LEAP YEARS
Council for Chronology Ups Calendar Three Years, ‘About Time’ Says Ji
Describing common perceptions of Chinese antiquity as “extremely static,” the government’s newly formed Council for Chronology announced today that China’s history is 5,003 years old. “We’ve been using 5,000 forever. It was 5,000 years last year, and 5,000 years the year before that,” said Yo Shi-jian, the council’s chairman. “It’s about time we got into the twenty-first century.”
Yo said the Council would add three years every year for ten years meaning 30 more years for a total of 5,033 years by year 2,014. “Otherwise, people may get confused,” he added. At a press conference to launch the new years, Yo frankly said that 7,000 years would be more accurate as “we Chinese are certainly better than the Egyptians and that’s how long they claim to have been domesticating cats and whatnot.” He added that while
most of the world’s people can trace their roots to Africa, the Chinese spontaneously appeared in a rice paddy near the Yellow River. “Using carbon dating, we calculate this happened approximately 7,001 years ago,” he said. “Nothing personal to the Africans, or to the Egyptians.”
If it weren’t a spoof, I’d say it has something to do with the commonly shared belief in the mytho-history of 5,000 years of steady progress as part of some unified culture that began on a fixed date 5,000+ years ago and has continued refining itself ever since.
It is the kind of short piece that could be used in advanced conversation classes. It might be pretty simple satire to some of us, but it would be interesting to try and explain that humor to a group of Taiwanese people.
There have recently been a lot of you communist mainland propagandists on forumosa that I expected this to be another of your attempts to brain-wash us… :fume:
There is no need to start with your home made analyses of THE Swiss. Obviously you don’t know Switzerland or you would know, that there is no such concept as THE Swiss… :raspberry:
that you replied to me the way you did again proves not only can you not detect satire, but sarcasm escapes you as well. Perhaps I was right the first time, the swiss are a humourless lot.
