5000 years of chinese civilization ? Really ?

[Maciamo]

I am currently reading China Road by Rob Gifford. The author, who graduated in Chinese studies, lived many years in China as a journalist and speaks fluent Mandarin, often mentions that China has 5000 years of continuous history. I have read or heard that many times before, in documentaries, in guide books, on Chinese government websites... Sometimes it is just 3000 years. Some will say 5000 years of 'civilization', others of 'history'.

But what is this obsession with this idea ? What is so special about that. India, Middle Eastern countries and Europe could all claim the same (or longer), but we never hear anyone boast about them. I spent 5 months in India and never heard anyone boast or remind tourists about India's 6000 years of civilization. Egyptians sometimes do, but not with the same fervour, or the same brainwashing tendency. Actually, many Chinese will tell you that China is the world's oldest civilisation.

Is it justified to think that China is is the oldest civilization in the world ? No, because it simply isn't. The definition of "civilisation" may differ a bit from person to person. Some will place the dawn of civilisation with the rise of agriculture. Others will the first city-states. Others with the first kingdoms or empires. Others still, will claim that we cannot be sure before recorded history, and so take the invention or adoption of writing as the beginning of a civilisation. I will demonstrate below that China cannot be considered the world's oldest civilisation whatever the definition.

The first agricultural societies developed in the Middle East. The earliest evidence for use of wild cereals go back to 20,000 BCE in Egypt and the Levant. Actual cultivation had become widespread in this region around 10,000 BCE. In China, rice culture developed from 7500 BCE in Hunan, and millet cultivation from 7000 BCE in Henan. This is a good 2000 years after the Near East.

As a consequence, the world's first cities appeared in the Levant soon after 10,000 BCE (Jericho, Damascus, Byblos...) and preceded Chinese cities by several millennia (the first Chinese cities date from about 5000 BCE).

China's first kingdom was the mythical Xia dynasty, which supposedly began around 2000 BCE. The first historical dynasty, though, is the Shang Dynasty (oldest record from 1600 BCE). The first historical Sumerian dynasties arose around 2900 BCE, while Egypt's early dynastic period starts from 3150 BCE. The first Mesopotamian empires preceded the first Chinese empire by 2000 years. Even Alexander's Empire is slightly older than Qin Shihuangdi's.

Cuneiform writing appeared in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago (8,000 BCE). The first alphabet was devised nearly 5000 years ago, and the Phoenician alphabet, from which all modern alphabet derive, is over 3000 years old. Primitive Chinese characters originated 3500 years ago during the Shang Dynasty, but modern ones were only standardised 2200 years ago. In every respect, the civilisation of the Middle East and Europe, which can indeed be considered as a single block, is considerably older than the Chinese one.

I anticipate the reaction of some people who will say, 'Yes but China is only one country, a single ethnic group speaking the same language throughout its history, while it is not the case for Europe and the Middle East'. Unfortunately this is totally wrong.

Does it make sense to think of China as a country and a civilisation, but of Europe and the Middle East as multiple civilisations ?

China was only unified 2200 years ago, but was split and reunified times and again, sometimes after many centuries of warring states. There are as many and possibly more languages and dialects in China than the whole of Europe and the Middle East. China officially has 55 ethnic minority groups (+ over 400 unofficial ones) in addition to the Han ethnicity. Genetic studies have shown that there is more genetic diversity within the Han ethnicity than between northern Hans, Manchus and Koreans. In other words someone from Beijing is genetically closer to a Korean than to someone from Hong Kong. There is also more genetic diversity within the province of Guandong than between all the other Han Chinese ! If we include all ethnic groups, there is more genetic diversity in China than in all Europe.

Agriculture spread from a small region of China, and took thousands of years to reach the traditional Han territory (less than half the size of modern China). Indigenous tribes were replaced or assimilated to the Han farmers. The exact same thing happened with the Middle East and Europe. Neolithic farmers from the Levant expanded eastward to modern Iran and westward to Greece, the Balkans, Central Europe, then all Europe. By the time agriculture reached the southern shores of China (around 5000 BCE), all Europe was already cultivating wheat or barley, including Scandinavia. Regions like Yunnan, Sichuan or Qinghai did not become agricultural until 3000 BCE, in the more accessible regions at least.

Haplogroup studies show that most of the European population migrated from in the Middle East, Caucasus or Eurasian steppe after Mesopotamian civilizations came into existence. In other words, Europeans can just as well claim to be descended from the Mesopotamians as a Chinese from Shanghai or Hong Kong can claim to be descended from the first Chinese farmers from the Yellow River basin.


It makes no sense to view the Middle East and Europe as a mosaic of separate civilizations and at the same time see China as a single civilization. Europe and the Middle East have had many contemporaneous cultures or kingdoms, but they were only one large civilization, which also sprouted from the same source of Neolithic farming in the Levant. The geography of the Mediterranean forced political and linguistic parcelling over time. But both regions have a "small" historical cradle (Mesopotamia & Anatolia vs the Yellow River basin) from which agriculture, technologies and genes spread more or less continually for the first 5 or 6 millennia. The last great migration from the Middle East to Europe was the Indo-European invasion from northern Anatolia around 4500 years ago. The Han Chinese had colonised most of their present-day territory around 4000 years ago.

Most of Europe and the Near East was unified under Roman rule about 2000 years ago. Eastern China (without Manchuria) was first unified around that time too. Scandinavia and North-Eastern Europe could be seen as the Manchuria, Mongolia, Turkestan (Xinjiang) and Tibet of China. Mongolia, Manchuria and Tibet all invaded China, just like Germanic and Slavic tribes invaded the Roman Empire. China does not have a longer history of living in unity. After all, even in medieval times, Europe also had a single, unifying authority figure in the Pope in Rome, and only recognised one emperor at a time until the 19th century. This is because Europeans felt part of a same civilization and understood that their could only be one emperor for Europe (Russia excluded), even if he did not control the whole of Europe.

China as a whole should be compared to Europe and the Middle East combined, not individual countries. As MIT political scientist and sinologist Lucian Pye said, "China is a civilization pretending to be a state". What we call countries in Europe (or EU member-states nowadays) are the equivalent of provinces in China.

I sometimes hear that the Chinese have preserved their writing system for longer than anybody else. This is false ! The Western alphabet is the Roman alphabet, which is only a slightly modified version of the Greek and Phoenician alphabets. Gauls and ancient Britons didn't know how to write 2500 years ago, but the same was true for most of China. Chinese writing originated in the Shang Dynasty, which covered an area about 1/10 the size of modern China. In fact, the modern alphabet was already in use in most of Europe 2000 years ago, thanks to the Romans, while only about half of modern China was part of the literate Chinese empire at the same period. Owing to the complexities of the Chinese writing system, functional literacy would have been lower within the Han Empire than Roman Empire in any case.

I do not write this to disparage China, but I am fed up of people (Westerners and Chinese alike) who think that China has a longer continuous history than Europe, just because they see China as a block and Europe as a mosaic. I can't understand why a British writer like Rob Gifford would write that. The CNTO (China National Tourist Office) introduces Chinese history with the statement "China, with a recorded history of 5,000 years, was one of the world's earliest civilizations. China was one of the countries where economic activity first developed." They are not fooling me, but I know for a fact that many people who read that believe it. Educated Western writers and journalists believe that. People making documentaries about China believe that. They never try to look at the big picture and think "wait, Chinese civilization isn't that old. It's more recent than India, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, Anatolia, Greece and by extension Europe.

If civilizations start with the first kingdoms or empires, then China, the country as we know it today, does not have 5000 years of civilization. A small part of China, around a section of the Yellow River, has at best 4000 years of civilizations since the Xia Dynasty, China's first dynasty. In comparison, Minoan civilization in Greece arose 5000 years ago, and a bunch of early cities between Greece and Germany are over 6000 years old (the oldest nearly 8000 years old). Europe being more ethnically homogeneous than China. Europeans can more easily relate or claim descent from ancient Greeks or Neolithic Danube farmers (even if very partially) than a Yunnanese or a Manchu could do with the people of the Xia Dynasty.

In conclusion, it is ok to say that the province of Shaanxi or Henan have 4000 years of civilizations. It is not to say that China does. It is even less to say that it is 5000 years. If you do like to extrapolate and say that the Han Chinese civilization arose 4000 years ago, then you could just as well say that European civilization arose 5000 years ago.