What do people mean Taiwan is more China than China

I dont get it is it because they both speak loudly

the chinese communist party and the cultural revolution, look into it.

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6/10

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see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WPkkbq0U4Y

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I don’t get this too. Context would help.

But I’d guess it’s because we inherited all the chinese traditions. You see, chinese can’t even write the word chinese right. They write it simplified.

So it’s important to understand that there has been many China ruled by different people and controlling different territories. When Mao took over, he disliked chinese culture and felt it was holding China back from his Chinese communist Utopia. He set out to destroy elements of chinese culture he deemed impure and capitalist during the cultural revolution. Temples, relics, ancient sites, books, etc were all destroyed during this time.

For example, you won’t find many ancient temples in China. Many westerners go to China thinking they’ll stumble on some ancient shaolin temple, not the case. They were mostly abandoned if not torn down during this time.

Taiwan or rather the ROC as the KMT retreated to the island of Taiwan still believed it was the true China. And has kept more of the traditions and culture alive and preserved. That is why almost all of the treasures of China are in Taiwan. And why only replicas are in China and they resent Taiwan for this.

So in many ways, Taiwan is more like the China of the past than the PRC or what we call modern day China.

But then again, China wasn’t some single monolithic empire and culture.

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Yup they stole the name “China” and thought themselves were the real chinese. I mean at least have the decency to come up with your own name if you’re taking over a country. 夏商周秦 to 宋元明清 all got their own names. Yeah occasionally we got something like 漢 and 蜀漢, but 蜀漢 thought they’re the legitimate successor of 漢. CCP didn’t succeed anything from the old China.

And now people are convinced that they represent the chinese culture. You want culture you go to Hong king, Taiwan, or even japan preserve some old oriental traditions.

But this goes back to the fall of the Tang dynasty. At that time China was invaded by northerners (again), and the “Han” Chinese were pushed south and to the periphery (Taiwan). Some Taiwanese say their names can be traced back to Tang dynasty ancestors, giving them a kind of China elan, whereas the modern Chinese in China are pretty mixed. Well, that’s the story. I mean who cares?
Fast forward to the 20th century and the nationalists preserved and promoted traditional “Chinese culture”–calligraphy, poetry and painting etc.–as the over enthusiastic commies were smashing temples and simplifying Chinese characters. You won’t find many active Taoist temples in Chinese cities these days, whereas they are all over Taiwan etc.

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that’s a fact.

but i don’t see much traditional chinese heritage in taiwan either. might be that taiwan’s a relatively new country. they don’t have century(not so say millennial) old buildings here. but in general there’s a scarcity of historical buildings here, whether it be fujian, hakka, portuguese, holland influenced. i guess 99% of the old architecture fell victim to the industrial revolution.

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Well there’s actually a lot of old temples in Taiwan , you just need to travel around a bit. old buildings, agreed very few. Since I’ve arrived I’ve seen most of the Japanese heritage buildings disappear in Taipei too along with the KMT miMitary camps.
I don’t like Taiwan is the real China statements though, it’s not it’s just Taiwan.

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Yeah it’s lazy

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by buildings i also included temples. may should be excluded but i don’t see why. most of them were built in the last few decades and most of them look shitty, they don’t hold any worth except for the mazu triad gang boss who keeps it.

There was no significant settlement of “Chinese” people in Taiwan during the Tang dynasty. This came much later with the Dutch setting up an entrepot at Fort Zeelandia (now Anping in Tainan) in the 17th century.

If we’re tied up with “China” it is in fact linked to this history of colonialism, specifically settler colonialism. And in this way, Taiwan is closer to places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other settler colonies. Would you think of those places as authentically “French” or “British”?

Guy

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Yeah, we all know the story. But if you speak to Taiwanese some will claim descent from Tang antecedents. I thought this was interesting. Most likely a number came over in the wake of the collapse of that dynasty, a really significant event in Chinese history that is remembered by the Chinese as if it happened yesterday.

And I didn’t mention the obvious point that the Qing (northerners again) was a foreign dynasty and that the Ming (“Han”) loyalists decamped to Taiwan, Zheng Chenggong and all that.

You need to bone up on your history if you believe that bullshit.

When was the fall of the Tang?

When did Chinese start coming to Taiwan?

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Ooh ohh I got this!

Crop rotation in the 14th century was considerably more widespread…

…sorry wrong history text book. Um, 907. The Tang Dynasty ended in 907. The first 7 Eleven opened in Taiwan in 1979. So that’s quite the gap.

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I am very well read in Chinese history, and I suggest you have a little more respect both for me and local people who know their history a lot better than you I would wager.

Tell me more then about your theory and how it applies to Taiwan .:sunglasses:

I mean you could have said the Ming or the Qing but nope…You went down the Tang route.

The Tang was a great era in Chinese history it’s no surprise half the ethnic Chinese population would like to imagine an ‘association’ with them.

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I don’t have a theory, but I could make one up I suppose. Perhaps the Taiwanese I spoke to were doing the same, but oral history always contains nuggets of truth. Apparently, names and grammar of Taiwanese have links to Tang China. The fall of the Tang was a cataclysmic event in Chinese history. In the general exodus of many Han Chinese to the south it is quite likely a few made it over to Taiwan. To extrapolate from these associations and say this makes you more Chinese than the Chinese in China is of course silly. But I doubt the original reportage of Tang connections is bullshit.

There are occasional stories around that Quebec-French is closer to the French language of 400 years ago than modern France-French is; I’ve heard similar things about aspects of English, but I think more in the United States than in Canada or New Zealand. I very much doubt the languages are any more authentic - a word I cringe at anyway - but little bits of vocabulary, or pronunciation, could certainly have changed at variable rates.

Of course, that doesn’t make them more French than the French, but it’s reasonable that aspects of a culture can be better preserved in its new home than the place of origin: the Middle East, for example, is after all Christianity’s original heartland. (It’s kind of a pity Dawkins’s word “meme” has been taken over for Internet jokes: it’d be a good term for this.)

Not at all saying that is true for Taiwan and China.

Taiwanese people claiming distant Tang ancestry sounds like British people in the 19th century deciding they must be descendants of those good Celts or Picts, not those nefarious Angles or Saxons or, heaven forbid, Normans. Barely within the realm of possibility, sure, maybe - verifiable or anything that could be called “historical”, probably not.

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