There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang
So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously.
But I'll give it credit for hijacking a genuinely interesting scholarly premise: What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed. It is of rather mythic proportions; later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy. And there is very little evidence to support its existence. The Shang Dynasty is also supported by rather scant evidence -- and is also mythic, though obviously less so than the Xia.
Worth noting that both the Xia and Shang are exceedingly ancient -- roughly 2000 BC to 1000 BC between them -- unlike the Tang, which fell around 900 AD and is thus middle-of-the-pack by Chinese dynastic standards.
Yeah. You're probably familiar with the "Hanfu" revival -- a sort of resurgence in people adopting traditional clothing and makeup styles from the Han and Tang dynasties. It's entirely on account of the fact that those two dynasties were remarkably stable, prosperous, and peaceful, so they lend themselves to historical romanticism -- like the Chinese equivalent of the Renaissance Faire. Good vibes. Even popular in Japan, with e.g. The Apothecary Diaries and similar fare.
Shang, and all of the post-dynasty collapse centuries like The Spring and Autumn Period, were not great times to live in. Dismal and evil vibes, for the most part, unless you happen to be a mighty hero or bandit-lord who believes that he can conquer the age. Even so, most of them ended up in soup pots.
And thus for a very long time, and even today to some extent, the Japanese (or their cultural theorists at any rate!) have viewed themselves as the inheritors of "true" Ancient Chinese culture -- unsullied by Mongol/Manchu/Communist influence.
There's some truth to this. The Japanese preserved certain Tang Dynasty customs which were lost to China, and they have some of the best collections of Tang-era artifacts.
This line of thought was, however, used in very unfortunate WWII-era propaganda, like "we have to invade China to rescue its civilization, only we can do this!"
In my experience the Chinese very much think this as well. Though it can be framed in a more derogatory way as "derivative" or "they just copied us"
I'd argue its difficult to find major aspects of Japanese culture that don't trace back to ancient China (maybe the language, eating raw food and sumo)
That’s really interesting. Thanks for sharing. I’m a big fan of clothing and architecture that are appropriate/historic for a given country or area. It’s unfortunate we’ve standardized on 5-over-1s and graphic t-shirts with sweatpants/leggings over time instead of maintaining some of that cultural and location based uniqueness. I understand why we have changed our clothing patterns, but we did lose a little bit of something in that change, in my opinion.
Your comment sent me to Wikipedia and this caught my eye [0], a Late Shang inscribed rhinoceros rib, which then deepened the wikihole [1], it's funny how even though I know of the Indian rhino and Sumatran rhino, it never occurred to me that they were even more widespread...
Not exactly an issue though. Because the following Dynasty Zhou was portrayed as a protagonist, which rebelled against Shang and abolished human sacrifice and established the right Chinese civilization. And all the following dynasties are claiming that Zhou was the good old days and they are following Zhou's tradition.
> What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed
There are some nuances about this. We know that there are multiple developed cities (and likely monarchies, given there are palace-like ruins) around or before Xia era. It's just that we don't know which one is so-called Xia Dynasty. But it doesn't meant that there were only small tribes and suddenly Shang came out of nowhere.
Everywhere in the Wikipedia articles is this phrase "had Han ethnic origins". Looks like China Editors are trying to change history. At least that is based upon what the CNN article is saying.
I spotted the same thing, and there's never a source given. Allegedly his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (or 15th great-grandfather for short) was totally Han, the son of the scourge of the Xiongnu - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Guang
For a few hundred years European archaeologist Indiana Jones types visited every remote corner of Asia ironically disproving Euro centrism and the Bible in the true spirit of scientific enlightenment and writing much of Chinese history (also looting some artefacts unfortunately).
One of the few good things to come out of colonialism.
If you define Europe as Sumer or Egypt, then yes. If you define Europe as Rome, then no. The earliest deciphered Greek writing dates from 1450 BC (Linear B) but that civilisation fell in the Bronze Age collapse and there is no (written) continuity with Europe as it stands today.
As far as I'm concerned we're all equally ancient descendants from LUCA.
The Xia and Shang dynasties are necessary to exist in order to maintain the story of "5000 years of Chinese history" that is ingrained into Chinese students and repeated to anyone who will listen
>So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously.
There are people who believe that Trump won in 2020, that vaccines cause autism, and that the Holocaust is a hoax. You cannot reason people out of an idea they didn't use reason to arrive at.
My favorite conspiracy of the moment is that Trump won in 2020 and lost in 2024, but they switched them because he needed more time. People truly are regrettable.
> later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy
Troy was indeed largely fabricated though! Really I think that's of a piece with stuff being, y'know, really old. There are big holes in Sumerian and Egyption history too (though the latter helped out a ton by digging secret tombs and hiding them really well). Post-classical Mayan history is pretty suspect in a lot of places, etc...
Maybe it is healthy for society in the long run to have pockets of divergent belief. Most of the time it is groundless and fades away. Every so often it gains traction. If it is based in reality, we gain a better understanding. If it is misleading, it vitalizes a competing and more correct understanding.
The more interesting phenomenon is that we are able to agree on anything at all, it's not exactly our strongest instinct. Reading through HN, for example, the longest comment chains are a series of disagreements. But we build resources like Wikipedia and science journals, which also use disagreement as an engine for generating a more correct understanding. Its a strange and hopeful aspect of human societies.
How could it be healthy to not even agree on the most basic facts of history like whether hundreds of years actually happened or the shape of the earth?
I don't think these particular fringe beliefs are directly useful, and they have a real cost in terms of confusion. I also don't expect them to last since they are easy to disprove.
But they belong to a bigger trend which questions the value of experts and institutional knowledge. This could either send us into a dark age, or challenge a better class of experts and institutional knowledge. My money is on the latter. Few things improve without some kind of challenge.
That’s why I’ve lost much of my optimism regarding U.S. politics.
It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging.
Oh boy... I think you will find the answer in George Orwell's Animal Farm.
But to help you understand, rewriting the past to sustain power is the type of thing that degenerates into genocide for example.
In the short term it might look innocuous, but if corrupting truth and suspend basic moral and ethic values on something as basic as History, what other basic human values are you willing to suspend because you don't like how something feels?
This is the breeding ground for racial supremacists, ethnophobia, etc. Terrible stuff.
And you don't need to go into the past to see the consequences, Ukraine is fighting for their existence because a group of people in Russia don't want to acknowledge that a ethnic group they deem inferior can have better chances at thriving than them, to the point of denying Ukrainians existence all together.
Spread flat earth theories, get influencers to question if sunscreen is actually harmful, etc. Spread enough contradictory information so that gradually, people don't have any idea what to believe, and then they become susceptible to political misinformation, or just become completely politically disengaged.
It is not a sign of a healthy society at all, it is a disease.
Now that's a good old classic perennial conspiracy theory. (Good thing y'all banned the other perennial bad guy conspiracy theories with your crimethought laws.)
It's a shame people are drifting from vaccines but the unwillingness of the WHO, etc., to backtrack on claims that turned out false with respect to Covid, does not help the cause. The sausage-making history that's coming out from Covid is also making people suspicious and one cannot blame them.
Additionally, they've redefined that a pandemic is (removing severity from the definition), additionally it's expanding way from its traditional geopolitical framework and also what were recommendations are now becoming legally binding mandates that supersede sovereignty.
So, yes, people are overreacting but the WHO and people who suppressed truthful but contrarian claims during the pandemic, share some of the blame.
Did they die with covid like most health officials were requiring every death to be catalogued under covid? Even though there were only flu tests available? During peak of flu season? What did they do to the bodies? Were cemeteries overflowing from this rather severe increase in covid related deaths? I mean statistics show about 50k deaths at peak from influenza related deaths yearly, before the "happening". 1M deaths means 20x more deaths from that alone, how did funeral homes and cemeteries handle this several magnitude bump in death numbers? Sadly the lies will become history (in fact are already) and will continue so more, "ChatGPT tell me about the great pandemics of our time...."
Why the downvotes but no argument? Aren't those reasonable questions? I didn't even mention the medical guidelines that came out during that period?
All I wrote is verifiable (or was)
Back in the early 2000's, well before most social media sites existed, I had a coworker who shared with me a number of questionable theories, one of which was basically this. He also believed very passionately that plate tectonics was wrong. Unfortunately social media didn't invent brain worms.
I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk!
I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong.
Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard.
Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport
Many of the more esoteric conspiracy theories are hard to debunk. Lets take the earth if round, prove it. You can bring up many cases, sails disappearing behind the horizon, goemetry, etc. but actually doing these measurements and calculations cold is pretty hard. And whenever you bring up a fact, they will dismiss it out of hand. Tectonic plates, I believe they exist, I have seen the evidence in books. But I doubt I could prove it, I've never really studied geology or anything like that. And if I were to debate someone who believes they weren't real, I would probably lose as they would bring up obscure papers, incidents, etc. which I wouldn't be able to refute well.
I was recently in Hawaii on Kauai. I wondered if I could see any of the other Hawaiian islands (besides the small local ones). Can you see Oahu from Kauai (70 miles away)? Rarely, and only if you get to a high enough elevation and even then you can only see the highest peaks. On the other hand, Maui is easily visible from Hawaii from sea level. Simple, practice, repeatable.
Likewise, flying in a plane for any distance and seeing the course is identical to if you pulled a string tight against a globe (give or take). I suppose pilots could choose to fly in an arch to keep the secret, but eventually some capitalist has got to spill the beans to cut costs, right?
Conspiracy theorists can also be really into their stuff. Someone who believes the moon landings never happened and who is enthusiastic about that can probably recall a huge number of facts, whereas I can't even recall the years the flights happened, or the names of more than two of the astronauts. That stuff is just pretty irrelevant to a random member of the general public.
You don't particularly need calculations, just have friends around the world or even a couple hundred miles away, get on a video call to prove the world is round. Whatever your pet theory of how the sun moves across the "flat" earth can be contradicted with a couple of facetime calls.
I’ll do you one better, you shouldn’t even spend any time engaging in a debate with people who believe the earth is flat because they don’t want to change their mind.
It doesn’t really matter if the earth is flat or not, for them it’s about being part of a community of people who believe in something that society tells them is wrong. There is no changing minds besides the 1 in a million you hear about and so all the calculations you could do would never work, sadly.
No but its nice to do relevant observations of basic science yourself. Its fun and satisfying.
My daughter did the shadow stick experiment when she was 14 (for GCSE astronomy), we have lived in different countries so have observed the differences in constellations for ourselves, and we speak to people around the world anyway.
If you're so disinterested why are you talking about it now? Better to focus your attention on something you're not going to be so dismissive and negative about unless your hobby is being an asshole.
I was just browsing comments and read yours and thought it prudent for others to realize what they were dealing with when it came to flat earth theorists so that they protect their time. I’ve probably at this point already saved dozens of seconds for someone.
Social media gave a geographically distributed population of the “quirky” and their natural predators the grifters a chance to mingle on a global scale. It didn’t invent anything, but it’s a vector for the pathogen.
Depending on how much older he was than you at the time, he might genuinely have been taught in high school that this was wrong. Only in the early 1970s did that even start to gain traction. If he was taught by one of the hold-outs that esteemed a pre-tectonics geologist, it'd be pretty natural to think like that I imagine.
oh he understood what plate tectonics was proposing very well, he just completely rejected it in favour of many distributed prehistoric oceans and a lot (a LOT) of erosion. It was weirdly congruent to phantom time theory.
Okay. Look at the moon. Look at every other planet not currently protected by an atmosphere. They all have craters. This fact is ignored by rote Geologists. "All the high and low points on the planet are due to plate tectonics and erosion!"
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?
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.
Yes I was going to point to the Fomenko chonology too. I believe that has adherents in some minor Russian nationalist circles:
> In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society"
"A reliable support for the formation of modern ideology"? That pretty much screams that any connection with the truth is... optional. It's not being considered on grounds of truth, but on grounds of being good for ideology.
I knew about the Tartarian Empire theory but not Fomenko's new chronology.
its amazing, and one of the most thorough and clever conspiracy theories and it has no lack of scope and ambition. Jesus was made up based on a 12th century Byzantine Emperor is almost as good as Suleiman being Solomon, and lots of otherwise reasonable seem very ready to believe conspiracy theories about Jesus (Dan Brown made a lot of money out of people who thought the Da Vinci Code theories were plausible).
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 more
If you actually read the article, you'd be directing your vitriol at the Nanjing Daily and "The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government."
AIUI the Conspiracy Theory isn't that birds don't exist, but that they are not real. All the birds you've seen were actually government spy cameras.
This feels more plausible if you've only ever encountered pigeons and at some distance. If you've owned a parrot or some chickens, it is very apparent that this is not a spy camera. In fact the word I'd use for chickens is "saurian". They're clearly just lizards with feathers, if I didn't know their evolutionary story it would still scream at me when I see one laying on a rock in the sun that this is a lizard.
That wikipedia page lists four points speaking against the phantom time conspiracy, and in those four points relies on the Tang dynasty twice. Which doesn't exist. Checkmate /s
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...
I have a theory that "narrative warfare" doesn't exist, and it's all just faulty emanations of the single truth from the primordial creation blasting into our craniums in haphazard and mutually contradictory ways.
I'll write a book about it. See you in your local bookstore!
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 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.
"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 Baudrillard
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.
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.
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.
> The outlandish claim has since spread far and wide
Is this significant? I never saw anyone talking about it on my side of corner.
But, It's not really that surprising. A significant part of human civilization still believes that we humans were created by beings who live somewhere in the sky/atmosphere, and these beings are watching our every move to punish or reward us, and you beg really really hard, they'll help you (if they didn't, you ain't begging hard enough).
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.
The rise of historical nihilism is why we need new algorithms that can tell true from false. Human moderators simply can't manage the scale and volume of modern communication.
probably not their actual name. if you need a search term, qiao乔于yu is better than qiao yu. better read chinese. they've long deleted the actual video, of course
Or the whole thing is an "inverse" PR, completely manufacturing the information spread, to get people interested in Tang dynasty.
Conspiracy vs. conspiracy.
> 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.’”
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.
That’s exactly the same as what is happening here. They’re ideas crazy enough that most people react with “you’re fucking with me, right?” And some people definitely are… but there’s always a cross section of people gullible enough to believe it wholeheartedly, and a large grey area in the middle of people who aren’t sure what to believe.
They say a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots. Part of the reason these things are viral is because their ridiculous nature demands attention. And that attention alone is enough to generate influence.
1. "Doesn't have the death rate I publicly stated" is very different from what you claimed.
2. At that time, information about Covid was changing somewhat rapidly. By the time he testified to Congress weeks later, he may well have had better information. (Look, I am very much not a Fauci apologist. But you need to do better than this at finding reasons to condemn him.)
1. Inflating death rates to claim something is a pandemic is not very different. It was at worst a "bad flu," which is what many Q posts were indicating. You don't need a lockdown for a "Bad flu". You also don't need masks.
2. You seem to think I need to do better than this, but if this were a trial what I have provided is sufficient to establish motive. The dude wanted to be famous, and didn't mind who died to get him there or what kind of lies he needed to tell to climb that mountain.
Nuh uh is not a conversation, and it is clear he was tracking how famous he had become. The reason he was not on trial in a common way is because he was pardoned—which in this case it is clear is because he was involved in crimes against humanity.
“Many parents say that, thanks to the hoax, their children now feel confused about historical facts, the Nanjing Daily reported”
Great, lets make this useful … this specific nonsense will settle down and be proven to be a hoax and/or misinformation. An important component of parenting today is to raise kids who take claims presented on the internet with a large grain of salt. Rather than contrived examples in critical thinking exercises they might get in class or a textbook, parents now have a perfect, real example here to show their kids that online nonsense can look authoritative and be very widely believed, and yet still be false. Shields up. Less time online for kids. And don’t outsource your critical thinking to the online majority or to AI!
It is a series of science fiction novels in which a future China conquers the world and re-writes history as if the Tang dynasty never ended. The rulers present themselves as being the legitimate inheritors of a continuous Tang dynasty and all of western history from 900 CE onward is secret banned information.
Sort of the exact opposite of this conspiracy theory.
"Claiming that the 300-year dynasty was actually a myth is akin to saying the American Civil War never happened"
Aren't republicans in Texas trying to rewrite history books to ignore lynchings and burnings of Black Wall Street and claim that slaves were treated pretty well?
Seems like every country has factions who do this - right?
There are cranks who claim that, essentially, the _middle ages_ did not happen. Claiming that things which obviously happened didn’t happen is one of the more common forms of crankery; motives vary (I think the Middle Ages deniers are generally a bit more innocent than the Texas Republicans, say)
My daughter is a tx high school student and the books don’t mention slavery in context of the civil war. It’s framed as only a states rights issue, in which Texas is the honorable fighter of freedoms.
It was a states rights issue...the right of those states to own slaves. If you read the articles of succession for each of the confederate states (the actual words the actual people who decided "screw that Union thing..." put on paper to justify what they are doing and sent to Washinton), every one of them explicitly states "we are doing this because you are threatening our right to own slaves". This is the "well ackshually..." argument used to pretend the Confederates were fighting a noble cause and the rest of the hypocrisy being shoveled about.
In fairness, Texas is a place where they make elementary school kids stand up every morning and say the Pledge of Allegiance...
to the TEXAS flag.
Just pointing out that the educational experience in Texas is not necessarily indicative of what the educational experience in the rest of the US is like.
> Aren't republicans in Texas trying to rewrite history books to ignore lynchings and burnings of Black Wall Street and claim that slaves were treated pretty well?
I don't think that's very much alike at all. Denying the existence of a major dynasty is like declaring that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson didn't exist, and all the historical traditions and documents to the contrary were invented to cover up the two terms Jefferson Davis served in the White House. I've never seen even the most strenuous Lost Cause advocates say something like that, because why in the world would you?
> Denying the existence of a major dynasty is like declaring that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson didn't exist
There's a great difference of scale.
Lincoln died about 150 years ago. There are voluminous primary sources about Lincoln - e.g. photographs of him, original documents that he wrote, firsthand accounts of his actions, etc. We certainly don't know every detail of his life, but we do know a lot of it, and we're quite confident it's true.
The Tang dynasty, by contrast, fell over a thousand years ago. We know of it primarily through second- and third-hand histories and through interpretation of archaeological artifacts - much like our knowledge of Greek and Roman history, for instance. There are a lot of thinly covered areas, and many of the sources are biased; there's a lot more to be uncertain about.
Let's not get started on corners of the American internet... ask your favourite AI about "list of historical denial theories with US subscribers, including religious". No doubt longer and more amusing!
Our politicians and leaders being lizard people absolutely has true believers. Zuckerberg specifically might've taken off as a meme amongst tech critical folk but the core idea comes from genuine conspiracies. Birds are real, I admit, is totally a joke but it flows so well in my comment
This article still pushes the typical "China bad" narrative, throughout which it attempts to disparage Chinese nationalism.
Take the incident mentioned in the piece: the Xi'an Culture and Tourism Bureau later clarified that no one had actually made such phone calls. The reporter simply cited an unverified online comment without doing any fact-checking.
This is a classic tactic used to smear an opponent—exaggerating their views to an absurd degree to weaponize public disgust against them. In reality, aside from this fabricated "phone call" incident, conspiracy theories claiming the Tang dynasty didn't exist have never received any attention from mainstream media or the general public in China.
Its real-world impact is virtually zero. Following this bizarre logic, the author would be better off reporting on how praise for German Nazism spreads on Chinese social media(but i know CNN dont have the balls).
The beginning of the article says it doesn't have mainstream traction. Not sure about the "China bad" thing, we seem to have the Han nationalists vs the mainstream who wants ethnic unity and 5000 years of unbroken history vs the internet memers and people who "did their own research".
I think the bigger point here is that even the CCP, with it’s heavy-handed totalitarian controls on the Chinese web, isn’t able to entirely filter out misinformation.
Not sure why you're getting down voted but this does seem like the key point. There obviously is a major challenge in avoiding conspiratorial nonsense in societies with strong freedom of speech, but in this example we have China facing something similar.
Note the reason of this conspiracy: the founder of Tang dynasty is not of pure Han Chinese ethnicity. In the grand scheme, this is just part of the rise of Han nationalism in recent years, which had its roots in the nationalism rhetorics adopted by the Chinese state under Xi.
I'm sure you can see the parallels of this in the United States and Europe.
"This thing challenges my preexisting biases about the CCP. The only conclusion must be that it is truly exceptional, never that I can eating from the pig trough of my country's propaganda."
Behold, the most educated and intellectually curious American, folks.
In another headline, people under a certain age get most of their news from social media. It 'democratizes' it, said one person quoted.
It is more important than ever that we teach people to think critically and skeptically, and the necessity of empiricism (i.e., publicly verifiable evidence).
There are also histories written just after the Tang Dynasty had fallen. It was considered good form for a new dynasty to write a historical review of the previous one, and there are two retrospectives on Tang, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Book_of_Tang
And there is ironclad evidence from foreign sources. Among others, Japanese histories detail the journeys of emissaries to the Tang Court: https://web.archive.org/web/20260315181529/https://japansoci...
So the theory is bait, and hard to take seriously.
But I'll give it credit for hijacking a genuinely interesting scholarly premise: What is taken quite seriously is the notion that China's first dynasty -- the Xia Dynasty -- never existed. It is of rather mythic proportions; later Chinese would speak of Xia the way Romans would speak of Troy. And there is very little evidence to support its existence. The Shang Dynasty is also supported by rather scant evidence -- and is also mythic, though obviously less so than the Xia.
Worth noting that both the Xia and Shang are exceedingly ancient -- roughly 2000 BC to 1000 BC between them -- unlike the Tang, which fell around 900 AD and is thus middle-of-the-pack by Chinese dynastic standards.
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