Chinese Culture Chinese Culture

Chinese Culture Wikipedia

Image:Incense_taiwan_temple_fu_dog.jpg|thumb|250px|The Chinese Dragon, Imperial_guardian_lions|Fu dog and Religion_in_China|religious incense comprise three pervasive symbols of traditional Chinese culture.

Home to one of the world's oldest and most complex civilizations, China boasts a history rich in over 5,000 years of art|artistic, philosophy|philosophical, and politics|political advancement. Though regional differences provide a sense of diversity, commonalites in language and religion connect a culture distinguished by such universally signifigant contributions as Confucianism. Credited with shaping much of Chinese thought, Confucianism was the official philosophy throughout most of Imperial China's history, and mastery of Confucian texts provided the primary criterion for Imperial examination|entry into the imperial bureaucracy.

Moreover, the Chinese people have been unified for over two millenia by the commonalities of their languages which, although generally mutually unintelligible in their spoken forms, share a common structure as analytic languages, where each concept is represented by a different word. This has allowed China to develop a common ideographic, calligraphy|calligraphic script which allows speakers of different dialects to communicate with the same script.

With the rise of Western economic and military power at the turn of the last century, however, non-Chinese systems of social and political organization gained adherents in China. Some of these would-be reformers totally rejected China's cultural legacy, while others sought to combine the strengths of Chinese and Western cultures. In essence, the history of 20th Century China is one of experimentation to find a new system of social, political, and economic organization that would allow for the reintegration of the nation in the wake of dynastic collapse.

Last Modified:   2005-02-26