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
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 :)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
That's mainly because, in China, region-based criticism is considered very, very rude.
people don't talk about this in public even though they do have opinions
> I couldn't even get people to tell me some negative stereotypes
it's kinda like you're asking people to tell you some negative stereotypes of colored people
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 :)
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.
https://www.douban.com/group/topic/73775950/?_i=2828208KaNEX...
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
> 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.
(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).
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.
Most Americans can easily make themselves understood (in speech or writing) to most other Americans. They watch the same TV shows and movies.
In the EU, local languages are still much stronger than dialects in China.
Parts of the Europeans also make do with English, a language that is native to none of the countries in Europe.
Which ones would be the most conservative and liberal provinces?
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.
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.
Source: Been watching their YT channel for a while.
It’s a great guide for Chinese-focused foodies.
Please note that he mainly focuses on Sichuan cuisine, which is a bit spicy.
Interestingly, they have referenced chef Wang a couple of times, among few other YT channels.
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.
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.
As with some other commentors, I was surprised to not see a lot of dishes that I thought were staples, and quite a few were under different names.
Nonetheless, really amazing---and made me quite hungry at well-past midnight!
> 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.
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.
It's a shame that it's now being destroyed.