It’s a pity nobody bothered to tell the world what its economic and cultural center was, so it went completely unnoticed.
It’s hard to say who is more stupid, Xi for saying such stupid things or Merkel for having a guy check if these childish mumblings were true.
“nobody bothered to tell the world what its economic and cultural center was”
My very superficial understanding is that China is a very good cautionary example of the dangers of authoritarian leadership.
It’s no secret that it was far advanced in many areas, compared to Europe, but it’s fatal flaw was the cultural preference (demand?) for an absolute leader with no accountability (pace Yarvin). In this way it’s similar to russia, another country that has massive potential that is wasted because of the people’s desire/acceptance of absolute, unaccountable leaders (who inevitably get stupider the longer they are in power and lead to ruin as no one can counteract their stupid decisiions…. many such cases!).
Exactly. And it’s absolutely true that Russians also keep pouting about how nobody recognizes their achievements.
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“Economic and cultural center?!? Both China and Russia were remarkably slow to leave feudalism”
Yeah, the idea that China was some kind of world (as opposed to regional) center is pure nonsense. It was very advanced in lots of ways but still the retarded tendency to give leaders unchecked and uncheckable power kept it (and russia) from ever achieving anything like its potential. There’s one theory that the political model of both countries comes from family structure where fathers have absolute unquestionable authority within the family.
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Fathers having total political authority is the householder franchise and why the introduction of the Westminster system led to such a patriarchal society in SA.
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I keep asking that people point me to Chinese art or thought that impacted the rest of the world. We all see how Shakespeare, Cervantes, Michaelangelo, Renoir, and I could go on forever, impacted art far, far beyond their countries of origin. Everybody except for the extremely illiterate knows their names. Who are the Chinese artists whose names everybody knows? I’m a literary critic, I read for a living. How come I never came across anything written in “the cultural center of the world”? If it had any impact on anything, surely I would have experienced the need to familiarize myself with it.
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I just remembered one. Sun Tzu. He’s popular with online nerds but insufficient to make you a cultural capital of the world for centuries.
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“Chinese art or thought that impacted the rest of the world”
Confucius and Confucianism? Taoism?
But it was a different cultural dynamic… while Chinese culture strongly influenced a lot of neighboring countries (to the point where it can be difficult to separate the local from the Chinese) it was never an…. exploring culture. The Chinese approach seems to have more been ‘We’re the center of the world (that’s their name for themselves) so they can come to us’.
That said, you certainly should know of (if not directly know) “The Journey to the West” which is still the source of lots of TV series (inc anime), movie adaptations and video games which are enthusiastically consumed by lots of western youth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_media_adaptations_of_Journey_to_the_West
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I have seen some accounts on substack recently that I think are probably CCP cultural propaganda outlets: their entire mission is to basically whine that Chinese art is just as great as Japanese art, and it’s unfair that it doesn’t get as much airtime.
Ok, who was the Chinese Hokusai? Hiroshige?
There’s a lot of history there, sure, but we aren’t huge fans of Chinese art, because for the most part the brilliance isn’t there. Also, it wasn’t massively influential on French impressionism the way Japanese printmaking was.
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“whine that Chinese art is just as great as Japanese art”
Are they smoking crack? Japanese painting (sensu largo) is easily the greatest in Asia…. and among the best in the world.
Chinese… mkay….it has its moments but nothing has ever made the ‘Wow!’ impression on me (or the ‘why do I find this so fascinating that I want to stare at it for hours? impression).
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Exactly. It can be really good but for a country to count as the cultural center of the world, it needs to have influential cultural products. It can be unfair that it didn’t attract attention but unfairness doesn’t change facts.
I’m only an important scholar in my field if people read and quote my stuff, if it defines the conversation, if people use it in their own scholarship. If nobody in the field heard of me, then I’m not an important academic. Whether it’s fair or not is beyond the point.
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In SA, it’s much more about the party than the politician. This made the Soviet Communist Party enormously influential, but Putinism just seems like old style big man politics. The government can’t adopt the CCP system either since the Mandarin system goes against their DEI ideology.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2025/09/07/an-ignominious-suicide-the-anc-on-death-watch/
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I know a sweet young college student IRL who is taking a chinese course from somebody who is obviously an official state emissary direct from CCP. Kid is just full of bubbling naive enthusiasm about how wonderful China is. This is what we get for not teaching *anything* about our own culture, or anybody else’s. The first person you meet with any real nationalism (or a hefty training in indoctrination techniques), and you go down like a bottlefed lamb.
IKR? That and you mention really huge, formative historical events that you remember well, as an example or counter-example of something being discussed, and the whole table just kind of turns its eyes on you with a collective “file not found” readout.
Like, oh. It happened before you were out of diapers, so you’ve never heard of it and it doesn’t exist.
Asia has been hugely economically important for centuries. That’s why Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus tried to find trade routes. It’s why the Dutch established a settlement in SA to resupply their ships on the trade with Asia. Why wouldn’t you consider yourself the center when everyone is trying to get to you?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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