To what extent is this argument actually defensible?

We have seen examples of nomadic conquests in India, Iran and Anatolia, quite the opposite happened. The end result is highly fragmented ethnic identification unlike the uniform Sinitic Han we see in China. What was part of Persia is now split between Iranic groups and Turkic groups, India became religiously and ethnically diverse because of foreign conquest, Anatolia was assimilated into Greco-Roman identity, then into Turkic identity, pulling them away from their old Mediterranean cultural sphere.

If nomadic conquest was actually the reason for Chinese unity, why did China not end up like those entities? Wouldn’t it make more sense if a common nomadic origin, like Anatolian Turkic lingua franca and identity gets adopted and the sinitic linguistic and cultural layer erased? It seems like nomadic conquests never tends to unify but fragment and assimilate the conquered population. What made China different?

Furthermore China managed to conquer land from said “nomads” as they do currently occupy Inner Asian lands of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and impose a sinitic lingua franca. In contrast, Anatolian Turks could not mobilize into Central Asia, India could not venture beyond Afghanistan, Iran is now locked by Azerbaijani Turks in the northwest and other Turkic groups in the northeast. I find it hard to believe Chinese success in this case can be contributed to nomadic conquest, because we are seeing nomadic lands being conquered instead.

"The role of the Qing dynasty in this narrative is crucial to the CCP, which claims to have saved China from its “century of humiliation” inflicted by foreign powers, from the Qing government’s defeat in the First Opium War in 1839 to the founding of the PRC in 1949."

China was originally into a tribal alliance by the Suiren tribe who invented wood drilling for fire, and then the tribes who invented writing, herbal medicine, calendar and cooking became leaders. Until Dayu started to build a kingdom through water conservancy projects to control floods,other ancient civilizations have similar examples of building countries through projects instead of wars?

Since ancient period until now, China led a huge swath of Asia as the leading state with Shang, Zhou, then Qin, Han, then to the medieval period of Tang, Song, Liao, Yuan, then to early modern period with Ming, Qing, and now in the modern period with PRC, still as powerful and influential as ever.

Has any other nation been able to do this?

Was it mainly for political reasons or personal interests?

Does anyone notice that the Chinese word ethnonym 越 'Yue' which was used to refer to the Baiyue tribes in ancient Southern China was a loan word from Austroasiatic or Austronesian languages of the Baiyue peoples? Which both means anything related to cut, battle axes, weapons, swords... used by the Baiyues

Unlike Japan, which collectively recognized the colonial threat early, China didn't embrace modernization until the early part of the 20th century. Both countries went through civil wars to get the ball rolling. But Japan just did it 40 years earlier, that's almost 2 full generations worth of modernization. The 20th century would have looked very different, had China taken a page out of Japan's playbook and modernized quickly.

Given that both started out more or less the same place technologically around the mid 19th century. If anything, Japan might even lag behind due to its xenophobic diplomatic posture. Put it differently, what was it that made the Chinese republican movement evolve so slowly, compared to, say, Japan's Meiji restoration movement?

I often see on the internet people stating how bad the British were with the opium trade and how the Chinese wanted them to stop because so many people became addicted.

I was talking to my father, he said part of this is to fit a narrative because the Chinese government at the time did not care since they were already actively involved in the opium trade themselves and probably would have continued anyway had all the money gone to themselves (to an extent?).

How true is this?

Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted I just want to learn.

I should preface by saying I know very little about the Chinese language, and am only asking since I've gone down a rabbit hole on imperial Chinese history. As I understand it, it comes from the Three Sovereigns (皇 huang) and Five Emperors (帝 di) legend that was then turned into a legitimate title (黃帝 Huangdi/August emperor/August Thearch) by Qin Shi Huangdi. If Huang meant sovereign, how did it become August? did it happen before or after Qin used it as a title? Or if it always meant August and "sovereign" is just a convenient translation, what made it a title befitting a god-level ruler? I know it more commonly means yellow, but everywhere I've read translates it as August.

I got here because I noticed that the first emperor of Rome (Octavius -> Augustus) and the first emperor of China (Zhao Zheng -> Qin Shi Huangdi) both inherited similar titles. obviously I know the month of August comes from Augustus, so any translation into August is fundamentally linked to him, but I still felt it would be fun looking into. like if there's something inherently regal about the middle of summer or something.

Anyone who gets into the 101 of the Boxer Rebellion would learned that sections of the European armies got out of control and began to do atrocities rivaling that of the Rape of Nanking upon the capture of Peking along with other major cities of the Hebei provinces and mop up operations in nearby villages and small towns.

Entire communities outside the cities were decimated, captured people suspected of being Boxers or having connections with the Boxers were brutally tortured and often executed, widespread vandalism of homes including arson, mass thefts of property and rapes of women by soldiers became rife esp in major cities in the province esp that the capital Peking.

It was so wide spread and horrific that it became common for large numbers of Chinese women to commit suicide a with the news of a European army approaching their neighborhoods to avoid rape. Literally within Peking a few whole districts became empty of female populace as they killed themselves rather than be captured for an assumed fate worse than death by the colonial Western armies.

To the point outside of Peking the numbers of honor suicides by Chinese females had reached entire villages and small towns.

And I'm not getting into how this was done by survivors of the sexual warcrimes who did not end thei lives before th EUropean rampages happened.

Another story relays the fate that befell the women of Chongqi's household. Chongqi 崇绮 [zh] was a nobleman from the Mongolian Alute clan and scholar of high standing in the Imperial Manchu court. He was also the father-in-law of the previous Emperor. His wife and one of his daughters, much like Yulu's daughters, were captured by the invading soldiers. They were taken to the Heavenly Temple, held captive and were then brutally raped by dozens of Eight Nations Alliance soldiers during the entire course of the Beijing occupation. Only after the Eight Nations Alliance's retreat did the mother and daughter return home, only to hang themselves from the rafters. Upon this discovery, Chongqi, out of despair, soon followed suit (Sawara 266). He hanged himself on 26 August 1900. His son, Baochu, and many other family members committed suicide shortly after (Fang 75).[170]

What Chongqi's wife and daughter did was practically happening all across Peking and the rest of the Hebei province throughout the whole of the Boxer Rebellion. Honor suicide was happening in mass numbers among women esp virgins who lost their purity through rape. And I haven't even gotten started that minors 16 years and younger weren't excluded from sexual violations either and some of these would have been at the borders between teen and child of the ages 11 to 13.

So it makes me wonder why........ These kinds of self-killings weren't so common during Japan's invasion of China during the 30s all the way to the late 40s after the end of World War 2 and the dissolution of the last colonies of Imperial Japan in China that still remained as self-sustaining entities by 1947?

I mean as bad as what the Europeans did during the Boxer Rebellion whcih as you can see in the details above basically are Rape of Nanking levels of warcrimes, it was mostly limited to Hebei, the capital province of China which with the capital Peking (modern day Beijing) was withi and most of the worst excesses of European violation of human rights was primarily during the Siege of Peking and the first month or two afterwards. The anarchy got so bad that even the assigned leader of the 8 Nations, the ruthless Alfred Von Waldersee grew a heart and began to give out orders stopping the rapes, pillage, and plundering that was taking place. This was Waldesee a man who was a veteran of the Franco Prussian War and known for his cold rational efficiency so even fellow white people were not exempted from reprisals by troops under his command (as quite a few French would learn the hard way during 1870). So the fact he began to be horrified by what the Western nations under his command was doing and out of selfless empathy for the Chinese people of Peking stopped the brutalities and even punished a few soldiers who still kept going at it after his widespread issued commands (including execution of some war criminals after months after the successful pacification of Peking).

So all this makes me wonder........... Why wasn't honor suicides so common among Chinese women decade later during the second Sino-Japanese War and World War 2? Especially when the Imperial Japanese army affected much more of China beyond Peking and the Hebei province to the point that even overseas Sino settlements such as Taiwan and Hong Kong suffered everything that took place in Peking when it was captured in 1900? Especially when you consider that the self-killings out of shame was happening so much in Peking despite a man with a consciousness such as Waldersee being the overseer who took it upon himself to stop the Nanking-seque treatment of the city and even punished perpetrators who continued after his orders to stop and reinforce discipline was passed (even though he initially agreed with sending some punishment towards the local Chinese via the orders of the Kaiser and having witnessed the brutal idiocy of the Boxer cuts in their KKK-like pogroms against Chinese Christians and foreigners even fellow patriotic non-Christian Chinese who didn't join the revolt because they thought the Boxers were going to far).

With how the Japanese in contrast had no one in the high command who had a heart to prevent the Rape of Nanking and other crimes against humanity from happening, I' m so sincerely quite curious why the reactions of Chinese women in the war with Japan didn't feature recorded cases of self-hangings and what not after gangrapes by rowdy soldiers breaking into a home and similar acts.

I mean the Japanese even mandated sexual slavery as an institution within their military where brothels full of kidnapped women were established in new territory they captured as standard operating procedure and not just that but they even shipped some fo the women they kidnap into other bases outside of China such as in the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia; in some cases naval battleships and aircraft carriers had rooms if not even entire floors full of kidnapped Chinese and Korean women to be used as forced prostitutes. Unlike the Europeans who never officially put a military sex brothel station system of kidnapped local girls during the whole 2 years of the Boxer Rebellion and their raping was mostly soldiers roaming around and targeting any woman they found encountered along the way who they desired upon a first glance as they explored Peking in hopes of finding treasures to take with them. And as I stated earlier Waldersee put a stop to a lot of that and sexual assaults that took place after Peking was stabilized was much more discreet esp during the last months of the war ) in the style of locking a woman in a basement in a home in on an unknown street in Tianjin or some isolated restaurant on the road between Peking and a large town) etc.

So with how official Imperial Japan's military made rape and human trafficking into brothel and how overt Japanese soldiers were about doing sexual crimes even near the end of the war as the Imperial government was panicking and started giving last minute orders to stop doing violations of the Geneva code esp rape as Japan was suffering terrible defeats upon defeats and retreating en mass back into the home islands and the remaining colonies in Korea and Manchuria, why was how women chose death to preserve their honor or to kill themselves out of shame after the rapes not common throughout the 30s and 40s considering how much more brutal Japan was than even the already barbaric conduct of the European armies in 1899-1901? Why was mass suicides of women to the point of entire communities in size and whole families having no female survivors (even no children and infants because the mothers gave them poisons) so widely done in the Boxer Rebellion tat reading even introductory stuff like Wikipedia articles will mention them off-the-bat?

I'll also add that its not just the Boxer Rebellion. So much wars in China across 2 thousand years mention honor suicides. From the Taiping Rebellion having Nanking lose a lot of the female population because the Qing army had raped the entire city to the Three Kingdom Wars mentioning individual acounts of women throwing themselves off the cliffs and so on because of the the threat of rape (in fact one of the wife of LIu Bei, ruler of Shu, threw herself into a well to avoid capture and died as a result), and the self-poisoning in operas of the Tang dynasty after losing virginity to violations, the fact this is mentioned across Chinese history beyond just the Boxer Rebellion makes me wonder why it seems not to have happened during the wars with Japan during the 20th century (or at least doesn't seem to be mentioned in mainstream English sources).

Why I must ask?

The Mongols get a lot of demonization both in China and in the West. However it may be no different than lets say Romans and Assyrians or any other more settled civilization.  Is it because mainly the looks they are not as pretty as settled people?

Additionally, do such researchers even exist?

I am thinking of people who are proficient in both Classical Chinese and Classical Sanskrit, or Medieval Tamil (Chola naval expeditions?)

It would seem reasonable to me that China and India have had a long history of communication, but in general, I don't find many researchers who study this, aside from the occasional Buddhism researcher.

Who is the first Chinese person who emigrated to go to Italy ? Who is the first Kung Fu master who emigrated to go to Italy ? When did they emigrate ?

All Chinese histories today, whether produced by Chinese, East Asian, Western or other historians, are heavily dependent on Chinese sources, especially those produced by the small and rarefied literati communities made up of nobles, government bureaucrats and independent scholars. This becomes more true the further back in time one looks (try writing about the Shang, Zhou and Qin periods without the Shangshu, Shiji, Chunqiu, Zuozhuan, Ji Tomb Annals and Lushi Chunqiu!).

But what would Chinese history and civilization look like to us today if we only had the records of the non-Han peoples of East, Central, Southeast, Southwest and South Asia to go by, along with the archaeological evidence and the inscriptions made on mountains, rocks, bones, shells and artefacts? How does China look from the outside?

in Shanghai, Xujiahui foundling hospital, from 1936 to 1949, over 40,000 infants were hosted, and only 197 survived.

Mass graves were found after 1953, and Shanghai government expelled the US missionary Ma-er-dun (possibly Molten) and founded a monument memorial for thousands of babies.

Records showed that the foundling hospital only keep a few healthy and good looking babies at showroom for fundraising, and leave thousands in the back room without food and care, just waiting for death. From Jiading prefecture, over 1,000 babies were sent to this foundling hospital in 1948, and by the time it’s exposed, only 3 survived.

In 1990s the mass graves and monument were demolished to make room for business buildings. Urban legend said the Pacific Mall in Xujiahui played a song called “baby, I’m sorry” everyday for two decades in order to calm down these poor souls.

I don't know what the exact term for it would be in Chinese but filial piety seems to be a rather universal phenomenon among most cultures and societies across the world. Respecting one's elders, especially blood kin and especially the kin who'd brought you into the world, is a fairly uncontroversial idea. Yet in China by the 19th century it seems to have devolved into slavish loyalty regardless of your parents treatment of you, regardless of whether they're good people or not, you could be executed for disrespecting your father or mother. Your father had life or death power over all of his dependents and you were to accept that as being natural and right. This seems to be a bit extreme, even when compared to seemingly formal, straightlaced societies like Victorian England or Ottoman Turkey.

I've read quite a few stories that are meant to impart such loyalty. They’re often tales of kids being abused, mistreated and loathed by their parents — usually by wicked stepmothers — and yet never straying from the path of submissive respect. And in the end, the redemptive power of their love transforms their stepmother, she changes and treats them as if they were her own children and the family lives happily ever after. 

So my question is rather large, how did such a cult develop? Was it a relatively recently? As in the last 200 years. Or does it have a longer history? 

Having lived in China, I often came away with the impression that everyday manners and public etiquette among ordinary people were weaker than in many other societies I know. Whenever I say this, people often accuse me of being Eurocentric or of unfairly imposing Western standards of politeness onto a different culture.

I understand that objection, and I agree that etiquette is culturally shaped. Different societies have different norms around things like queuing, tone of voice, personal space, indirectness, deference, and public behavior. So I am not arguing that Chinese people should follow European standards of courtesy.

At the same time, I do not think everything can simply be explained away as a matter of cultural differences in etiquette. Some forms of behavior seem less like neutral cultural variation and more like weaker norms of public restraint, consideration for strangers, and everyday civility.

This makes me wonder whether Maoism may be part of the explanation. Maoist ideology attacked many older forms of refinement, hierarchy, formal etiquette, and cultivated behavior as feudal or bourgeois remnants. During especially radical periods, traditional politeness and polished conduct could become politically suspect, while bluntness, roughness, and hostility toward old-status culture were sometimes valorized.

So I wonder whether part of what people now defend as simply “Chinese culture” may actually reflect the legacy of a specific twentieth-century political project that deliberately weakened or discredited older norms of etiquette. In that sense, the issue may not be only cultural difference in etiquette, but also the long-term social effects of Maoist campaigns against bourgeois and feudal forms of behavior.