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Kingdom Of Wu

Kingdom of Wu

Eastern Wu (Chinese: 東吳, pinyin: dōng wú), also known as Sun Wu (Traditional Chinese: 孫吳, pinyin: sūn wú) and (misleadingly) in English as the Kingdom of Wu, refers to a historical state in a region of China. During its existence, its capital was largely at Jianye (建業, modern Nanjing), but at times was at Gong'an (公安, in modern Jingzhou, Hubei) or Wuchang (武昌, in modern Ezhou, Hubei -- not Wuhan, as the name might suggest). Wuhan From 222 to 280, Eastern Wu was one of the Three Kingdoms competing for control of China after the fall of the Han Dynasty. During the decline of the Han dynasty, the region of Wu - a region in the south of the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang), surrounding Nanjing - was under the control of the warlord Sun Quan. Sun Quan succeeded his brother Sun Ce as the lord over the Wu region paying nominal allegiance to Emperor Xian of Han (who was, at that point, under the control of Cao Cao). Unlike his competitors, he did not really have the ambition to be Emperor of China. However, after Cao Pi of the Kingdom of Wei and Liu Bei of the Kingdom of Shu each declared themselves to be the Emperor, Sun Quan decided to follow suit in 222, claiming to have founded the Wu Dynasty. Under the rule of Eastern Wu, southern China, regarded in early history as a barbaric "jungle" developed into one of the commercial, cultural, and political centers of China. Within five centuries, during the Five Dynasties and Ten States, the development of Southern China had surpassed that of the north. The achievements of Wu marked the beginning of the cultural and political division between Northern and Southern China that would repeatedly appear in Chinese history well into modernity. The term Southern China as used here does not include Guangdong and other provinces in the far south, which were not incorporated into China proper until the Tang Dynasty and remained for the most part economically and culturally backward until the late 19th century. The island of Taiwan may have been first reached by the Chinese during the Three Kingdoms period. Contacts with the native population and the dispatch of officials to an island named "Yizhou" (夷州) by the Eastern Wu navy might have been to Taiwan, but what Yizhou was is open to dispute; some historians believe it was Taiwan, while others believe it was the Ryukyu Islands. Eastern Wu was finally conquered by the first Jin emperor, Sima Yan, in 280. It was the longest-lived of the three kingdoms. Important figures:
- Sun Jian (孫堅)
- Sun Ce (孫策),
- Sun Quan (孫權)
- Huang Gai (黃蓋)
- Gan Ning (甘寧)
- Taishi Ci (太史慈)
- Zhou Yu (周瑜)
- Zhou Tai (周泰)
- Ling Tong (凌 統)
- Lu Su (魯肅)
- Lü Meng (呂蒙)
- Lu Yi (Xun) (陸遜)
- Zhang Zhao (張昭)
- Zhang Hong (張紘)
- Zhuge Jin (諸葛謹)
- Dong Xi (董袭)
- Xu Sheng (徐盛)
- Chen Wu (陈武)

List of sovereigns


Eastern Wu 222-280
Posthumous Names ( Shi Hao 諡號) Personal names Year(s) of Reigns Era Names (Nian Hao 年號) and their range of years
Convention: use personal name
Da Di (大帝 dà dì) Sun Quan (孫權 sūn quán) 222-252 Huangwu (黃武 huáng wǔ) 222-229
Huanglong (黃龍 huáng lóng) 229-231
Jiahe (嘉禾 jiā hé) 232-238
Chiwu (赤烏 chì wū) 238-251
Taiyuan (太元 taì yuán) 251-252
Shenfeng (神鳳 shén2 fèng) 252
Kuaiji Wang (會稽王 kuaì jī wáng) Sun Liang (孫亮 sūn liàng) 252-258 Jianxing (建興 jiàn xīng) 252-253
Wufeng (五鳳 wǔ fèng) 254-256
Taiping (太平 taì píng) 256-258
Jing Di (景帝 jǐng dì) Sun Xiu (孫休 sūn xiū) 258-264 Yong'an (永安 yǒng ān) 258-264
Wucheng Hou (烏程侯 wū chéng hóu)
or Guiming Hou (歸命侯; gūi mìng hóu)		 Sun Hao (孫皓 sūn haò) 264-280 Yuanxing (元興 yuán xīng) 264-265
Ganlu (甘露 gān lù) 265-266
Baoding (寶鼎 baǒ dǐng) 266-269
Jianheng (建衡 jiàn héng) 269-271
Fenghuang (鳳凰 fèng huáng) 272-274
Tiance (天冊 tiān cè) 275-276
Tianxi (天璽 tiān xǐ) 276
Tianji (天紀 tiān jì) 277-280
Category:History of China ko:오나라 (삼국) ja:呉 (三国)

Chinese language

The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ, 华语/華語, Huáyǔ or 中文, Zhōngwén) forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. The terms Chinese language and Chinese can both refer to spoken Chinese or written Chinese. Spoken Chinese is tonal. Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable to that of, for instance, the Romance language family; many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible (see Is Chinese a language or family of languages? below). For spoken Chinese, there are between six and twelve main regional groups (depending on classification scheme), including Mandarin, Cantonese, Fujianese and Hakka. However, variants of spoken Chinese almost always use the same written form (with occasional dialect-specific characters, such as in Cantonese). Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China, united Chinese writing in the 3rd century BC by setting standard written forms for which there had previously been many regional variations. Before the 20th century, the common written form was Literary Chinese (Classical Chinese), which no one spoke as a mother tongue. In the early 20th century, the baihuawen movement pushed the birth of the new written form, Vernacular Chinese, based on dialects of Mandarin. In the meantime, dialect-specific characters have contintued to develop primarily in Cantonese, but also occasionally in other dialects. The Chinese language, spoken in the form of Standard Mandarin, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore (together with English, Malay, and Tamil). Chinese—de facto, in spoken form, Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (alongside English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish). Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Among Chinese diaspora, Cantonese is the most common language one can hear in Chinatowns, thanks to early immigrants from Southern China. However, the rise of Northern and Taiwanese immigrants has led to the increase in the use of Mandarin and various Min dialects. Min The terms and concepts used by Chinese to separate spoken language from written language are different from those used in the West, because the political and social development was different in China compared to Europe. Whereas Europe fragmented into smaller nation-states after the fall of the Roman Empire, whose identities were often defined by language, China was able to preserve cultural and political unity through the same period, and maintained a common written language throughout its entire history, despite the fact that its actual diversity in spoken language has always been comparable to that of Europe. As a result, Chinese makes a sharp distinction between "written language" (wén; 文) and "spoken language" (yǔ; 语/語). The concept of a distinct and unified combination of written and spoken forms of language is therefore much stronger in the West than in China.

Spoken Chinese

Chinese spoken language The map on the right depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are:
- Mandarin 北方 or 官話/官话 (shown in the map as divided into East and West groups, but also includes the Jianghuai and Huguang areas depicted in the map)
- Wu 吳/吴 (Shanghainese)
- Cantonese 粵/粤
- Min Family 閩/闽, further divided into 5 to 7 subdivisions, all mutually unintelligible.
- Xiang 湘
- Hakka 客家
- Gan 贛/赣 In parentheses above are the culturally dominant or representative dialects of each language or dialect group today. Chinese linguists have recently distinguished 3 more groups from the traditional seven:
- Jin 晉/晋 from Mandarin
- Hui 徽 from Wu
- Pinghua 平話/平话 from Cantonese There are also many smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect, spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua, spoken in northern Guangdong. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. There is also Standard Mandarin, the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore. Pronunciation of Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing, with vocabulary largely based on dialects of Mandarin, and grammar and syntax on vernacular Chinese. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. It is therefore used in government, in the media, and in instruction in schools. There is much controversy around the terminology used to describe the subdivisions of Chinese: some people call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family and its subdivisions languages. Although Dungan is very closely related to Mandarin, not many people consider it "Chinese", because it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by people outside China who are not considered Chinese in any sense. It is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several varieties of the language. Typically, in southern China, a person will be able to speak Standard Mandarin, the local dialect, and occasionally a more general regional dialect, such as Cantonese. Such polyglots frequently code switch between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect, depending on the situation. A person living in Taiwan, for example, may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered socially appropriate under many circumstances. In Hong Kong, it is not unusual for people to speak Cantonese and English, and sometimes Mandarin. In the sense that the written language is based on Standard Mandarin and the dialects are mostly spoken but not written, the situation in China is a complex and interesting case of diglossia.

Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?

Spoken Chinese comprises many regional and often mutually unintelligible variants. Linguistically, the situation is comparable to that of Romance languages, which are mutually unintelligible but all derive from Latin and so share many common underlying features. However, the socio-political context of Chinese language is quite different from that of European languages. In Europe, political fragmentation gave rise to independent states roughly the size of Chinese provinces. This generated a political desire to create separate cultural and literary standards to differentiate nation-states and standardize the language within a nation-state. In China, a single cultural and literary standard (Classical Chinese and later, Vernacular Chinese) continued to exist while the spoken language continued to diverge between different cities and counties, much as European languages diverged, due to the scale of the country, and the obstruction of communication by geography. For example, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of south China, a major city's dialect may be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, but its dialect is more like Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou, than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987). The diverse Chinese spoken forms and common written form comprise a very different linguistic situation from that in Europe. In Europe, linguistic differences sharpened as the language of each nation-state was standardized. For example, a farmer on the French side of the border would start to model his speech and writing after Paris while his neighbour on the Spanish side after Madrid. The use of local speech became erroneous. In China, standardization of spoken dialects was weaker, and mostly due to cultural influence. Although, as with Europe, dialects of regional political or cultural capitals were still prestigious and widely used as the region's lingua franca, their linguistic influence depended more on the capital's status and wealth than entirely on the political boundaries of the region. China's linguistic situation is more similar to India's. Although India was historically not as unified as China, parts of it speaking multiple languages have long been united in various states, and many of its languages were not standardized until the last few decades through political centralization. Like Classical Chinese, Sanskrit long played a role as common written language. Unlike Classical Chinese, its descendants are recognized as separate languages, 18 of which are official national languages. Many Chinese languages do not have sharp boundaries. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear whether the speech of a particular area of China should be considered a language in its own right or a dialect of another. The Ethnologue lists a total of [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90151 14], but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on how strict the intelligibility criterion is. For Chinese people, regional linguistic differences are less important than cultural or nationalistic similarity. They generally consider Chinese a single language, partly because of the common written language. They refer to dialects as the speech of a location, for example Beijing dialect is (北京話/北京话), the speech of Beijing, and Shanghainese is (上海話/上海话), the speech of Shanghai. Often laypeople are not aware that various "dialects" are categorized into "languages" based on mutual intelligibility, though in areas where language varies greatly (such as the southeast) people do group dialects into categories like Wu or Hakka. There is a tendency to regard dialects as equal variations of a single Chinese language, even though many parts of north China are quite homogeneous in language, unlike parts of south China. As with the concept of Chinese language itself, the divisions among dialects are mostly geographical rather than based on linguistic distance. For example, Sichuan dialect is considered distinct from Beijing dialect in the same way that Cantonese is, although linguists consider Sichuan dialect and Beijing dialect Mandarin dialects, unlike Cantonese. The idea of single language has major political overtones, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. The idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that China consists of several different nations, challenge the notion of a single Han Chinese "race", and legitimize secessionist movements. This is why some Chinese are uncomfortable with it, while supporters of Taiwan independence tend to be strong promoters of Min- and Hakka-language education. Furthermore, for some, suggesting that Chinese is more correctly described as multiple languages implies that the notion of a single Chinese language and a single Chinese state or nationality is backward, oppressive, artificial, and out of touch with reality. However, the links between ethnicity, politics, and language can be complex. Many Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese speakers consider their own varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one entity. They do not regard these two positions as contradictory, but consider the Han Chinese an entity of great internal diversity. Moreover, the government of the People's Republic of China officially states that China is a multinational state, and that the term "Chinese" refers to a broader concept Zhonghua Minzu that incorporates groups that do not natively speak Chinese, such as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols. (Groups that do speak Chinese and are considered "ethnic Chinese" are called Han Chinese.) This is seen as an ethnic and cultural concept, not a political one. Similarly, on Taiwan, some supporters of Chinese reunification promote the local language, while some supporters of Taiwan independence have little interest in the topic. And the Taiwanese identity incorporates Taiwanese aborigines, who are not considered Han Chinese because they speak Austronesian languages, predate Han Chinese settlement, and are culturally and genetically linked to other Austronesian-speaking peoples such as Polynesians.

Written Chinese

The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. It is compounded by the fact that spoken variations evolved for centuries, since at least the late Han Dynasty, while written Chinese changed much less. Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in wényán (文言), translated as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, which was very different from any spoken variety of Chinese, much as Classical Latin differs from modern Romance languages. Since the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to báihuà (白話/白话), or Vernacular Chinese, which, while not completely identical to the grammar and vocabulary of dialects of Mandarin, was based mostly on them. The term standard written Chinese now refers to Vernacular Chinese. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus, although the number one is "yi" in Mandarin, "yat" in Cantonese and "tsit" in Hokkien, they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and still share an identical character ("一"). Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialects are not completely identical. The vocabularies of different dialects have diverged. In addition, while literary vocabulary is mostly shared among all dialects, colloquial vocabularies are often different. Colloquially written Chinese usually involves "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other dialects or characters that are considered archaic in standard written Chinese. Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a widely used written colloquial standard with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this variety of Chinese. By contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely-used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use standard written Chinese. Also, in Hunan, some women wrote their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan people live outside China.

Chinese characters

The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin: hànzì), which are logograms: each symbol represents a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). They are not just pictographs (pictures of their meanings), but are highly stylized and carry much abstract meaning. Only some characters are derived from pictographs. In 100 AD, the famed scholar Xushen in the Han Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, only 4% as pictographs, and 82% as phonetic complexes consisting of a radical element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that arguably once indicated the pronunciation. All modern characters derive from Kaishu. There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the traditional system, essentially a streamlined styling of Kaishu, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. The other is the simplified system adopted during the 1950s Chinese Cultural Revolution in Mainland China. The simplified system requires fewer strokes to write certain radicals and has fewer synonymous characters. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first and only foreign country to recognize and officially adopt the simplified characters. Singapore Various written styles are used in Chinese calligraphy, including zhuanshu (篆書, "seal-script"), caoshu (草書, "grass script" or "haste script"), lishu (隸書, "official script") and kaishu (楷書, "standard script"). Calligraphers can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. As with Latin script, a wide variety of fonts exist for printed Chinese characters, a great number of which are often based on the styles of single calligraphers or schools of calligraphy. There is no concrete record of the origin of Chinese characters. Legend suggests that Cangjie, a bureaucrat of the legendary emperor Huangdi of China about 2600 BC, invented Chinese characters. But archaeological evidence, mainly the oracles found in the 19-20th centuries, only dates Chinese characters to the Shang dynasty in 1700 BC. The vast majority of oracle bone inscriptions were found in Yinxu of the Shang Dynasty, although a few Zhou dynasty-related ones were also found. The forms of the characters in the inscriptions changed over the 200 to 300 years, and scholars date the inscriptions of the Shang to the ruler by the content, particularly from the name of the diviners who inscribed the shell or bone artifacts. Contemporaneous with the end of Shang and Western Zhou periods are the bronze inscriptions. Over the last century, a great many ancient bronze artifacts have been unearthed in China which contain dedicational texts of the Zhou aristocrats where the characters show similarities and innovations compared to the oracle inscriptions. It is said that during the reign of Zhou King Xuan (宣王 827-782 BCE), the form of written characters was revised, and these became refered to as the "greater seal script" or dazhuan.

History

Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, similar to Proto Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relations between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the division between proto-Sino-Tibetan and Chinese. In addition, many of the languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood. Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s. The system was much revised, but always heavily relying on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese (), sometimes known as 'Archaic Chinese', was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history of the Shujing, and portions of the Yijing (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably had no tones yet. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists. Middle Chinese () was the language used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (7th through 10th centuries AD). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 'Qieyun' rhyme table (601 AD), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 'Guangyun' rhyme table. Linguists are confident of having a reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; for example, scholars have shown that trying to reconstruct modern Cantonese from the rhymes of modern Cantopop would give a very inaccurate picture of the language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. The language tree shown below indicates how the present main divisions of the Chinese language developed out of an early common language. Comparison with the map above gives some idea of the complexities left out of the tree. For instance, the Min language that is centered in Fujian Province contains five subdivisions, and the Mandarin dialects (Beifanghua) also contains nine, such as Yunnan hua and Sichuan hua. Most northern Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in Sichuan is largely due to a plague in the 12th century. This plague, which may have been related to the Black Death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China. Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese did not speak any Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthoepy academies () to make pronunciation conform to the Qing capital Beijing's standard, but had little success. During the Qing's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Beijing Mandarin finally replaced Nanjing Mandarin in the imperial court. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their regionalects for every aspect of life. The new Beijing Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited. This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken fluently by a majority of people in mainland China and on Taiwan. In Hong Kong, the language of education and formal speech remains Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.

Influence on other languages

Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Han Tu. It was the only available form to write the Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese elites. From the 14th till late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chu Nom, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables appropriate for native Vietnamese speakers. This is now completely replaced by a modified Latin script that incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate the tones, as well as modified consonants. Vietnamese language has mixed with multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and rather sharp consonant endings. However, there is a slight influence from Mandarin due to the sharper vowels and, along with Mandarin, have the "kh" sound that missing from other Asiatic languages. In South Korea, the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is used as a sort of boldface. (In North Korea, Hanja has been discontinued.) Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not been considered sufficient. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. 50% or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. 10% of Philippine language vocabularies are of Chinese origin. Chinese also shares a great many grammatical features with these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. The Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages seem to retain sounds of Classical Chinese that are otherwise only found in southern China.

Sounds

:For more specific information on phonology of Chinese see the respective main articles of each spoken variety. The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants and can stand alone as their own syllable. Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to , , , , , , or . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely and . Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters. The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are the five tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma". The tones correspond to these five characters:
- "mother" — high level
- "hemp" — high rising
- "horse" — low falling-rising
- "scold" — high falling
- question particle — neutral .

Romanization

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages; this is due to the complex history of interaction between China and the West, and to the Chinese languages' lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries of the 16th century, but may be written down by Western travelers of missionaries of earlier periods. At present, the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin, also known simply as Pinyin. Pinyin is the official Mandarin romanization system for the People's Republic of China, and the official one used in Singapore (see also Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is also very commonly used when teaching Mandarin in schools and universities of North America and Europe. Perhaps the second-most common system of romanization for Mandarin is Wade-Giles. This system was probably the most common system of romanization for Mandarin before Hanyu Pinyin was developmed. Wade-Giles is often found in academic use in the U.S., and is widely used in Taiwan. Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Regardless of system, tone transcription is often left out, either due to difficulties of typesetting or propriety for audience. Wade-Giles' extensive use of easily-forgotten apostrophes adds to the confusion. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng, and with Taipei than with T'ai2-pei3. Regardless of romanization, the words are pronounced the same. Learning a system of romanization requires occasional deviations from the learner's own language, so, for example, Hanyu Pinyin uses "q" for very different values than an English speaker would probably be used to; the sound represented is similar to the English "ch", but is further back. This is a cause of confusion but is unavoidable, as Mandarin (and any language transcribed) will have phonemes different from those of the learner's own. On the other hand, this can be beneficial, since the learner knows immediately that he will have to learn a new pronunciation. Often with languages like Spanish, the pronunciation is similar enough to English that a learner will often revert to his habitual pronunciation when he sees the letters in Spanish words. There are many other systems of romanization for Mandarin, as well as systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages. Also there are at least two systems of cyrillization of Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system.

Morphology

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest building blocks, of the language. Some of these single-syllable morphemes can stand alone as individual words, but contrary to what is often claimed, Chinese is not a monosyllabic language. Most words in the modern Chinese spoken varieties are in fact multisyllabic, consisting of more than one morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. The confusion arises in how one thinks about the language. In the Chinese writing system, each individual single-syllable morpheme corresponds to a single character, referred to as a zì (字). Most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì, but this view is not entirely accurate. Many words are multisyllabic, and are composed of more than one zì. This composition is what is known as a cí (詞), and more closely resembles the traditional Western definition of a word. However, the concept of cí was historically a technical linguistic term that until only the past century, the average Chinese speaker was not aware of. Even today, most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì. This can be illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese sentence (romanized using pinyin): :Jīguāng, zhè liǎngge zì shì shéme yìsi? :激光, 這兩個字是甚麼意思? :激光, 这两个字是什么意思? The sentence literally translates to, "Jī 激 and guāng 光, these two zì 字, what do they mean?" However, the more natural English translation would probably be, "Laser, this word, what does it mean?" Even though jīguāng 激光 is a single word, speakers tend to think of its constituents as being separate (Ramsey, 1987). Old Chinese and Middle Chinese had many more monosyllabic words due to greater variability in possible sounds. The modern Chinese varieties lost many of these sound distinctions, leading to homonyms in words that were once distinct. Multisyllabic words arose in order to compensate for this loss. Most natively derived multisyllabic words still feature these original monosyllabic morpheme roots. Many Chinese morphemes still have associated meaning, even though many of them no longer can stand alone as individual words. This situation is analogous to the use of the English prefix pre-. Even though pre- can never stand alone by itself as an individual word, it is commonly understood by English speakers to mean "before," such as in the words predawn, previous, and premonition. Taking the previous example, jīguāng, jī and guāng literally mean "stimulated light," resulting in the meaning, "laser." However, jī is never found as a single word by itself, because there are too many other morphemes that are also pronounced in the same way. For instance, the morphemes that correspond to the meanings "chicken" 雞/鸡, "machine" 機/机, "basic" 基, "hit" 擊/击, "hunger" 饑/饥, and "sum" 積/积 are also pronounced jī in Mandarin. It is only in the context of other morphemes can an exact meaning of a zì be known. In certain ways, the logographic writing system helps to reinforce meaning in zì that are homophonous, since even though several morphemes may be pronounced the same way, they are written using different characters. Continuing with the example, we have: For this reason, it is very common for Mandarin speakers to put characters in context as a natural part of conversation. For example, when telling each other their names (which are often rare, or at least non-colloquial, combinations of zì), Mandarin speakers often state which words their names are found in. As a specific example, a speakers might say 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyíng, Jiālíngjiāng de jiā, Yíngguó de yíng "My name is Jiāyíng, the Jia of Jialing River and the Ying in England." The problem of homonyms also exists but is less severe in southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Taiwanese, which preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese. For instance, the previous examples of jī for "stimulated," "chicken," and "machine" have distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gik1, gai1, and gei1, respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to employ fewer multisyllabic words. There are a few morphemes in Chinese, many of them loanwords, that consist of more than one syllable. These words cannot be further divided into single-syllable meaningful units, however in writing each syllable is still written as separate zì. One example is the word for "spider," zhīzhū, which is written as 蜘蛛. Even in this case, Chinese tend to try to make some kind of meaning out of the constituent syllables. For this reason, the two characters 蜘 and 蛛 each have an associated meaning of "spider" when seen alone as individual characters. When spoken though, they can never occur apart.

Loanwords

Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times. Words borrowed from along the Silk Road in ancient times include 葡萄 "grape", 石榴 "pomegranate" and 獅子 "lion". Other words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩薩 "bodhisattva". Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations; characters in this case are usually taken strictly for their phonetic values. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè). The Chinese characters used here literally mean "using-colour-rank", or "ranking using colour", but the sense is automatically ignored because it is understood that the characters are used for their phonetic values only. Characters which are used nearly exclusively in the transcription of foreign words are present in Chinese; many of these characters date back to Middle Chinese when they were used to translate Sanskrit phonemes. For example, 斯 sī and 爾 ěr, which are Classical Chinese words for "this" and "you", are never used in their original senses (except in a limited number of idiomatic expressions) and more often used to transcribe the sounds /s/ and /l/ in foreign words. Nevertheless, this method tends to yield somewhat strange results, and is therefore overwhelmingly used to transcribe foreign names only. A rather small number of direct phonetic borrowings have survived as common words, including 幽默 yōumò "humour", 邏輯 luójí "logic", 時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable", 麥克風 màikèfēng "microphone", and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics". It is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped, making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned phonetically as 德律風 (Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s, but later 電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 藍牙 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 賽百味 (sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Another important source came from a related writing system, kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language. The Japanese used kanji to translate many European words in the late 19th century and early 20th century. These words are called wasei-kango in Japanese (和製漢語 literally Japanese-made Chinese), and many of these words were then loaned into Chinese. Examples include lìchǎng (立場, たちば, stance), zhéxué (哲學, てつがく, philosophy), chōuxiàng (抽象, ちゅうしょう, abstract), guóyǔ (國語, こくご, national language), zhǔyì (主義, しゅぎ, -ism) and làngmàn (浪漫、ロマンス、romance). Some of these terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this to-and-fro process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese continue to share many terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages.

Grammar

In general, all spoken varieties of Chinese are isolating languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology (changes in the form of the word through inflection). Because they are isolating languages, they make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Even though Chinese has no grammatical gender, it has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring (but not related) languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese measure words for an extensive coverage of this subject. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping (and the related subject dropping), and the use of aspect rather than tense. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess various differences. See Chinese grammar for the grammar of Standard Mandarin (the standardized Chinese spoken language), and the articles on other varieties of Chinese for their respective grammars.

See also


- Chinese numerals
- Chinese number gestures
- Haner language
- Four-character idiom
- Common phrases in different languages
- Chinese measure words
- Nü shu
- Han unification
- HSK test
- Subgroups of the Han nationality
- Chinese character encoding
- List of writing systems
- Numbers in various languages
- Chinese honorifics
- Chinese language facts and fantasy

References


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External links

Dictionaries


- [http://www.dict.cn Free Online Chinese - English Dictionary] 1,000,000 English and Chinese words
- [http://www.zhongwen.com Zhongwen.com:] Chinese to English dictionary and other resources presented in English; searchable by English meanings; Chinese text displayed as graphics (i.e. does not require any Chinese font)
- [http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary]
- [http://www.chineselanguage.org/CCDICT/index.html Chinese Characters Dictionary]: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc.
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Chinese-english/ Chinese - English Dictionary]: from [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org Webster's Online Dictionary] - the Rosetta Edition
- [http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/chinese-french-dictionary.html Chinese - French Dictionary] search Chinese, pinyin or French
- [http://www.mandarintools.com/cedict.html CEDICT] Chinese-English Dictionary Project
- [http://www.online-dictionary.biz/english/chinese Chinese dictionary] Free Chinese-English-Chinese dictionary
- [http://stardict.sourceforge.net Stardict] free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32
- [http://cdict.giga.net.tw English-Chinese Translation Dictionary]: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised)
- [http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php CantoDict]: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project

Resources for students of Chinese


- [http://www.chinese-forums.com Chinese Forums:]Discussion of Chinese language and culture with some very knowledgable participants, mostly intermediate or advanced learners of Chinese but also many native speakers / overseas Chinese.
- [http://www.oneaday.org Oneaday.org] One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation.
- [http://www.shufawest.us/language/tonedrill.html Mandarin Tone Drill] Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones.
- [http://www.mandarin123.com/pronunciation.html Mandarin Tone Quizzes] Useful practices on Mandarin tones.
- [http://www.pinyinpractice.com/tones.htm Pinyin Practice] Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all level

Traditional Chinese

Traditional Chinese characters are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese characters. It is the set of characters that first appeared during the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) and has been used since the 5th century during the Southern and Northern Dynasties. It is called traditional as opposed to the other form - the simplified Chinese characters, created or standardised by the government of the People's Republic of China (mainland China) starting from the 1950s. Traditional Chinese is text written with Traditional Chinese characters. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and some overseas Chinese communities; especially those originating from the aforementioned countries or who emigrated before the widepspread adoption of simplified characters in the People's Republic of China. In contrast, simplified characters are used in Mainland China, Singapore, and in some overseas Chinese communities; especially those from aforementioned countries who emigrated after the widespread adoption of simplified Chinese characters.

Controversy over name

Among Chinese people, traditional Chinese characters are referred to by several different names, each with different implications. The government of the Republic of China (Taiwan) officially calls traditional Chinese characters standard characters or orthodox characters (Traditional Chinese: 正體字; Simplified Chinese: 正体字; pinyin: zhèngtǐzì), which implies that traditional characters are the full and correct forms of the characters. In contrast, users of simplified characters call them complex characters (Traditional Chinese: 繁體字; Simplified Chinese: 繁体字; pinyin: fántǐzì), or, informally, old characters (老字; pinyin: lǎozì), with the implication that traditional Chinese characters have been replaced and are obsolete. Traditional character users argue that traditional characters cannot be called "complex" as they were never made more complex; the characters were preserved the way they were. Conversely supporters of simplified Chinese characters object strongly to the description of these characters as "standard," since they view the new simplified characters as the contemporary standard. They also point out that traditional characters are not truly traditional as Chinese characters have changed significantly over time. Curiously, although the character which is generally translated as "complex" is itself comprised of numerous, if not complex strokes, the character has not undergone simplification; this is perhaps intentional as it demonstrates the relative complexity of the Traditional characters in contrast to the Simplified versions. Additionally, while "complex" bears somewhat of a negative connotation in English, the Chinese character per se does not imply anything to the extent that it might be construed as "complex" or "troublesome"; rather, the meaning is rather vague and remains neutral unless coupled with other characters. Some older people refer to traditional characters as proper characters (正字; pinyin: zhèngzì) and simplified characters as simplified-stroke characters (Traditional Chinese: 簡筆字; Simplified Chinese: 简笔字; pinyin: jiǎnbǐzì) or reduced-stroke characters (Traditional Chinese: 減筆字; Simplified Chinese: 减笔字; pinyin: jiǎnbǐzì) (simplified- and reduced- are actually homonyms in Mandarin Chinese, both pronounced jiǎn).

Printed text

When printing text, people in Mainland China and Singapore mainly use the simplified system, which was developed by the People's Republic of China government in the 1950s. However, the PRC also prints material intended to be read outside of Mainland China using traditional characters. In handwritten text, most people use informal, sometimes personal simplifications. In most cases, an alternative character (異體字) would be used in place of one with more strokes, such as 体 for 體. Contrary to popular belief, most of these are still part of the set of traditional chinese characters, but informally and confusingly called simplified form (簡寫). Though not standard, these are usually accepted outside schools, and some are extremely widespread, notably the tai (台) in Taiwan as opposed to the standard character (臺).

Computer character encoding

In the past, Traditional Chinese was most often rendered using the Big5 character encoding scheme, a character encoding scheme that favors Traditional Chinese. Unicode, however, has become increasingly popular as a way to render Traditional Chinese. Unicode gives equal weight to both simplified and traditional Chinese characters and does not favor either over the other. There are various IMEs (Input Method Editors) available to input Chinese characters.

Usage in other languages

Traditional characters are also used in Korean Hanja, and moderately simplified traditional characters are used in modern Japanese Kanji.

See also


- Kaishu
- Chinese character Category:Chinese language Category:Logographic writing systems ko:번체자 ja:字体

China

to protect the north from nomadic invaders and has been rebuilt several times since.]] China () refers to a number of states and cultures that have existed and are viewed as having succeeded one another in continental East Asia, dating back at least 3,500 years. China as it exists today has been variously described in different points of view as a single civilization or multiple civilizations, as a single state or multiple states, and as a single nation or multiple nations. With one of the world's longest periods of mostly uninterrupted civilization and the world's longest continuously used written language system, China's history has been largely characterized by repeated divisions and reunifications amid alternating periods of peace and war, and violent imperial dynastic change. The country's territorial extent expanded outwards from a core area in the North China Plain, and varied according to its moving fortunes to include multiple regions of East, Northeast, and Central Asia. For centuries, Imperial China was also one of the world's most technologically advanced civilizations, and East Asia's dominant cultural influence, with an impact lasting to the present day throughout the region. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, China's political, economic, and military influence declined relative to growing regional power Japan and the influence of Western powers. Semi-colonialism developed by the late nineteenth century in parts of China, and the country was invaded by the Empire of Japan during World War II. The imperial system in China ended with the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) under Sun Yat-sen in 1912; however, the next four decades of ROC rule were marred by warlord control, the Second Sino-Japanese War (WWII), and the Chinese Civil War which pitted Chinese Nationalists against the Communist forces. After its victory in the Chinese Civil War, the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, forcing the Republic of China (ROC) to retreat to the island of Taiwan, which it had governed since the end of World War II. Since then, the ROC has maintained administrative control over Taiwan, the Pescadores, several islands off the coast of Fujian province, and some islands in the South China Sea.

Terminology

"Zhongguo"

South China Sea China is called Zhongguo in Mandarin Chinese (Simplified: 中国, Traditional: 中國; also romanized as Jhongguo or Chung-kuo), which is usually translated as "Middle Kingdom", but could also be translated as "Central State" or "Central Country". Zhong (中) means "middle" or "center" while guo (国 or 國) means "country," "kingdom," "state," or "land", referring to the claim that China stood at the centre of that society's "known world", surrounded by lesser tributary states. The term has not been used consistently throughout Chinese history, however, and carries certain cultural and political connotations both positive and negative, some ideological, and early states considered part of Chinese history are not called "Zhongguo". During the Spring and Autumn Period, it was used only to describe the states politically descended from the Western Zhou Dynasty, in the Yellow River (Huang He) valley, to the exclusion of states such as Chu and Qin. The "Chinese" thus defined their nation as culturally and politically distinct from - and as the axis mundi of surrounding nations; a concept that continued well into the Qing Dynasty, although being continually redefined while the central political influence expanded territorially, and its culture assimilated alien influences. Thus Zhongguo quickly came to include areas farther south, as the cultural and political unit (not yet a "nation" or "country" in the modern sense) spread in a southerly direction, including the Yangtze River and Pearl River systems, and by the Tang Dynasty it even included "barbarian" regimes such as the Xianbei and Xiongnu. Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, and the island of Taiwan, over time, came to be dominated (to a greater or lesser extent) by, or officially ruled by, imperial China, and are often included as a part of Zhongguo, though acceptance or denial of such claims remains politically controversial, especially where Zhongguo means PRC. During the Han Dynasty and before, Zhongguo had three distinctive meanings: # The area around the capital or imperial domain. The Book of Poetry explicitly gives this definition. # Territories under the direct authority of the "central" authorities. The Historical Records states: "Eight mountains are famed in the empire. Three are with the Man and Yi barbarians. Five are in Zhongguo." # The area now called the North China Plain. The Sanguo Zhi records the following monologue: "If we can lead the host of Wu and Yue (the area of southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang) to oppose Zhongguo, then we should break off relations with them soon." In this sense, the term is synonymous with Hua (華) and Xia (夏). During the period of division after the fall of the Han Dynasty, the term Zhongguo was subjected to transformation as a result of the surge of nomadic peoples from the northern frontier. This was doubly so after the loss of the Yellow River valley, the cradle of Chinese civilization, to these peoples. For example, the Xianbei called their Northern Wei regime Zhongguo, contrasting it with the Southern Dynasties, which they called the Yi (夷), meaning "barbarian". The southern dynasties, for their part, recently exiled from the north, called the Northern Wei Lu (虏), meaning "criminal" or "prisoner". In this way Zhongguo came to represent political legitimacy. It was used in this manner from the tenth century onwards by the competing dynasties of Liao, Jin and Song. The term Zhongguo came to be related to geographic, cultural and political identity and less to ethnic origin. The Republic of China, as it controlled mainland China, and later, the People's Republic of China, have used Zhongguo as an entity existing theoretically to mean all the territories and peoples within their political control as well as those outside of it (people in the Republic of China on Taiwan now usually use Zhongguo to refer to the PRC and use Taiwan to refer to itself). Thus it is asserted that all 56 officially recognized ethnic groups are Zhongguo ren (中國人), or Zhongguo people. Their disparate histories are collectively the history of Zhongguo.

"China"

Song in ancient times, was the imperial capital of 13 different historical dynasties (including the Han and Tang dynasties) in China.]] English and many other languages use forms of the name China (and the prefix Sino-), which is believed to have derived from the name of the Qin dynasty that first unified the country, even though it is not completely resolved and the origins are still controversial to an extent [http://www.bartleby.com/61/80/C0298000.html]. Despite the fact that the Qin dynasty was short-lived and was often regarded as overly tyrannical it unified the written language in China and gave the supreme ruler of China the title of "Emperor", hence, the subsequent Silk Road traders would identify themselves by that name. Alternate theories on the origin of the word "China" exist. In any circumstance, the word China passed through many languages along the Silk Road before it finally reached Europe and England. The Western "China", transliterated to Shina (支那) has also been used by Japanese since the nineteenth century, and has since evolved into a derogatory term in that language. The term "China" can narrowly mean China proper, or, often, China proper and Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, a combination essentially coterminous with the 20th and 21st century political entity China; the boundaries between these regions do not necessarily follow provincial boundaries. In many contexts, "China" is commonly used to refer to the People's Republic of China or mainland China, while "Taiwan" is used to refer to the Republic of China. Informally, in economic or business contexts, "the Greater China region" (大中華地區) refers to Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Sinologists usually use "Chinese" in a more restricted sense, more akin to the classical usage of Zhongguo, or to the meaning of the "Han ethnic group", who make up the bulk of Mainland China. In many contexts it may be more appropriate to speak of "mainland China" (中國大陸,zhōngguó dàlù in Mandarin), especially when contrasting it with other, politically different regions like Hong Kong, Macau, and territories administered by the Republic of China (Taiwan).

History

:Main articles: History of China, History of the Republic of China (1912–1949; 1949–Present on Taiwan), History of People's Republic of China (1949–Present) History of People's Republic of China China was one of the earliest centers of human civilization. Chinese civilization was also one of the few to invent writing independently, the others being ancient Mesopotamia (Sumerians), India (Indus Valley Civilization), the Mayans, and, some hold, Ancient Egypt—though it may have been learned from the Sumerians. The first dynasty according to Chinese historical sources was the Xia Dynasty. Until scientific excavations were made at early bronze-age sites at Erlitou in Henan Province, it was difficult to separate myth from reality in regard to the existence of the Xia Dynasty. But since then, archaeologists have uncovered urban sites, bronze implements, and tombs that point to the possible existence of the Xia dynasty at the same locations cited in ancient Chinese historical texts. However, the first confirmed dynasty is the Shang, who settled along the Huang He river, dating from the 18th to the 12th centuries BC. The Shang were in turn invaded by the Zhou (12th to 5th centuries BC), whose centralized authority was slowly eroded by the ceding of state-like authority to warlords ruling small states; eventually, in the Spring and Autumn period, many strong independent states, in continuous war, paid but nominal deference to the Zhou state as the Imperial centre. They were all unified under one emperor in 221 BC by Qin Shi Huang, ushering in the Qin Dynasty, the first unified centralized Chinese state. This state, however, did not last for long, as it was way too authoritarian, destroying many sources of competition for power that were also sources of good governance and development, such as scholars and intellectuals. After the fall of authoritarian Qin Dynasty in 207 BC came the Han Dynasty which lasted until 220 AD. A period of disunion followed again. In 580, China was reunited under the Sui. Under the succeeding Tang and Song dynasties, China reached its golden age. For a long period of time, especially between the 7th and 14th centuries, China was one of the most advanced civilizations in the world in technology, literature, and art. The Song Dynasty fell to the invading Mongols in 1279. The Mongols, under Kublai Khan, established the Yuan Dynasty. A peasant named Zhu Yuanzhang overthrew the Mongols in 1368 and founded the Ming Dynasty, which lasted until 1644. After the Ming dynasty, came the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, which lasted until the overthrow of Puyi in 1911. Oftentimes regime change was violent and strongly opposed and the ruler class needed to take special measures to ensure their rule and the loyalty of the overthrown dynasty. For example, after the foreign Qing (Manchus) conquered China, because they were ever suspicious of the Han Chinese, the Qing rulers put into effect measures aimed at preventing the absorption of the Manchus into the dominant Han Chinese population. However, these restrictions proved ineffective against the assimilation of Manchus into the Chinese identity and culture. In the 18th century, China achieved a decisive technological advantage over the peoples of Central Asia, which it had been at war with for several centuries, while simultaneously falling behind Europe in that respect. This set the stage for the 19th century, in which China adopted a defensive posture against European imperialism while itself engaging in imperialistic expansion into Central Asia. See Imperialism in Asia. However the primary cause of the decline of the Chinese empire was not European and American interference, as the ethnocentric Western historians would lead many to believe. On the contrary it was a series of internal upheavals. Most prominent of these was the Taiping Civil War which lasted from 1851 to 1862. The civil war was started by an extremist believer in a school of thought partly influenced by Christianity who believed himself to be the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus. Although the imperial forces were eventually victorious, the civil war was one of the bloodiest in human history - costing at least twenty million lives (more than the total number of fatalities in the First World War). Prior to this conflict a number of Islamic Rebellions, especially in Central Asia, had occurred. Later, a second major rebellion took place, although this latter uprising was considerably smaller than the cataclysmic Taiping Civil War. This second conflict was the Boxer Rebellion which aimed to repel Westerners. Although secretly supporting the rebels, the Empress, Ci Xi, aided foreign forces in suppressing the uprising. Ci Xi, 1949.]] In 1912, after a prolonged period of decline, the institution of the Emperor of China disappeared and the Republic of China was established. The following three decades were a period of disunion — the Warlord Era, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War. The latter ended in 1949 with the Communist Party of China in control of mainland China. The CPC established a communist state—the People's Republic of China—that laid claim to be the successor state of the Republic of China. Meanwhile, the disorganized and potentially corrupt ROC government of the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, where it continued to be recognized as the legitimate government of all China by the Western bloc and the United Nations until the 1970s, when most nations and the UN switched recognition to the PRC. The United Kingdom and Portugal transferred their colonies of Hong Kong and Macau on the southern Chinese coast to the PRC in 1997 and 1999, respectively. China used in a modern context often refers to just the territory of the PRC, or to "Mainland China" (the territory of the PRC excluding Hong Kong and Macau). The PRC does not recognize the ROC, as it claims to have succeeded the ROC as the legitimate governing authority of all of China including Taiwan. On the other hand, the ROC—while never formally renouncing its earlier claims or changing official maps that show its territory as including both the modern-day PRC, Mongolia and Tibet—has moved away from this former identity representing its rule over all of China, and increasingly identifies itself as Taiwan. The PRC has historically resisted the ROC's identification of itself as Taiwan, especially in light of the movement supported by residents of Taiwan and others who advocate Taiwan's identity as an independent political entity. Significant disputes persist as to the nature and extent of China, possible Chinese reunification and the political status of Taiwan.

Chinese Pre-history

Archeological evidence suggests that the earliest occupants in China date as long as 2.24 million to 250,000 years ago by an ancient human relative (hominin) known as Homo erectus. One particular cave in Zhoukoudian (now known as Peking) has fossilised evidence dating to 300,000 and 550,000 years old. Evidence of primitive stone tool technology and animal bones in association to H. erectus have been studied since the late 18th century to 19th century in various areas of Eastern Asia including Indonesia (in particular the Island of Java) and Malaysia. Originally it is thought that these early hominis first evolved in Africa during the Pleistocene. It is thought that human evolution first took place in Africa expanding 7 million years. By 2 million years ago the first wave of migration from the species in association with H. erectus settled into various areas in the Old World. Fully modern humans (homo sapiens) are believed to originally have evolved roughly 200,000 and 168,000 years ago in Ethiopia or Southern Africa (ei. Homo sapiens idaltu). By 100,000 to 50,000 years ago modern human beings settled in all parts of the Old world (including the New World, Americas 25,000 to 11,000 BCE). By less than 100,000 years ago all proto-human populations disappeared as modern humans took over or drove other human species into extinction. It remains a controversial subject to whether fully modern humans evolved from separate H. erectus populations (known as "multiregional") as some evidence in ancient bones show a transitional change from H. erectus to H. sapiens having archaic features. However it is now more widely accepted that all modern humans genetically share a direct ancestor, a female nicknamed "Mitochondrial Eve" from Eastern Africa 150,000 years BCE. This model is known as Mitochondrial Eve Hypothesis. The earliest evidence examples of fully modern humans in China come from Liujiang, China where a cranium dates 67,000 years BCE. Another is a partial skeleton from Minatogawa being just 18,000 years old.

Political history

Before unification by the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC, "China" did not exist as a coherent entity. The Chinese civilization consisted of a patchwork of several states, each ruled by a king (王), duke (公), marquess (侯), or earl (伯). Although there was a central king who held nominal power, and powerful hegemons sometimes held considerable influence, each state was ruled as an independent political entity. This is also the time of the beginnings of Confucian philosophy and that of many other philosophies that greatly influenced Chinese philosophy-political thought. This ended with the Qin Dynasty unification, during which the office of the emperor was set up, and a system of bureaucratic administration established. After the Qin, China experienced about 13 more dynasties, many of which continued the extensive system of kingdoms, dukedoms, earldoms, and marquisates. The territory varied with several expansions and contractions depending on the strength of each emperor and dynasty. However the emperor had ultimate, supreme, and unquestionable authority as the political and religious leader of China. The emperor also consulted civil and martial ministers, especially the prime minister. Political power sometimes fell into the hands of powerful officials, eunuchs, or imperial relatives, often at the expense of a child heriditary emperor. This happened especially since the emperor often was many layers of power removed from the outside world, making him susceptible to manipulation because his sources for information could manipulate that information causing him to make incorrect decisions, especially when their age at becoming emperor often had no bottom limit, with rule passing heriditarily but also given "in trust" to another relative. Political relations with dependencies (tributary kingdoms) were maintained by international marriages, military aids, treaties, and gifts. (see section "Geography, Political" below for examples), Luoyang, Chang'an (today's Xi'an), Nanjing, and Beijing are the four cities most commonly designated as capitals of China over the course of history. Chinese was the official language, though periods of Mongol and Manchu conquest saw the arrival of Mongol and Manchu as alternate official languages. On January 1, 1912, the Republic of China (ROC) was established, signaling the end of the Manchu-dominated Qing Empire. Sun Yat-sen of the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party), was proclaimed provisional president of the republic. However, Yuan Shikai, a former Qing general who had defected to the revolutionary cause, soon forced Sun to step aside and took the presidency for himself (formally it was a negotiation where Sun agreed to step aside for what was then perceived as a strong reformer, Yuan). Before long, Yuan attempted to have himself proclaimed emperor of a new dynasty; however, he died soon of natural causes before fully taking power over all of the Chinese empire. After Yuan's downfall, China was politically fragmented, with an internationally-recognized, but virtually powerless, national government seated in Beijing (thus failing to fit the definition of a state). Warlords in various regions exercised actual control over their respective territories. state In the late 1920s, the Kuomintang, under Chiang Kai-shek, was able to reunify the country under its own control, moving the nation's capital to Nanjing and implementing "political tutelage", an intermediate stage of political development outlined in Sun Yat-sen's program for transforming China into a modern, democratic state. Effectively, political tutelage meant one-party rule by the Kuomintang with heavy Leninist influences. Ironically, both the Kuomintang and the CCP have heavy Leninist influences. In 1947, constitutional rule was established, but because of the ongoing Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China (CPC), many provisions of the 1947 ROC constitution were never put into actual practice on the mainland. By early 1950, the CPC had defeated the Kuomintang on the mainland, and the ROC government retreated to the island of Taiwan. Beginning in the late 1970s, Taiwan began the implementation of full, multi-party, representative democracy in the territories still under ROC control (i.e., Taiwan Province, Taipei, Kaohsiung and some offshore islands of Fujian province). Today, the political scene in the ROC is vibrant, with active participation by all sectors of society. But rather than the usual conservative-liberal policy distinctions that are the hallmarks of most democracies around the world, the main cleavage in ROC politics is the unification with China in the long-run vs. formal independence issue. However, Greens are generally more liberal (i.e. more environmentally friendly) and Blues are generally regarded as more conservative. environmentally friendly Meanwhile, Mao Zedong, the leader of the communists, proclaimed the People's Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949 in Beijing, saying China had stood up. From the beginning, the PRC has been a dictatorial one-party state under the Communist Party. However, post-1978 reforms have led to the relaxation, in varying degrees, of party control over many areas of society. Nonetheless, the Communist Party still has absolute control over political aspects of society, and it continuously seeks to eradicate threats to its rule. Examples of this include the jailing of political opponents and journalists, general control of the press, regulation of religions and other non-party organizations, censorship of the press, literature and film, and suppression of independence/secessionist movements. In 1989, a popular demonstration held in Beijing at Tiananmen Square was violently put to an end by the Chinese government. Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 The attempted eradication of the Falun Gong movement is also held by its supporters to be motivated by fear of Falun Gong's growing influence. Today, however, there is much more freedom in intellectual thought in non-political areas and propaganda, while still continuing, has lessened.

Territory

Historical overview

propaganda The Zhou Dynasty, which preceded the unification of China by Shi Huangdi, was originally the region around the Yellow River. Since then, the territory has expanded outward in all directions, and was largest during the Tang, Yuan, and Qing dynasties. The Qing Dynasty included parts of modern Russian Far East and Central Asia (west of Xinjiang). Xinjiang Along with provincial administrators, some foreign monarchs sent envoys to offer gifts to the Emperor of China and the Emperor returned compliments to them. The Chinese thought that the barbarians attached themselves to the virtue of the Emperor, while the foreign governments sometimes disagreed. Since the end of the 19th century, China has tried to reinterpret this relationship as suzerainty or suzerainty-dependency, but this no longer has any real conception in modern international political theories. The Qing Empire reduced the territorial value of the Great Wall of China as a barrier of China proper after they merged their homeland (Manchuria) north of the wall with China proper south of it. In 1683 after the surrender of the Kingdom of Tungning established by Koxinga, Taiwan including the Pescadores became a part of the Qing Empire, originally as one prefecture, then two, and later a province. Taiwan was subsequently ceded to Japan after the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895. At the end of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1945, Japan relinquished the sovereignty of the island in the San Francisco Peace Treaty, and the Republic of China took over. Since then, the de jure sovereignty of Taiwan has been under dispute between the PRC, and the now democratic ROC and Taiwan independence supporters.

Historical political divisions

Historically, top-level political divisions of China have altered as the administration changed. Top levels included circuits and provinces. Below that, there have been prefectures, subprefectures, departments, commanderies, districts, and counties. Recent divisions also include prefecture-level cities, county-level cities, towns and townships (see below for examples). Historically, most Chinese dynasties were based in the historical heartlands of China, known by the politically-correct term of China proper (since it doesn't include places it doesn't control, such as Mongolia or Taiwan). Various dynasties also exhibited expansionism by engaging in incursions into more peripheral territories like Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Xinjiang, and