guy showed up to a board game group and when he found out I was sympathetic to China he told me:

If you want to know more about the cultural and historical reason causing the seemingly crazy Chinese expanding ambitions. I highly recommend you read this book. It explains why Xi is being so aggressive these years and why it’s almost inevitable. It’s not the same logic most people in the world understand. Even most Chinese people aren’t aware it.

And he linked me to “The China Order” by Fei-Ling Wang. I skimmed it, and it was complete drivel.

The central thesis is that Europe developed a peaceful Westphalian model that led it to respect the sovereignty of states, throughout it’s history and into the present day (somehow ignoring the entire history of colonialism, the Cold War, etc), while China’s historical model was based around “tianxia” which basically means that it ruled the known world, which is why it will always be a big evil meanie out to conquer the world.

Apparently this is a whole genre. Taking random snippets from China’s thousands of years of extremely varied history and picking out anything that supports the thesis that China is just inherently evil. There’s tons of works with similar theses written by white people, but I really can’t be assed to skim more than one, Fei-Ling immigrated from China to the US and has a doctorate, and he still writes this crap, in a university press, I can’t even imagine how bad the shit written by “China watchers” and pundits gets.

What’s funny to me about this is that I once watched a film made during WWII produced by the US government, “Why We Fight: The Battle for China” which made the rather dubious claim that China had, “never once waged an aggressive war in it’s 4000 years of history.” Change your posture towards the US, and your entire history going back thousands of years gets rewritten.

It’s just so lazy and childish to paint all of Chinese history with such a ridiculously large brush like that, it’s unbelievable.

I heard about this woman who is a professor specialising in Buddhism. She doesn’t know Sanskrit, she doesn’t know Pali, she doesn’t know Chinese, she doesn’t know Tibetan. She knew a little Japanese once but has forgotten about it now.

She is considered my country’s foremost scholar on Buddhism and is invited on TV whenever they need a Buddhism expert.

Too generous. This assumes average westerner could even get the scale right.

Not Saruman’s proudest moment.

Bro you can’t just let a cube rest unsolved like that. 🫣

Sprinkle in a little bias, a little propaganda, a little mythology, then lose 75% of the information, and you’ve got the Eastern understanding of Asian history.

Same goes for the Western understanding of Caucasian history, of course.

There is no discoverable objective reality when it comes to history. Not even the people in the moment at any given point in history really understand what’s going on. It’s all a construct.