A professor whose research focused on China (social sciences, not food) told me that Americans also tend to imagine China as similar to the US - one large country. They said it was more like Europe, if Europe was all one federal country - different languages, different cultures, different cuisines, etc.
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, and trying to bring into the fold Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, .... For decades, the People's Liberation Army's main focus was internal, on its own people as in many dictatorships.
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
It is not that taboo. People talk about that in private very often, but I agree that it is rude in public. Plus it is a bit better in the younger generation.
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 :)
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
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.
> 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.
That seems usually true in densely populated areas that attract people from all over; e.g., most people in NY or LA don't care where you're from; it doesn't even register as something to question.
It's the people in the less dense areas that object (to people they've seldom encountered). They are the ones that much more often object to immigrants or certain ethnic groups. People from less dense areas are the ones who want 'crackdowns' on urban crime - that is, in a community they don't live in. People in the cities vote for liberals overwhelmingly.
Shilled it in another spot but a lot of the banter of https://www.youtube.com/@CadenceGao is about regional stereotypes. Look for videos with english thumbnails.
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.
"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.
Thanks for the translation, and that's very interesting. I would have guessed that in the Cultural Revolution the central government destroyed its own capacity to govern, by killing or otherwise losing senior and competent personnel, and lost its legitimacy.
(Can we compare it to the US currently?)
After, what I've read of Deng Xiaopeng's reforms was that they opened up the economy, starting by privatizing agriculture in some ways, and continuing by privatizing much of the economy and spurring capitalism. And of course eliminating many of Mao's / Gang of Four's economically destructive policies was the lowest-hanging fruit. Deng said "To get rich is glorious", which was not something that the Mao-era CCP would have advertised.
I don't recall reading about devolving power to provincial government as a cause of economic growth.
> I would have guessed that in the Cultural Revolution the central government destroyed its own capacity to govern, by killing or otherwise losing senior and competent personnel, and lost its legitimacy.
Yeah, more or less. The people were inspired at the beginning but lost the steam towards the end. Many researchers believe the Cultural Revolution only lasted about 3 years, from 1966 to 1969, and definitely ended when Lin Biao was killed in the plane crash.
> After, what I've read of Deng Xiaopeng's reforms was that they opened up the economy, starting by privatizing agriculture in some ways, and continuing by privatizing much of the economy and spurring capitalism. And of course eliminating many of Mao's / Gang of Four's economically destructive policies was the lowest-hanging fruit.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The Gang of Four did have a plan to open up the economy, not from Shenzhen, but from Shanghai, as late as 1975. And Mao did normalize the relationship with the US in 1972, which paved the way for any opening up afterwards. People also argued that the Gang of Four was not entirely against opening up the economy or allowing some private elements, while some colleagues of Deng were actually more "conservative". So I guess it was not a question of whether China should open up, but the questions of who should do it and how to do it.
> I don't recall reading about devolving power to provincial government as a cause of economic growth.
The central government relaxed ideological constraints, regulations and kept their eyes looking to the other way, so that local governments can do whatever they wanted. Basically everyone wanted to get rich, and get rich really fast. Many elder politicians and military leaders, removed and shamed during the Cultural Revolution, managed to claw back because of their support during the coup d'etat in 1976 (which was why it went so smoothly), and in turn they were promised immense amount of autonomy.
I wish I could provide more concrete proofs to all I said, but unfortunately a lot of the material was in Mandarin and TBH a lot of them are my guesses and other researchers' guesses.
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
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
> 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.
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).
In fact, "dialect" is a political definition. Using Europe as an analogy, it is conceivable that if Rome had not disappeared, today's French language, Italian language and Spanish language would be considered dialects of Latin language (English is not included, because it is a Germanic language). With a few exceptions, the dialects used by the Chinese are descendants of Middle Chinese and have been influenced by the official dialect, so they are all called "Chinese dialects".
> 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 some ways yes, in some ways no? How do Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and until recently, Hong Kong fit into your theory? In Europe, they don't have 're-education' camps; on the other hand, they also aren't trying to impose a strong central government (the EU is nothing like Chinese central government).
Europe mostly has a unified alphabet, and words are often mutually recognizeable - not the same as China, but not nothing.
What do I mean by 'dialects' is, these dialects/language share same words and similar structure, and they all reflect to same chinese words
again, things are very differenct in China, you can not simply define if a language is a dialect or not by if it's intelligible
for example, the vast majority of northern Chinese cannot understand the Jiangxi dialect(in fact, the dialects in different regions of Jiangxi are to some extent mutually unintelligible), yet the Jiangxi dialect is definitely a dialect
In my understanding, writing is politically related, with different regions under the same political entity using the same script, while pronunciation is regionally related, a relatively isolated area (such as a mountainous region) will develop its own distinct pronunciation
All the Indo-European languages share a very large number of words and of grammatical structures.
While for someone who has not studied languages, German, Spanish and Russian may appear as very different languages, for someone familiar with the evolution of the Indo-European languages it is easy to recognize the word correspondences between these languages, even when seeing some words for the first time.
The same is true for any other group of languages that have separated at most a few thousand years ago, so they are still recognizable as belonging to the same family.
In all languages for which writing has become frequently used, that has slowed significantly the divergence of the languages, at least in their written form, when divergence may have occurred between pronunciations.
Written down Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually intelligible. They have regional grammar and vocabulary, but not excessively so. They're mostly pronouncing words differently
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.
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).
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.
That seems like trying to take the originalist arguments for returning to the 18th century, and trying to insist they are real. There are of course regional variations in culture - how could there not be in a place that large - but nothing like the differeces between France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, etc., and state borders have nothing to do with it. The federal government has far more power than you say, and far more than the EU government.
This would be more obvious to people if we didn't share a language.
It's also true of large countries like India.
What most people in the West think of as Indian food or Chinese food is usually cuisine from one to a handful of regions, but it's like lumping Swedish and Italian cuisines together as "European food".
And of course you can find ever more levels of culinary granularity down to the level of the town or village.
> 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.
Wow, food in China can be so hyperlocal that I thought surely this won’t include stuff that’s not know outside China, like Guilin Noodles, but its there just under a different name than what I expected.
In particular, going to Hangzhou and trying the food there opened my eyes to how varied Chinese food is. There were a lot of lightly cooked vegetables and thinly sliced meats with subtle flavoring and sauces, the opposite of what I thought of saucy heavily cooked stir fry.
The Guilin rice noodles you get in Beijing is just a non-local copy of the actual dish. You don’t even have to leave China to eat non-local Chinese food, you will find Kungpao Chicken in more places outside of Sichuan (especially Beijing) than you will find it actually in Sichuan.
Hangzhou is very vanilla Chinese food, they like seafood without much spice added, also Ningbo is similar, but you’ll find plenty of Sichuan restaurants in both cities if that doesn’t float your boat. As a foreigner you learn the characters for Sichuan very quickly.
It's nice banter and rough cooking instructions. Since it goes over the process in a more chaotic manner it makes it IMO less intimidating/closer to how people cook their normal food. Look for the videos with english in the thumbnail.
More interesting is to research the history and development of regional cuisines
For example, Xinjiang’s representative dish, Big Plate Chicken, was actually invented by a Sichuanese chef in the 1980s, primarily to serve truck drivers
Another example is that both Beijing and Nanjing have roast duck as a signature dish. This is because in the 14th century, the Ming Dynasty emperor moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, bringing roast duck along with it.
My wife is from a small town just 50 km southeast of Nanjing, that is now folded into Nanjing proper, with metro and all. The town's language has nothing to do with Nanjing, they cannot understand each other at all. The town's cuisine is completely different, there's no duck at all, no similarities besides focus on rice as a staple.
I applaud the author of the article. Living and traveling China for 13 years drove me to understand that, to me, there's really no "X Chinese Cuisines", every little town has something unique and some cooking methods that are totally different from the next little town. Same with the language.
this is amazing. Definitely going to use this when I visit China again. Level of detail and accuracy is incredible I definitely learned a lot while reading about which cuisines I missed when I visited China
> Shaxian Wontons (沙县云吞). Top left. Similar in many ways to Cantonese style wontons
The locals always use the term bianrou 扁肉 even though it was the Shaxian delicacies chain that popularized it outside of Fujian. I was a little confused when I saw my favorite dish called this.
> And yet, there is regionality. Jilin - around the city of Changchun - hues to my personal stereotype of ‘Northeastern’ food the closest, with their hearty stews and love of fermented cabbage.
Hahah yuuuup. Every other day we have sauerkraut mixed with something. Literally just ate some random Jilin style sauerkraut dish a couple of hours ago.
> In Yanbian along the North Korean border, there is a large group of ethnic Koreans called the Joseon, which have Korean food similar to what is found in North Korea.
And yes, wow. If you pop down to Yanbian from Jilin/Changchun, you can get really good North Korean food, which is harder to find like anywhere else.
Stopped watching after 10 minutes due to it being a detailed discussion of methodology and not about food. Would like to see a video of "Top 20 Chinese Dishes You've Never Heard Of." And here it is - don't watch this on an empty stomach!
I have known since I was a child that China must have more than eight major cuisines, but the exact number of cuisines has always been a controversial topic. This work puts an end to this controversy.
A professor whose research focused on China (social sciences, not food) told me that Americans also tend to imagine China as similar to the US - one large country. They said it was more like Europe, if Europe was all one federal country - different languages, different cultures, different cuisines, etc.
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, and trying to bring into the fold Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, .... For decades, the People's Liberation Army's main focus was internal, on its own people as in many dictatorships.
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