this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Are we suggesting China is a younger country? I don’t deny they’ve caught up insanely fast though.
No, I didn't say anything like that. I'm saying they're a large country that only took 10 years to build out a high speed rail network.
It both is and it isn't. An entity know as China has existed for millennia, but the modern government has existed for a little over 100 years.
It's an interesting thought exercise on how to treat these types of things though. Like how old is the German state? Do you count it from the original unification in 1866, or do you count the government that's continued since the fall of the Nazi party? What about the Reunification after the fall of the Soviet Union?
The culture and the idea of a country can carry past the fall of its government, but how old does that then make the new state?
Truthfully I don't know how to answer this, it's neat though
And beyond the government, the modern culture of china is like.. one or two generations old? Imagine having half the rural population of a country move into cities in the span of like 40 years, that's what china has experienced.
I think it's quite fair to say that china is to a large degree one of the youngest countries on earth, right now.