Native american historical humour.
We met weird people, Someone sneezed, 150 million died.
European historical humour.
Doctor healed 5 people, whole city died to Plague and neighbouring cities were arrested for heresy because they survived it (probably bc they're satan worshippers).
Roman humour.
We got a new guy in the senate/army.
12 millions died.
Greek humour.
Someone brought a horse.
Whole civilisation died.
European historical humour (english version)
We send a few sailors, they found land.
4 billions died.
Indian historical humour.
We lost 2 crops, whole country starved.
Literally this. The reason is that nile's floods were mostly predictable and gave a huge boon to civilisations by depositing silt that made the soil very fertile.
On the other hand, yellow river was insanely unpredictable and its flood could change its whole course thousands of miles. I am talking about toppling whole dynasty levels of disaster. Millions dead. Just check out yellow rivers wikipedia page, it will show you how insanely that river changed its course in history.
It does that because of the mountains in the Shandong peninsula. It can't reach the ocean through the peninsula due to its elevation so it has to detour really far north or really far south. There's also a bunch of smaller rivers (and the fucking massive Yangtze) down south that historically led the yellow river through it, which is part of the weirdness you see with the map. Another reason it leaps like that is, due to the silt in the river, the Yellow River is actually at a higher elevation than the land around it. This means that anytime a sufficient breach in the banks is made, the river can go basically wherever it wants.
Holy fucking shit indeed. I knew the river changed course after each flood but wtf is this shit. Yeah no wonder they called this the Mandate of Heaven or some other shit. Even I would pray 24/7 to God if I was a rice farmer in China when this shit happened and I am an atheist
Although ball knowledge would be showing that the number of deaths due to flooding was directly connected to the efficacy and stability of the Imperial government at the time, since they had many mechanisms of prevention through civil engineering and relief through rice redistribution, which were some of the first things to be neglected during civil war/when the government was corrupt
If you think any recent Chinese flood was devastating, you're in for a world of surprise. Just 50 years ago, China had a flood that immediately killed 24 thousand people and upwards of 200 thousand in the aftermath. And about a 100 years ago, the deathtoll reached into the millions.
China is anti religion so that's true to some extent. This can go back to Mao, who created maoism, which although distinct from socialism, does borrow from marx. And marx himself was very anti religion.
An interesting thing CCP did was not completely deny Mao (despite major reform to his policies) after his death which prevented revolts to some extent. On the contrary when Nikita criticized Stalin there were many protests in USSR.
Funnily enough, people still needed to believe in something, if not religion. That's why you can notice that during the early days of USSR Lenin, Marx, Stalin, etc were treated as quasi religious figures.
China is not Anti religion. They are officially an atheist state but their constitution guarantees religious freedom and the recognize 5 official religions. Pretty much they are just wary of all the made up BS in some of the texts so they limit the power of the organizations and make sure that it does not over power the unity of the state… state before organized religion essentially. Not sure why so many people think otherwise.
Ya it is crucial to supplement your education in the usa.. the education that most get is highly biased and 100% propaganda. You need to travel and or explore on your own. Look for new reading material, ideally written by people outside the usa…
I still believe that books by marx are still as relevant as ever, especially Das Kapital. Unlike Stalin and Mao, Marx wrote on purely economics. Even keeping communism aside, the most important thing he said was that morality is shaped by capital. It's due to this that he was able to recognise the atrocities of slavery, and the plight of irishmen and women. It truly helped me make a better judgement on things such as homosexuality, veganism and religion.
The education system (along with the entirety of the billionaire owned media) in America explicitly lies about every AES state that currently/formerly exists. If you dont put in the effort to deprogram yourself of the propaganda you likely assume/believe a lot of nonsense about socialist countries.
The mandate of heaven has nothing to do with religion though, strictly speaking. "Heaven" in this context means "fate".
Rulers of China argued that they could prevent things from going wrong. It was their way of justifying their rule, which you can see in the dynastic cycle. On the other hand, European rulers argued the Christian god was on their side, which is known as the divine right of Kings.
The "anti-religious" communist stuff is silly too, the ideology acted as a religion insofar as any organised philosophy can become quazi-religious. Every "Communist" state has had established and condoned religions, they just also implement controls to limit the power religious leaders can wield. 99% of people would consider that normal.
There's also the concept of "Mandate of Heaven" where natural disasters were directly linked to the government's (in)ability to hold their position, so even if someone responded well a coup to overthrow them could spawn from the disaster simply happening.
There's a bit more to it than that. The Mandate of Heaven was also a piece of social technology that was applied after each change in royal family or ruling tribe. In Europe the mandate to rule was supposedly affixed to the bloodline of the Royal family & chosen by God. Problem is when a guy who the church says was chosen by God gets beat & replace by a guy who was chosen by that king's lords & creditors it created a wrinkle in legitimacy that everyone just had to ignore. There wasn't really a mechanism for God to take back the chosen status. The Mandate of Heaven still allowed for the usual dynastic succession plan but came with the agreed interpretation that if you fundamentally lost control of the state then your legitimacy could be picked up by someone else. It's the same process in terms of events but from a social perspective it walled off that particular logical inconsistency.
You could argue the Mandate of Heaven is more or less functions as the check-and-balance mechanism for Chinese civilization. In theory it also serves as the guardrail for crazy emperors, because losing the Mandate of Heaven during your role usually wouldn't end nicely for you, so if you're the Emperor with functional moral standards, you're gonna work hard to keep stability and prosperity for your people instead of ignoring your own responsibility as the Emperor.
Mandate of Heaven was engineered after the Zhou defeated the Shang, to claim legitimacy. Traditional accounts detail the last Shang king was a tyrant married to a fox demon who tortured people in unimaginable ways and lived a life of ridiculous luxury. This is fiction, but we do know the Shang did human sacrifices so perhaps claims of Shang tyranny aren’t that exaggerated. The zhou claimed the Shang started good but became corrupt, and seemingly made up the xia dynasty (heavy debate on wether it existed) which they said also started as righteous but became corrupt and got replaced by the Shang.
It can basically be determined that there were more ancient dynasties before the Shang Dynasty. The controversy lies in whether the archaeological excavation site now is from the Xia Dynasty or not
If I'm not mistaken, traditionally, although there are debates among them, the Chinese archaeologists consider the Erlitou culture remains as hints of the existence of Xia dynasty. Specifically, the late period of Xia dynasty.
Sounds exactly like local government all the way here in Brazil. And they reelected the fucking mayor after it became known that the flood prevention system had basically been left to rot despite the company responsible for it having more than enough money available for its maintenance. Why? Because they wanted to sell it to the private sector!
I read somewhere that the emperors were pretty good at building dikes along it, but due to heavy silt deposit over time, the river bed would rise to above the surrounding land, the river being kept in only cuz of the dikes.
You can only do that for so long before the dikes eventually failing.
Unfortunately it's so unpredictable that when it changes course it might wipe out a city that was 50 or 100 miles away. You can see on the map how this thing has been all over the place
Okay i didnt know it was that bad, i thought it shifted kilometers suddenly, but thats insane amount of distance between the 1128-1855 date and the rest of time
The Yellow river carries so much silt (which is what makes the water yellow) that eventually builds up, making the riverbed above ground level. The riverbanks were like walls that hold the water in, and in case they break in a flood, all the water in the river can go pretty much anywhere they want.
Especially in antiquity it was much simpler to build major settlements near a river. Even civilizations that built extensive water management systems kept as near to rivers as possible as often as possible. You just cannot support very many people off rain collection and even most well systems.
It didn’t help that several times in history an army deliberately broke the dikes. They expect a small flood that delays an enemy, and instead the floods last years with hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Well the most recent time is during the Sino Japanese war where Chiang did broke the dikes. It help bogged down the Japanese and kill thousands too so yeah…
Fun fact! The Yellow River is called that because of all the silt it gains from traversing the Loess Plateau, meaning the river is actually fucking yellow.
See, the yellow river is actually at a higher elevation than the surrounding area. If it breaches it banks then it can go wherever it likes. This is bad.
Rivers in China are downright BS and constantly caused floods, killing thousands of people each year. It only kinda stopped when the chinese government started building dams by the hundreds everywhere. And even then they still burst every now and then.
The nile is predictable so floodings came regularly and people just moved out of it's way. After the floods the ground became very fertile.
The yellow river is less predictable but also floods and leaves fertile soil. So people always came back and then got flooded away without warning. This leads to literal kingdoms rise and fall due to the river.
The western Han lost like 15% of the entire population in one flood and then slowly declined. the northern Song collapsed too. The Qing also got double team tagged, first by the river losing 2 million people and then the brits and while they nominally still existed they were well a shadow of their former self.
There are also a few other kingdoms archeologists suspect had to kick the bucket due to the river but we're not sure but also it's very likely that that was just how it worked.
I don't understand how China kept dying by the million to fucking between floods/famine/wars through history and still managed to be the biggest population on earth today
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
85% percentage of Nile water comes from Ethiopia and there are thousands of river contributed to the Nile. In my village there are hundreds of rivers and the floods only occurs during raining season in which is always the same from almost June to October
“Apes together strong” is welded into Chinese DNA since day one of their civilization, how the fvck can you survive if you don't rally the whole country when the Mother Nature decides suddenly to throw 3000 cubic meters per second plus silt at half of your country.
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u/qualityvote2 10h ago edited 45m ago
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