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Anonymous Dude's avatar

Interesting, thank you!

As an American nerd I always admired China's lengthy history and respect for scholarship. (I binged Three Kingdoms and was pleased to see the clever ministers taking pride of place over the burly warriors; though, really, how many farmers died in Zhuge Liang's ultimately futile northern expeditions?) But of course, most of your people are struggling to get by, just like most of ours, and, really, most people everywhere.

All I can hope is the fear of nuclear war means at least our elites we will not go to war with each other.

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Chinese Doom Scroll's avatar

Now, history insists that Liu Bei (Zhuge Liang's faction) was the one faction that never pillaged and raped cities, and that Zhuge Liang ran a good economy. But, to be fair, they're also clearly the most romanticised faction, so who knows if that's accurate or not?

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Anonymous Dude's avatar

Yeah, I'd be surprised. My understanding was the novel was written during the Yuan-Ming transition and the Ming identified with Han-Shu, being in the south and Liu Bei supposedly being a Liu and therefore a distant relative of the emperor?

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Chinese Doom Scroll's avatar

Liu Bei basically represented the faction that wanted to restore the Han Dynasty, and pretty much every Chinese Dynasty (except maybe the Yuan??) had really romanticised ideas about the Han Dynasty.

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Anonymous Dude's avatar

Makes sense.

The Yuan were Mongols no? First non-Han dynasty to hold all of China? But the Qing were Manchu...

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Chinese Doom Scroll's avatar

Yeah, but I think the Qing were more open to integrating the Han? At least, there wasn't any explicit caste system like the Mongols had. In fact, at one point, the Emperor got worried that children of nobility couldn't speak Manchu at all because they were surrounded by people who only spoke Han growing up, and put in a big effort to find wet nurses that speak fluent Manchurian (which was apparently really difficult).

To be fair, I know very, very little about Yuan Dynasty history. It's the least discussed and studied bit of history in online communities (probably because it's always the odd one out).

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Anonymous Dude's avatar

That's what I've read as well, the Qing tried harder to integrate whereas the Yuan were really Mongol supremacists and kept the local Han down. Could be why it's so unpopular among Chinese people.

Though I'm always afraid of being the guy lecturing a Chinese guy on Chinese history. Even without the cultural appropriation thing American liberals (baizuo?) have, no matter how many English sources you read there's always the possibility the guy pulls out two texts that haven't been translated. The history's *deep*.

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Chris Mills's avatar

Thanks for this! So much success for the CCP right now. They've rightfully seen that controlling what people see on their phones and controlling people's banking and consumption by requiring smartphones can totally change society and shape popular opinion.

The CCP's ability to leverage technology and social media to quash dissent is incredible - historic, even. In the US, we're just getting started. The use of disinformation to influence elections popped up in 2016 - years after the CCP's algorithms were already working nicely. Channels like Instagram, TikTok, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. have matured very fast these ten years. They've become much better in the US at stirring up nationalist sentiment and spreading disinformation.

Just wait until Deep Seek and ChatGPT are deployed globally in business. The sky's the limit when it comes to keeping people uninformed and misinformed in the service of totalitarianism.

Clearly, China's model really works, and the CCP has a huge head start...they've been hitting home runs for the last 15 years. We're a quick study though. We seem to be catching on pretty fast.

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

This was fantastic analysis, great stuff Moly

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