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chayote tacos's avatar

Fun reading, thank you! But I would suggest you redact this sentence: “country that is politically, religiously, linguistically, and ethnically uniform,….” China is no more uniform than Spain…… maybe it’s less uniform than Mexico, but not by much….. lots of religions and cult practices exist underneath the surface as well as Taoism and historic Buddhism as well as Confucianism and lots of different language groups. Most of them are same language family as Han Mandarin but certainly Cantonese is not mutually intelligible and there’s many other languages that are similarly different.

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

China has 1.4B people.

Spain has less than 50M.

Yet:

~92% of Chinese are Han.

~20% of people living in Spain were born abroad, and that doesn't even take into consideration 2nd & 3rd gen ppl.

Spain has several co-official languages (Basque, Catalan, Asturian, Galician...), some of which aren't mutually intelligible. All Chinese understand and share written Chinese.

80% of Chinese share that they have no religion.

And yet most Chinese share a mix of Buddhist / Confucianist culture.

In Spain, 20% are Catholic, 37% only culturally, 16% Atheists, 5% are Muslim...

China has been united politically for thousands of years, although with periods of breakage in between.

Spain was "only" united in 1492.

So yes, of course, no country that big will be culturally uniform!

But China is *remarkably* uniform for its size.

For the purpose of what we are trying to do here, it's as good as it gets, because it allows us to control for many other variables. Is it perfect? No, no natural test is perfect. But it's remarkably good!

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Richard's avatar
4dEdited

Tomas, you're confusing political definitions with culture. China is if the Romance-speaking countries were still one Roman empire with only Latin being the official written language (and taught in schools, like in the Middle Ages) and most/all of the Romance speakers were given the ethnicity of "Roman". Oh, and obviously the West has had more immigrants from elsewhere too. In terms of culture, native local spoken language, food and even genetics, Cantonese and Northern Chinese (say from around Beijing, excluding immigrants from elsewhere in both cases) are as different from each other as Sicilians are from Parisians. The various Romance Spanish "languages" (obviously excluding Basque) are much more similar to each other than some Chinese languages/regionalects are to each other. Most of them are completely unintelligible to other Chinese when spoken.

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Alan Perlo's avatar

What you said regarding language is true, but there is definitely a sense of ethnic cohesion among the Han despite this. Mutual intelligibility is only one piece of the puzzle, look at Serbians, Croatians and Bosnians, who speak the same language and are close genetically, but still view themselves as different ethnic groups. East Asian ethnicities tend to share identities over larger portions of land. than Europeans, who were historically more divided by politics and religion( though perhaps less nowadays, with the EU).

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Richard's avatar

Yeah, but the point is that that Han "ethnicity" (just like French "ethnicity" or really any ethnicity) was politically made by a political process. Strictly speaking, the "Han" "ethnicity" is a foreign definition. Northern Chinese did refer to themselves as "Han ren", but Cantonese would (and still do) refer to themselves as "Tang ren". Chinese would also refer to themselves as "Hua ren" living in "Huaxia" or "Jiuzhou" (the "9 states", which was an ancient concept of China). The (Manchurian) Qing dynasty did differentiate between Chinese and Manchurian, Mongolians, Tibetans, Hui, and other groups, but when the Mongol Yuan dynasty ruled China, they differentiated between Northern and Southern Chinese (so in modern terms, considered them different races/ethnicities). And most southern Chinese actually have a lot of ancestors who were Sinicized "non-Han" ethnicities/cultures and there was a lot of fluidity. For instance, in one village in southern China that ancestrally was of some X minority but was in the process of Sinicizing (the more educated/better-off families were learning and speaking the prestige language of Chinese and learning about/adopting/blending in Chinese cultural traditions and customs) in the 1930's when Western anthropologists visited, when asked, they would all say they were (Han) Chinese because that was higher status (as it generally was throughout Chinese history in southern China), but when the Communists took over the country in 1949, they suddenly all declared that they were actually X minority (because the PRC gives/gaves) minorities special privileges. These days, the members of the urban Zhuang ethnicity have Sinicized so much that they are not distinguishable in any way from their Cantonese-speaking Han ethnicity neighbors.

So my point is that the whole idea of ethnicity is a fluid and politically constructed concept, not some innate and fixed characteristic that Tomas seems to think it is. So if Italy, Spain, and France were all one country with its capital based in Rome, we may be speaking of Parisians and Sicilians being of the "Roman ethnicity". In fact, with much of Europe starting to align with each other culturally and by values, referring to the "European" or "EU ethnicity" makes as much sense as referring to the "Han ethnicity". So sure, Hunan ren and Fujian ren share some commonalities. But so do the Dutch and Norwegians! In fact, these days, many Dutch and Norwegians (and other Europeans) share the same (non-native) language (English) just like Hunan ren and Fujian ren share the same (non-native) language (Mandarin).

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Alan Perlo's avatar

I think Tomas and myself are aware of how ethnicity can be an ongoing process and not always be about a homogenous group, but the larger theme is that some ethnic unification processes are more successful than others, and this has significant effects on a country's politics. The Han Chinese have a lot of internal variation, but they've come to see themselves as a nation or ethnicity, and this makes China quite unified compared to say India. France and Spain is another good comparison to show what I'm saying: 300 years ago, both had a wide range of ethnic groups with quite divergent languages( like for example Basque in both, Breton and Occitan in France, Catalan and Galician in Spain), but the French unification process was carried out more efficiently( sometimes via force and discrimination!), with the end result being that Spain still has ethnic groups that view themselves as different semi-states, while native French people might speak minority languages but do not have goals of political autonomy or independence to the same degree. I do commend your knowledge on China, very detailed and illustrative. Europe's more fractured political history is why there's so many more countries within it than inside China's large territory. A good example here is Austria and Germany being different countries, despite their shared language and culture( with South Germany).

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Richard's avatar

Which just shows how this is all simply just political. Bismarck wanted to keep the Austrians out of Germany (and Hitler went far too far). Taiwan (which is similar culturally to Fujian across the strait; small wonder as Taiwanese benshengren came from Fujian) is in a different country from the PROC as well.

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chayote tacos's avatar

Appreciate the reply!

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Fever's avatar

This argument is also examined at length in the French historian Fernand Braudel's "Les Structures du Quotidien" (volume one of Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme). He makes most of the same points, and extends the reasoning to maize (corn) in the new world. Traditional maize crops also yield substantial calories per hectare, but require even less work than wheat, so you have a well-fed, healthy population with time on its hands. Your land use graph above makes this point implicitly. I'm not sure the dots connect as well as they do for rice and wheat - the influence of the Black Death on labor availability in the 15th century bears mention as well - but it's definitely interesting.

I think potatoes might have been the real game-changer anyway, but those became widespread much more recently, because they originate in the new world. But they are historically cultivated in ways that are complementary to other crops, such as raised beds in Ireland prior to the famine in the 1840s. The Irish ate as much as ⅔ of their calories from potatoes in the 1830s and were among the healthiest people in Europe. This dependence is why the famine hit them so hard.

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chayote tacos's avatar

Charles C Mann in 1493 makes the point that potatoes introduction to China also had devastating effects, deforestation, overpopulation, and flooding…. Interesting!

Ireland has never reached the same recorded population that it grew to pre-famine, afaik.

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

Added to the reading list! Thx!

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David Brown's avatar

When I lived in California, it was across the street from a rice field, and I was astonished to discover they planted the fields with airplanes. Wonder what that will do for culture going forward.

https://www.abc10.com/article/life/food/rice-fields-airplane/103-0d898650-6416-4cd1-a0e9-489c3b881e4c

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

Oh wow! I had no idea

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Илья's avatar

Great post, thank you.

I would agree with chayote tacos that China is much more diverse than it seems from the outside. The language is different region to region up to a point where one cannot understand the other.

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

But the point is not that it's uniform, but rather that it's as uniform as we can get for the purposes of our test!

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

Respect is mandatory in these comments.

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Vic Froelicher's avatar

How about populations dependent upon corn vs soybeans (and other protein sources like meat/fish) and strength/size differences in populations since corn lacks an essential protein (lysine)? How about the debate over the origin of civilization after moving from hunter/gathers to agriculture being due to bread or beer? Unfortunately, the strongest evidence points to the need for warfare as being the origin of civilization.

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Dave Schuler's avatar

Your maps of U. S. rice production are somewhat misleading. More acreage in California is devoted to rice production than any state other than Arkansas.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rice-yearbook

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

These are global maps, for dozens of crops, probably not perfect of fully updated! Thanks for the link and correction

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Guiperion Funes's avatar

A very Jared Diamond style article. Very interesting. One thing: in Milan, north of Italy and Valencia. Spain, rice farming and rice cuisine are traditionally more important than wheat. Are Valencianos and Lombardi more social and less individualistic or rice cultures inside wheat regions can't influence the bigger regional idiosyncrasies?

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

Interesting! I'd need to know how rice is farmed there. Because these places don't have that much water (especially Valencia)

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Qiulin Wu's avatar

Hybrid rice can now yield around 1000-1200 kg, and 1603 kg/{666m^2} in perfect condition.

It's about 300-400kg/{666m^2} 30 years ago. Agronomists did great work in developping high yield seeds.

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Tuskalin's avatar

Seeing Norway paired with Eastern countried at the top of the ranking for the influence of social norms made me check the original study (Gelfren et al., 2011). I'd take it with a grain of salt: samples are VERY different (in some countries students constitute 20% of the sample, whereas in others they represent 80%; similar variability for gender composition).

But most of all, the ranking is based on answers of those people to questions on the line of "do you think that social norms are pervasive in your country?", whose answers might obviously be inversely related to actual pervasiveness of social norms.

Check it out and let me know what you think Tomas, thanks

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

Yes, this type of research is famously imperfect. For me it's more the consistency of these findings across research than the fact that any single research paper's result is 100% proven.

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Tuskalin's avatar

I absolutely agree with you, Tomas! Maybe I wasn't clear with my comment, but I wasn't trying to disregard your conclusion at all; quite the opposite, I was trying to find a motivation for the strangest looking residuals in the correlation of social norms vs rice production.

Norway especially caught my eye because it shows a tightness of social norms that seems very different from all other European and Western countries.

Israel as well doesn't look correct either.

I'd also probably exclude those countries in the New World where rice arrived far more recently because the impact on culture might have been very different.

And I'm also pretty sure that both rice production and tightness of social norms vary immensely within India.

Basically all the outliers in that correlation seem explainable, and that corroborates our thesis ;)

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Diana's avatar

Very interesting article, thank you. When I visited China, I was told that wheat-eating regions have historically had higher protein intake, which contributes to better growth and height..

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

Is that so? I'd be curious how that's the case

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Diana's avatar

Apparently wheat-based diets have historically provided higher protein and calorie content and it is a global pattern, seen in other countries like Italy, Vietnam and India.. Maybe it is worth looking into this, in a future article.

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Abhed Manocha's avatar

Fun read! Can you expand more on how wheat cultivation helped accelerate industrial revolution?

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

I will, in an upcoming article!

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Rafael Telli's avatar

I understand that nowadays rice cultivation is already automated to the point of eliminating these historical differences (not that these automation techniques are thoroughly disseminated, but they have proven their large-scale viability; where I come from there is little difference between rice-production culture and soy-production culture, they're both practiced at industrial scale). That makes me believe that this "Rice Theory of Culture", while a very interesting way of looking at past and present, might become irrelevant in a near future.

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

What's crazy is that culture is still defined by this to this day!

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Alan Perlo's avatar

Well the after-effects of a way of life in a given population might linger in the descendants of that population if there were genetic adaptations to that way of life. Think of African-Americans in the US, who no longer have to worry about malaria, but still carry the sickle cell anemia gene that is protective against malaria. Or close to 100% of the Irish being lactose tolerant, because it used to provide a massive survival advantage in a country with poor soil, but now it remains even though it is less directly useful to survival.

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Doug Delamatter's avatar

I wonder if you can check your conclusions against the First Nations people in Ontario and Manitoba who harvested wild rice as a staple vs others who had farmed maize or were itinerant hunters?

The Anishinaabeg who lived around the Great Lakes did use it as a staple, whereas others in drier regions did not.

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Buzen's avatar

Interesting to know if there are differences, but wild rice (Zizania palustris) was not cultivated, but just gathered as seeds from naturally growing aquatic grasses, where rice (Oryza sativa) is only cultivated. They are also dietarily different, but I expect the sociological differences stem from the actual cultivation practices, and these are very different (gatherers vs growers).

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

I'd need to know 10x more!

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Nicolasz's avatar

I'm sure I'm giving you a recommendation you have read but Richard Nisbett's book The Geography of thought is incredible on this. He also wrote a short paper on the Culture of Honor, looking at why Americans from the South had a "culture of honor" when compared to those from the North that touched on a bit of geography and agriculture impacting culture.

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Tomas Pueyo's avatar

Oh I need to look at it! Thanks!

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Nicolasz's avatar

but, to Tomas' point, they can each write the same language. The regional differences are dialects, not distinct languages, and all have the same written form. I think a fair comparison is not Spain but India. With a similar population but consisting of many different races, religions and languages

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Richard's avatar

Several corrections:

1. That top map is wrong. Was it made by a drunk? Shandong in northern China is very much a wheat-producing region and traditionally didn't eat rice products.

2. Northern Chinese traditionally didn't actually make and eat (leavened and baked) Western-style bread. They did sometimes make and eat flatbread but mostly steamed dough to make mantou & baozi or made dumplings (jiaozi) that they boiled or panfried dough or made noodles or porridge.

3. The Yellow River is _very_ fickle and unpredictable (being extremely silt heavy) which is how it gets its color and tended to flood in unpredictable ways, drowning a lot of people each time. However, it flows through wheat (and millet and sorghum) producing northern China, not rice-eating southern China.

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