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- Hacker News
- > Callum, a 24-year-old Beijing resident, told CNN that questioning the Tang’s existence could be a way to rebel against established wisdom and a way for China’s young – faced with a slowing economy and greater competition for jobs and resources – to criticize authorities.
> “It is a way for people to attack the established authorities. It is almost like saying ‘those so-called experts are nothing special. They have all been misleading people. I am the one who understands the truth, and I have exposed them all.’”
China got it's own form of Qanon.
by alsetmusic - Depends on how much you think people actually believe Qanon. This is "We're going to raise a middle finger to the authorities in a form that's hard for them to come down on us, but it's very deliberately against the authorities." Qanon may have been that, too, but my impression is that at least some people really believed it.by AnimalMuppet
- there's something comforting seeing that someone else on the other side of the planet from me has the same troubles.by fragmede
- Historical revisionism, CCP :sakura: :starry_eyed:
Historical revisionism, random people :angry: :barf:
- - What motivated the hoax and its spread is hard to pin down.
It’s not that hard to pin down. Nobody seriously doubts that the Tang dynasty existed; this was mostly a joke made to satirize the Western Pseudohistory Theory: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Pseudohistory_Theory
That said, plenty of Chinese people genuinely believe Chinese civilization has been the most advanced since antiquity, and that the sophistication of ancient Greek and Western civilization should be questioned.
by slowpacket - What's interesting is that if you read Wikipedia, there are multiple (without sources, mind) sentences going "btw Li Yuan was totally Han via an ancestor 17 generations previously".
So clearly this is rather important to some people.
by EdwardDiego - If Tang Dynasties are real, why haven't I seen one?by garbawarb
- They made orange drink powder for the Apollo Missions. I KID YOU NOT!by ForOldHack
- Because they aren't and never have been! This has been scientifically proven from the astrological data according to my sources.by yesco
- I had Tang every day with lunch when I was a kid. But it was the seventies so there's that ...by rnd0
- The Economist had a similar article [1] about Han chauvinism leading to rejection of the Qing dynasty, and causing quite a headache for the CCP.
> In China’s official narrative, the country suffered a “century of humiliation” of foreign invasions, starting with the first opium war in 1840 and ending only with Mao’s rise to power in 1949. But the 1644 view—cheekily expressed by some online as “three centuries of humiliation”—argues that subjugation began with the Qing. According to this school, the Qing were anti-Han interlopers and, making matters worse, feckless in repelling foreign forces.
> Dredging up all this history is uncomfortable for the party. The territorial boundaries claimed by modern China—including Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Taiwan—were brought into the Chinese empire by the Qing, not the Ming. Grievances about the Manchus also cut against the ideal of ethnic harmony advanced by the party. Although much of what forms modern Chinese identity is derived from Han traditions, it is unseemly to talk openly about the dominance of this one ethnic group, which accounts for 90% of the Chinese population. The party looks askance at “Han chauvinism”, believing, with reason, that it may lead to more resentment from non-Han groups.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/china/2026/07/20/why-criticism-of-...
by AlexCoventry - Tang Dynasty -- isn't that a band which introduced heavy metal to China in the 90's?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_Dynasty_(band)
They lived the Spinal Tap lifestyle before Spinal Tap.
by JennyWeston - I'm currently reading 'There Is No Antimemetics Division' and this news item reminds me of that. Also, 1984, in which the government actively establishes false narratives as actual history and do it so many times that it's impossible to remember what really happened.by raajg
- "The negationist proposition, in the age in which it is being advanced, cannot therefore be truly denied, since everything, all of us, including those who reject it, have passed over, whether we like it or not, into an age where there is no longer any objective recourse. The proposition, therefore, can be rejected only by a kind of mirror denial. And that is where its victory lies - though in fact it is not its victory, but the victory of real time over the present, over the past, over any form whatsoever of logical articulation of reality." - Jean Baudrillardby YackerLose
- When was there an age where there was objective recourse? I guess when we could burn people for heresy?
- A much better article about the phenomenon: https://open.substack.com/pub/ramble/p/the-tang-dynasty-was-...by sincerely
- Aside from the poor choice of background color. ;)by layer8
- I encourage anyone browsing through this to read that link. It gives insight on what many Westerners have no visibility into - how many Chinese view the Qing dynasty, which was romanticized by Spielberg's Last Emperor. More importantly, it's a clue on why China is fervently cracking down on this.
If you search on Google, there's a slew of Chinese restaurants in the US named "Ming Dynasty." If you were in the SF Peninsula in the 80's and 90's, the one on Embarcadero and 101 drew well known chefs from Hong Kong during its heyday. Conversely, Google knows of two "Ching" or "Qin Dynasty" restaurants in the US. Many Han Chinese have always looked down on the Ching Dynasty as illegitimate colonialists.
This particular issue is a sore point with the CCP with respect to Hong Kong. During the crackdowns in 2019, mainland propaganda justified the crackdown as de-colonization. They called the British takeover an invasion to force subjugation through mass drugging (opium).
In response to this, many protestors appealed to Han-centrism. They argued that the Ching were already an illegitimate colonizing force, and blame them for everything that led up to Western colonization. This includes everything from weakened military might to failed trade/war negotiations, to anti-opium crackdowns. If the British broke in, it's because the Manchus left the door open. And by legitimizing the Ching Dynasty, you have an indirect trail of responsibility to the CCP themselves.
This Hong Kong link is why this Tang issue is not a joke to the CCP.
Final note because I have to pre-emptively address this on social media: If you feel like you need to jump in with a generic anti-colonial comment, don't. Hongkongers' views of being British subjects, especially from 1970's on, should absolutely not be seen through Western, especially modern progressive PoV. TL;DR - the majority, often vast majority, of Hongkongers wished to remain under British rule.
by snapetom - The same sort of arguments are playing out in the US, albeit on a shorter timescale. I couldn't say when it started, but it's extremely depressing that the history section in most general bookstores is just a locus for narrative warfare rather than scholarship.
Of course, this phenomenon is by no means unique to these two countries. I know a Japanese author who has a small but dedicated following for his argument that nuclear weapons don't exist: https://books.google.com/books/about/Death_Object.html?id=Mw...
by anigbrowl - No atom bomb. Wow...that some nearly Shockley levels of 'engineers disease' right there.
Edit: clarified which part of the post I was referencing.
by kjs3 - What's his explanation for what happened? iirc, immediately after Hiroshima the survivors had thought the Allies had used some sort of fuel bomb.by Apocryphon
- I get what you mean that pop hist. books aren't academic, but "narrative warfare" describes a huge proportion of historical scholarship. Whether or not you agree with it, that's the whole point of Metahistory and the linguistic turn.
- I’ve read plenty of good history/biography publishing in the past 50 years right up to last year. I’m not sure I understand your claim.
Narrative warfare… I guess the question is, what isn’t “narrative warfare”?
by talon8635 - Its a Chinese equivalent of the phantom time theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory
Its just as silly as phantom time and covers almost exactly the same period. The motive is possibly racist which makes it more sinister.
by graemep - And it's taken about as seriously as "birds don't exist" or "the earth is flat". CNN is just doing straight up orientalism. Exoticizing a normal aspect of a culture that if you think hard enough happens in western cultures just as often if not moreby culi
- I just read the theory and I’m now a believer.
It’s only 1729! Let’s goo, I mean:
Come on ye lads!
by NotThatFast - I was going to say that it seems the equivalent of the "Belgium does not exist" meme (ante litteram) from a few decades ago.by riffraff
- Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) which I thought was the same as this but actually compresses a whole lot more time into less than 1000 years and does word magic to imply that King Solomon = Suleiman the Magnificent.by 1-more
- welcome to Russian equivalent New Chronology
https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/newchronology.html
https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-bizarre-conspiracy-th...
by etc-hosts - The version I've had argued to me didn't change any chronology, they just insisted that the Song dynasty started earlier so the Tang shouldn't be counted.
The context was weird, the person pushing it was very passionate about the subject, and since I certainly don't know all that much about Chinese history from the period, I just smiled and nodded. Apparently this is a bigger thing?
by Tuna-Fish