lyon-77

For real 😂

😅 I've adopted the EDF since 2018. Fully prepared to be heartbroken the third time in four years... (Please prove me wrong. Many thx)

@SecondRingSZN lol the shade

I've said he has a decent relationship with propaganda ppl that discourse won't hurt him, he's basically a May 4th youth model quoting Li Dazhao. His fans can calm down now that role (& his terrible acting) should be criticized.

@W_T_Han Those boots and the jade pendant—too classic 😂

Homelander painted in Song style

@SecondRingSZN We should be marketing our premium caste system—民为贵，社稷次之，君为轻

Sorry why are Indian bot farms pushing Chinese caste system propaganda in multiple languages I thought they're proud of their caste system

(2/2) Qin rose through a combination of Legalist reforms and an exceptionally militarized state structure that rewarded military achievement, mobilized manpower on an unprecedented scale, and oriented much of society toward interstate warfare. After unification, Qin centralized governance, standardized writing, measurements, currency, and systems of administration, while coordinating and connecting large-scale infrastructure projects such as canals, inter-state roads, and defensive fortifications (which would later be known as the Great Wall). This was the first time a centralized administration was extended across the entire realm. The burden of these reforms and projects proved too heavy to sustain, and the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) collapsed shortly after the First Emperor's death. However, many of its institutional innovations proved remarkably durable. The fact that the following Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) largely retained the centralized administrative framework despite Qin's political failure suggests that the institutional transformation itself had been successful. Initially, the Han Dynasty was ambivalent about how much of the Qin model should be retained. It adopted a hybrid system, continuing to enfeoff territories among members of the imperial family while reducing hereditary enfeoffment for founding generals and ministers outside the royal house. To avoid becoming a powerless figurehead like the Zhou king, the Han emperor also kept more territory under his direct control and retained greater leverage over the feudal kings. Over the next few decades, several rebellions by the feudal kings demonstrated that even family members could not necessarily be trusted after a few generations, leading successive emperors to steadily reduce the autonomy of hereditary rulers and expand the authority of the central government. This became the long-term trend in Chinese history. Feudal lordship gradually evolved into honorary titles with limited political authority, limited hereditary rights, or both. What ultimately enabled political centralization was not Qin's harshness but its administrative framework. The Han rulers retained the centralized administrative framework while generally adopting lower taxes, less severe laws, and a less militarized and more civil style of governance. As political authority became increasingly vested in institutions rather than personal relationships, the state developed its own bureaucracy, finances, and administrative authority. Distinctions between the state treasury and the imperial household treasury first appeared during the Han Dynasty, and government service gradually became less dependent on hereditary aristocratic status. Although elite families remained influential, access to education and bureaucratic office expanded beyond the hereditary nobility, creating new avenues of social mobility and making political authority increasingly tied to officeholding rather than noble birth. Over time, governance became less dependent on the personal relationships that had once held the Zhou feudal order together and more dependent on institutions that could outlast individual rulers or aristocrats. The result was a state that could often continue functioning through child emperors, regencies, succession crises, dynastic transitions, and other periods of political instability. With the development of this highly institutionalized bureaucratic system, China never returned to feudalism as its primary model of governance. Even during periods of division, political fragmentation gemerally produced competing centralized states rather than a revival of the Zhou feudal system.

(1/2) Technological advancement had more to do with the fall of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE) than the establishment of feudalism in the following Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BCE). Shang was a more militant state than Zhou and maintained its dominance through military superiority, supported by advanced bronze production and a royal ancestor cult that reinforced the legitimacy of the ruling house. Over time, however, bronze technology spread, allowing Zhou to build a coalition of dissatisfied peripheral states and tribes and eventually overthrow Shang. The transfer of power from Shang to Zhou created both a legitimacy problem and a governance problem. Zhou needed to explain why Shang's royal ancestors had apparently failed to protect the dynasty, and it also needed a way to govern a much larger coalition of allies and newly incorporated peoples. The answer to the first problem was the Mandate of Heaven: rulers held authority not simply because of their bloodline, but because Heaven continued to approve of their conduct. This allowed Zhou to justify both Shang's fall and its own rise. To address the second problem, the Zhou rulers divided land among members of the royal house and key allies to govern in a hereditary fashion. In this way, the Zhou royal domain only needed to maintain a network of political and familial relationships rather than constantly imposing its authority through military force. For centuries this arrangement worked remarkably well, allowing the Zhou order to expand far beyond what the Zhou king could have governed directly. It was also in this context that political hierarchy became closely associated with familial hierarchy: the ruler of a state was expected to care for his subordinates as a father cared for his children, while subordinates were expected to respect and obey him in return. Centuries later, Confucius looked back on the early Zhou order as an idealized model of political and social harmony and incorporated many of these ideas into what later became Confucian thought. In form the political system may resemble European feudalism, but the underlying logic was very different. The Zhou feudal states were originally parts of a single Zhou political order rather than independent polities that happened to share similar institutions. The system was an innovative political solution to the problem of governing a large coalition without relying on constant military domination and with limited administrative capacity. Over time, however, the bonds of kinship and alliance that held it together weakened with each generation. The period later known as Eastern Zhou (771–256 BCE) saw the gradual erosion of Zhou authority as the feudal states became increasingly powerful and competitive. Conflicts intensified throughout the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE) and eventually reached a point where states no longer meaningfully respected either the Zhou order or the authority of the Zhou king, marking the transition into the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). During this time, rulers of major states increasingly declared themselves kings, even though the Zhou king still existed. These kingdoms also increasingly conquered and annexed one another rather than merely forcing other states to acknowledge their hegemony. After several centuries of brutal competition, Qin emerged as the strongest state, conquered all others, and finally absorbed the weak Zhou royal domain, bringing both the Warring States period and the Zhou Dynasty to an end.

@fTU4sQyxgx86362 跑肯定跑呀，只是说极少出逃别国。其实最近的例子都不是载沣，应该算老蒋，跑了但没跑出国。

@77_lyon 皇帝逃跑的事情也不是没有发生过，唐玄宗往四川跑，北宋朝廷往临安跑，中国那么大，所经过的距离也不比欧洲贵族跑到邻国寻求庇护的距离近。朱由检他是被包围了没法跑，但凡有机会跑，南边还有个首都呢，那边有一套完整的官僚系统，直接跑过去无缝切换再次抵抗就是了。

I always find it fascinating that the first instinct of many failed European monarchs was exile abroad, whereas Chinese rulers usually abdicated or died where they stood. The last Song emperor died with his ministers rather than surrender. The last Ming emperor hanged himself in Beijing when the Ming fell. And the last Qing regent, after surviving multiple assassination attempts and the collapse of the dynasty, simply retired to his Beijing mansion. He then spent the rest of his life in Beijing and Tianjin through the warlord era, the Republican period, the Japanese invasion, and the founding of the PRC. When Japan established the puppet state of Manchukuo, he publicly denounced it rather than treating it as a refuge. Bro never seemed to think there was another state he could flee to or call home.

You might have the expectation that Chinese characters consist of more photographs, but in reality they are 80-90% phono-semantic compounds. The radical is supposed to just indicate a semantic category, and the phonetic component should not be processed for semantic clue whatsoever. It's actually more intuitive that you've learnt to speak first rather than learning to speak and read simultaneously, because this order is closer to how those characters were first invented. People were already speaking the language and knew perfectly well what a word sounded like. As such, they only needed a category clue and a phonetic clue to record this word in writing. This mechanism is surprisingly efficient in creating new characters even today: youtu.be/8ol7DsPnHcE?is…

@77_lyon @MetalSpearFish Oof, this is explanation on a stretch haha, but respect for writing a long explanation 😆 i know I am (only) HSK2 officially, but “watered down” logic would be aplicable for other things, not fire hahah 😁 but it is what it is, we just need to find our own ways to learn words 😁

its p common for people to hear me speak Chinese, have a conversation, understand what they say etc, but then they’re still really surprised when I show I can read something. I’m sorry who are these foreigners who can speak and understand Chinese but can’t read it?

Interesting review of China’s K–12 history curriculum covering WWII and China’s historical relationship with Russia, for those who are curious. (Auto-translated English captions available.) youtu.be/JQ2uMP0V7q0?is…

They are pretty logical! I'm very interested in languages and linguistics, though I'm not a Chinese-as-a-Foreign-Language instructor. Sometimes I wonder how Chinese characters are typically taught to non-native speakers and why some of these helpful insights don't seem to be introduced earlier. Take 淡 as an example. Like most Chinese characters, it is composed of a semantic component and a phonetic component. On the left-hand side, you've got water; on the right-hand side, you've got the phonetic clue 炎 ("yan"). Originally, the character was probably pronounced much closer to its phonetic component. However, pronunciation evolved over time, as it does in all languages, so the final vowel tends to be the more reliable clue today. Now you can see why 淡 is pronounced "dan," sharing the same final vowel as "yan," and why its meaning, "light" or "bland," is related to things being diluted or watered down. You can also learn a whole group of characters very quickly: 谈 ("tan," to discuss) has a speech radical; 毯 ("tan," carpet) has a fur radical; 痰 ("tan," phlegm) has an illness radical; and the less common literary character 啖 ("dan," to eat) has a mouth radical. You may also notice that these characters are all pronounced as either "tan" or "dan," suggesting that the phonetic component has not drifted very far. In Mandarin, t and d are both /t/ sounds in IPA, distinguished only by aspiration versus non-aspiration. The present-day differences are largely tonal and aspirational, yet the relationship remains obvious. Character forms like these preserve clues to historical sound changes, making them additionally useful for understanding how Chinese evolved over time.

@77_lyon @MetalSpearFish Main reason i dont spend too much effort on hanzi (i do Chineasy, and I know around 600-700) is because i want to focus on listening, but you cant tell me all of them have logic 😅 for instance 淡 - how does water radical and fire make logic? 😁 putting out fire makes it plain?

It's interesting because 面 originally indicated both "face" and "flour" due to their shared pronunciation. A separate character for the latter, formed by adding the wheat radical, first appeared during the Eastern Han Dynasty, but did not become dominant until much later. Meanwhile, the character used from the Eastern Han through the Tang was 麪 rather than the modern traditional form 麵. Because its phonetic component 丏 was itself a rare character, people gradually found it confusing and began replacing it with the more familiar 面 as the phonetic component, a trend that became increasingly common from the Song Dynasty onward. As a result, the modern traditional form 麵, combining the wheat radical with 面 as the phonetic component, did not become dominant until the Ming Dynasty. Meanwhile, the modern simplified form reverts to the older graph 面, which had served both meanings in formal writing from the Zhou through the Three Kingdoms periods and continued to survive in vernacular writing thereafter. I find it to be a pretty neat linguistic evidence that the two meanings have shared the same pronunciation throughout Chinese history.

@ShumeyNemke @MetalSpearFish No, Hanzi is so amazing and efficient once you get its logic.

@MetalSpearFish Life’s too short to learn hanzi #GoPinyinGo

@WhatTheEff1975 @Darnz98 @JoyFaiz84527 @Globalstats11 Non-Han people are also a mix bag of agnostic/atheist, shamanism/folk religion, religious syncretism, and then the stereotyped buddhism/Islam/etc. How assigning religion based on one's ethnicity is not seen as racist and ignorant is beyond me.

@Darnz98 @JoyFaiz84527 @Globalstats11 Map is still wrong: -Qinghai & Gansu are Buddhist majority or the largest religious group -Unofficially, Xinxiang has Han majority, the northern half (Dzungaria) already has 70-80% Han ...Han are mostly Chinese Folk religion/Buddhist/Atheist

Largest Religions in China by Province 🇨🇳 🟩 Islam 🟧 Buddhism 🟥 Catholicism 🟦 Protestantism

@xunyangwusu @VMinhTheBold 妓女才不会这么想，嫖客才会这么想

@VMinhTheBold 活在种姓制度文化中的人，看待其他国家事物时也只会想到种姓。 就像那句俗语：在妓女的眼中，所有女人都是会卖身的，不卖的只是因为价格没谈好。 还不如让他们继续这么认为，这样还能少一些印度移民。

I keep seeing posts from Indians claiming that China has a caste system similar to India's. They keep throwing around the terms Shi (士), Nong (农), Gong (工), and Shang (商) as if they were ethnic groups. These were just the four primary occupations of a Confucian society.

There are no ethnic Chinese, I would substitute that with Han if that's your intention. Even till today, in census you'd see that the majority ethnic group in China is Han—not Chinese, whereas in Russia the majority ethnicity would obviously be Russian, and Korean in South and North Korea.

@haravayin_hogh The 1st and 5th of the Five Dynasties were led by ethnic Chinese, and then the 2nd (Later Tang) was Turkic but had previously been granted the use of the Tang imperial surname and took a restorationist posture. So, not quite, really.

Interesting that the 5 northern states ruled by non-Han were retrospectively integrated as full Chinese dynasties. Equivalent might be the Byzantines claiming the western Germanic kingdoms as culturally/politically Roman had the plague of Justinian not ended hopes of reconquest.

Well, I definitely think that the nature of a centralized government binds the ruler more closely to the state, which ironically increases accountability. In China’s case, this accountability is more stable and long-term as the ruler typically follows a monarchy-like dynastic succession rather than relying primarily on military might and charisma. At the same time, governing such a large centralized state required a large and mature bureaucratic system that could continue functioning even under an emperor who played a relatively limited role in governance. This further bound the emperor to the state and created expectations that he govern in the state’s interest. In extreme cases, officials might strongly condemn or even abandon an emperor who appeared to have betrayed the state itself. Some scholars have argued that translating the Chinese Huangdi (皇帝) simply as “emperor” can be misleading because the institution itself evolved quite differently from what many people associate with the term. The title was created by the Qin after the first unification and was intended to stand above the rank of king, but many later dynasties would go on to have ten or more hereditary successions with only sporadic military activity and a heavy emphasis on civil governance. So Chinese “emperors” were more monarchy-like and more closely tied to the state than most people think. Their legitimacy rested more on maintaining order and governing effectively than on personal military achievement. This was reinforced by a bureaucratic system that allowed the state to endure beyond any particular ruler. It’s an interesting dynamic. The more the state became independent of any individual emperor, the more the office itself became accountable to the state it governed. In that sense, the institution combined hereditary succession with a centralized bureaucratic state in a way that does not fit neatly into the usual distinction between “emperor” and “monarch.”

@77_lyon For most of history, there was nowhere else a deposed Emperor might plausibly go.

@IgnatianThomist Haha I am aware

@77_lyon Well famously, Russian aristocrats spoke more French than Russian for a while

@IgnatianThomist I wouldn't use the word "cosmopolites," but otherwise see the quote for the discussion thread before my input. I don't disagree with you as I find Chinese rulers more connected to the land and their legitimacy dependent on this connection.

@77_lyon Because European monarchs were cosmopolites, specially in the late XIXth and early XXth century. Why should a German prince care so much about whatever nation they got the dynastic luck of ruling.

我没有在赞扬他😂 明朝名节方面的社会风气我整体上是反感的，钓名沽誉，逼人死节，都挺恶心。皇帝怎样我不管，我不觉得不相干的文人需要为了王朝覆灭自尽，先杀自家女眷更是毫无人性，把女眷当作个人私产随意处置。如果个人想死，可以，自己的选择；别人帮忙"自杀"，恕我完全不认同。 崇祯难道不是公认的糟糕皇帝？除了很努力以外，执政一塌糊涂，总觉得别人对不起他，还看不清自己错在哪儿。我说他本来不用死，但自个儿走了死路，不是在赞扬他。 另外北宋本来就不是必然要变成南宋的，如果没有些令人窒息的决策，把中流的牌打出了最差的可能，也不至于送成这样。但北宋的民生底子比明朝好太多了，政治也没糟糕到明末那种情形。一个本来就还没腐坏到要倒塌的王朝，退到南方再撑个 150 年是合理的。我不觉得明末有这个条件，而且政治上它的君臣关系长期恶劣到难以言喻，皇帝下限又极低，在整个中国史上都得垫底。它那个环境就是该洗牌了，能以最少伤害民生的方式最好，但苟延残喘我看够呛。

@77_lyon 東晉，南宋。一個政權還有管治能力的話都是會跑路活下去的，將來的事誰知道，可能中興呢。我覺得南宋這樣再苟150年，不丟人。不跑就是沒本錢維持政權了。皇帝怎麽個死法比較得體是他自己的事，對於百姓老説沒分別。你可以說這個皇帝還是要臉，有點骨氣，但是如果說氣節，感覺就過了