You may well be right. I will go with
@Nilgiri's vivid reconstruction of the Hakka, for instance, and the civil churn in China. Let's hear him out.
Yes but some basic context would be good.
Not everyone who is interested in China is a longtime Sinophile.
@Nilgiri
Cheers, Doc
I'll get into all of it in leisurely pace as time permits.
The Hakka are just one story of many other stories of trial and tribulation within China.
The context for doc, is one he knows all too well in end....theology, ideology, identity etc.
These occupy and jostle for same space deep down in the psyche search for the deep fundament of reality....recognition of ones own mortal limited time and how then to borrow from the much larger collective time of others before you. How you prioritise this process determines much of "you" in the end. A society is the larger form collective of this happening as it does....what is transmitted what is resisted and pushed back on. The forces governing this....as the human mind, its final summed integral with its factors and coefficients..... is the most powerful consequential resource to human life, society and history.
This is exactly why one Turkish friend of mine explained just why "Marxism" and "Islamism" compete for the exact same mindspace/psyche i.e an example of a (elder metaphysical) theology and neo-theology (one of materialism and as non-metaphysical as possible) being something of matter and antimatter....one must prevail as the "root" and by having larger amount of it imposed.
Doc, yours is extreme distilled unique case (the Parsi story), but larger populations have various tiers of this always going on in the mix....always.
These matters explain spawning of social angst and coercion/tension, wars, evictions, migrations, grievances, redemptions and so on....and all the relative stasis occupying time in between (to reflect, gather, deploy) given the size of whats at hand and whats at stake to each situation and perception.
You peer from the outside at your own dear people doc, just like my Chinese friend did for his homeland "turned". You do so on theological basis, he does so on ideological basis. The costs imposed, the return you want to see. Names change from place to place, timescales, intensities and starkness of the divides vary in breadth and depth. But there are parallels connecting them deep down.
Heck Jung even went so far as to say there are at even deeper layer preset archetypes from the human reality basic hardwiring (from things such as mortality, fear, love) rather than complete blank slate tabula rasa at birth.
Whatever one's position on this, it all inevitably transmits to other domains in the human psyche formed above it.
This is the deepest strata and core, then you start to understand civilisation (as a whole) and then specific civilisations like Chinese, Indian and Persian and many others, largely pertaining to one's circumstances. This is the underlying context I base things on these days for the human domain....rather than get swept away too much from whats at the very outermost layers.
