Omelchenko N.V.
Assistant to the Department of MIS
Chinese diploma
Chinese writing has been the only generally accepted way of writing the Chinese language for several thousand years. Chinese characters are also widely used in Japanese and Korean writing (called kanji and hancha, respectively). Until 1945, the Chinese script was also used to write the Vietnamese language (khan ty). The age of the Chinese writing system is constantly being refined. Recently discovered inscriptions on the shells of a turtle, reminiscent of the oldest Chinese characters in outline, date back to the 6th millennium BC. e.
Chinese characters, originally images of visible objects, have gone through a long period of development and in their current form bear a very distant resemblance to the original form. Most of the hieroglyphs do not serve to denote certain words, but are signs expressing concepts, and thus the same hieroglyph, depending on the place in the phrase, can mean the verb form of a concept, and a noun, and an adverb, and etc. Each hieroglyph has its own phonetic expression, reading, equal to the root-syllable and different for each dialect. It is generally accepted that this "reading" of a hieroglyph in ancient times corresponded to the colloquial designation of a given word (concept), but over time, the separation of writing from colloquial speech, which developed in its own way, led to the fact that the reading of a hieroglyph became a purely conventional phonetic designation of a sign that has little in common with a word that exists in spoken language to express the same concept.
There are a great many Chinese characters, and they are much more difficult to write than letters. The French philosopher Diderot drew attention to the fundamental difference between the Chinese language and generally accepted norms in the world: instead of inventing new words, the Chinese give different intonations to a limited number of words; at the same time, instead of defining a limited number of characters (letters) for writing words, they developed a huge number of hieroglyphs. For comparison: in Russian, 33 letters of the alphabet are used, in English - 26, and in Chinese, 50 thousand hieroglyphs are used for the same purposes. However, one cannot fail to mention the fact that modern Chinese regularly use only 5 thousand hieroglyphs, and in order to be considered literate, it is enough to know about 3 thousand hieroglyphs, but this is almost 100 times more than the letters in our alphabet.
Due to this uniqueness of the elements of writing, Chinese classical writing also has its own grammatical and stylistic structure that is completely different from colloquial speech. The characteristic features of classical writing are laconicism and a certain rhythm of sentences; missing punctuation is replaced by strict stamps in the construction of phrases; a well-known part of the hieroglyphs (the so-called "empty hieroglyphs") has the meaning of service grammatical signs. The usual hieroglyphic stock of old literary texts is 10-15 thousand characters.
Naturally, such a writing, which is an archaic relic of antiquity, could exist only due to the general economic stagnation of China and its isolation from the outside world, since the absence of external relations did not stimulate the enrichment of the language with new concepts and did not lead to the need to update the language. Requiring tremendous efforts to study, the Chinese writing was a special privilege of the ruling classes of feudal-bureaucratic China with the general illiteracy of the masses and, thanks to its versatility, served as an ideological instrument for uniting China under the rule of "Asian despotism."
The first to attend to this problem in the 17th century were Christian missionaries, whom the illiteracy of the population prevented from preaching in the Middle Kingdom. Since the end of the 19th century, local philologists have also been engaged in reforming. One after another, projects were put forward to translate the language into Latin script, Arabic numerals, arbitrary or Chinese graphics.
The communists also supported the modernization of writing. Mao Zedong, even before coming to power, came out with the installation: "Writing must be reformed under certain conditions, the language must be closer to the masses." As a result of this “literary revolution” a new written language was created, the so-called “simple”, “understandable” language of baihua (its rudiments existed earlier in the so-called “folk” literature). "Baihua", which basically left the same hieroglyphics, differs significantly from the classical language. Basically, the new writing already reflected colloquial speech, since the semantic unit was no longer a separate hieroglyph, but a combination of several hieroglyphs, in their totality corresponding to the word in the spoken language. Having significantly reduced the number of hieroglyphs used (up to 4-5 thousand), the new language simplified and qualitatively: instead of the old grammatical and stylistic forms, it adopted the usual colloquial forms.
In 1958, the National People's Congress approved the phonetic alphabet of the Chinese language based on the Latin transcription (called pinyin tzimu). The purpose of the alphabet is to serve as an auxiliary tool in the study of hieroglyphic writing in schools, in illiteracy eradication courses, in teaching Chinese to foreigners.
Hieroglyphics means a lot to the Chinese and, in fact, is one of the "bearing" elements of the entire Chinese civilization. The Chinese do not want it and are not able to refuse it. However, there remains the problem of eliminating illiteracy in the country while preserving the hieroglyphic writing. For several decades, the authorities have been carrying out a lot of work in this direction. A literacy rate has been established: for peasants - knowledge of 1,500 characters, for employees of enterprises in cities and counties - 2,000 characters, as well as the ability to understand simple newspaper texts, write reports or documents. A list of hieroglyphs for mastering literacy has also been determined. Nevertheless, many illiterate people remain in the PRC, especially in rural and border areas. According to the most conservative estimates, there are about 200 million of them.
Omelchenko N.V. Chinese literacy // Co-study of languages and cultures. Linguistic (language) education at the university.
URL: (date of access: 12/29/2019).
"Chinese letter"
Modern Chinese writing is so different from ours in both form and method of application that we hardly penetrate into its essence with great difficulty. Everyone knows the common expression "Chinese literacy", which involuntarily breaks out when you come across something that is extremely difficult or impossible to comprehend.
And this writing is unique and the most ancient of all that is used by people of our time. And it survived, the same age as the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform, only because it had a special path of development.
China III century BC. The foundations of ancient Chinese culture have already been laid in the country. Religious and philosophical systems of Confucianism and Taoism were formed. The first collection of literary monuments “The Book of Songs” (Shijing), a collection of ancient Chinese folk poetry (it contains more than three hundred works dating back to the 11th-7th centuries BC), and “The Book of Changes” (I Ching), a monument of Chinese natural philosophy, appeared.
The period when China was united into a centralized empire and the Great Wall of China was built. At this time, in 221 BC, a reform of Chinese writing was carried out, which streamlined the hieroglyphs and introduced a single writing system for the whole country.
By that time, Chinese writing was an established ideographic system. Each hieroglyph stood for a separate word.
The sounding Chinese language is very distinctive and whimsical. In it, tonality, raising or lowering the pitch of the sound, is of particular importance. This feature of the Chinese language is difficult for foreigners to grasp and assimilate. The same set of sounds (and there are many monosyllabic words in the Chinese language), depending on the key in which it is pronounced, has completely different meanings.
A word spoken in a low tone acquires one meaning, in an ascending tone - another, in a high tone - a third. Therefore, a syllable written in Russian letters does not mean anything to a Chinese without specifying the tone of its pronunciation. However, an intoned syllable has many independent meanings: power, rite, hill, grain, rule, stand and so on. Each meaning has a special sign by which the Chinese know which concept is meant.
Another feature of the Chinese language: it completely lacks grammatical forms and categories, it has no grammar. But there is a syntax different from ours. The word order in the sentence is strictly defined. The same hieroglyph can be a verb, a noun, or an adjective. It all depends on what place the hieroglyph takes in the sentence.
Hieroglyphs are written in vertical columns from right to left. The first word on the page is at the extreme top and right, the last at the bottom and a tear.
Chinese writing, like most writing systems, takes its origin from the pictogram. The oldest monuments of Chinese writing from the second millennium BC, discovered in 1899 during excavations in Henan province, confirm this. Signs that still retained the drawing of the object, but already sufficiently schematized and reminiscent of hieroglyphs, were applied to the bones of animals and the shells of turtles. These objects were used for fortune telling. Scientists believe that the remains of the archives of the royal soothsayers have been found. The inscriptions are well preserved. Some bones are polished to a mirror finish.
The divination ritual was a very important ritual in the life of an ancient man. Not a single serious business was started without fortune-telling. The ceremony took place like this. The bone with the marks carved on it was cauterized on the reverse side with a bronze stick. The signs contained a question to be answered. The outlines of the cracks that appeared when the bone was burned resembled some hieroglyph and were considered signs-answers.
In later times, when the forms of the hieroglyphs changed so much that the original signs became incomprehensible, the ancient "oracle" bones were considered sacred and were highly valued as a remedy. They were called "dragon bones" ("long gu"), ground into powder and added to various medicines.
The found monuments of writing, more than one hundred thousand, made it possible to trace the evolution of hieroglyphic outlines.
However, not all were able to decipher the most ancient signs of Chinese writing, although deciphering began in 1900. At first, specialists, including Chinese, could not compose whole inscriptions. Only individual signs could be deciphered.
Decryption was carried out as follows. They built a kind of row from the signs of the outline of each hieroglyph, belonging to a different time. Creating such an "evolutionary" series, scientists compared it with drawings on bones, similar in outline, and found out their meaning.
Following this path, they recognized a third of all signs, more than one and a half thousand. (It is assumed that the rest of the signs could have been lost as the language developed.) I managed to read the inscriptions containing requests addressed to the spirits of the earth, mountains, rivers, sun, moon, rain, wind, which, according to the ideas of the ancient Chinese, could bring on or take away various natural disasters. In these fortune-telling inscriptions, the king is denoted by the same hieroglyphs as the "supreme deity."
This deciphering, according to Professor H. Krill, is no less remarkable than the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
For four millennia, the Chinese language has not seriously changed its structure. Only the shape of the characters has changed significantly. Of course, the vocabulary has expanded, but the principles of word formation and the construction of sentences remained the same. The classification of hieroglyphs, which was given almost two thousand years ago, has not lost its significance today. It was presented in the work of the Chinese scholar Xu Sheng entitled "Explanation of Ancient Symbols and Analysis of Composite Signs." Based on the method of transmitting sounding words in writing, the scientist divides the entire mass of hieroglyphs into six groups.
The first category of signs consists of hieroglyphs for a specific subject. According to the outline, these hieroglyphs go back to the signs-drawings. This group is called in Chinese "xiang", which literally translates as "similarity in shape."
The second group of signs is called "chzhi-shi". It includes hieroglyphs depicting abstract concepts. They are conveyed by means of objects or gestures associated with these concepts, for example, the concept of "craft" is conveyed by the image of a tool of labor.
The third group "hui-yi" includes complex concepts, logical combinations. The sign is built from a combination of two or more hieroglyphs. For example, the sign female repeated twice - argument, three times - intrigue, Human a plus word - frank, field a plus strength - young.
The fourth group - "zhuan-zhu" is translated as "deviations and permutations." It brings together the hieroglyphs used in a new meaning. Depending on the position of the hieroglyph in the text, the sign prince, for example, can mean official or clerk.
The fifth group "jia-tse" is translated: "help through borrowing." Words that sound similar, but have different meanings - homonyms - get one hieroglyph.
The sixth group is "se-sheng", which means "to harmonize the meaning with the sound." The largest group of hieroglyphs, constituting nine-tenths of all characters. Each sign consists of two parts: a phonetic element, which indicates the sound of a word, and a "key sign".
If over the millennia the principles of the formation of signs in the Chinese language have not changed significantly, then outwardly, in their outlines, the Chinese characters have evolved significantly.
The Chinese character is constructed from nine original strokes. Their combination makes up the whole variety of hieroglyphic signs. Some strokes are repeated in one character two or three times. Outlines of hieroglyphs can have from 1 to 28 strokes. The evolution of the hieroglyph form is primarily associated with the material on which they were reproduced. When they wrote on silk with thin bamboo sticks, it was easier to draw lines, both straight and curved, of the same size. The writing brush made of hair had a huge influence on the drawing of the signs.
The ability to write beautifully was considered the highest art in China. Poems dedicated to the art of calligraphy have been created, many prescriptions have been developed for lengthening, shortening, joining
i omission of individual lines of written signs. There is even a concept of "square arrangement". This means that each character fits into a square. Skilled calligraphers, inventors of new handwriting, were not less famous than the greatest artists, writers and poets. A lot of pretentious and difficult to understand handwritings with figurative names arose: "letter of tadpoles", "letter of stars", "letter of dragons", "letter of clouds".
A very important milestone for the development of hieroglyph drawing was the invention of paper. For a long time, uncomfortable bamboo plates and expensive silk scrolls were used for writing. When the text written on the tablets was long, they were tied in bundles, like a fan. The silk was wrapped around a stick in the shape of a scroll. The first paper was invented by Tsai Lun, a Confucian scholar and major government official. This happened in 105 AD. In Chinese, paper was called zhi. It was first made from waste silk, flax fleece, young bamboo bast and mulberry tree. Zhi was lighter and more durable than papyrus. It can be folded into a notebook.
Book printing also appeared early in China. Even before our era, stamps were used in China. Brief texts were carved in stone and printed on paper with ink. From the 7th-8th centuries, wooden boards were used. The text on them was cut in the form of a relief. Since the 8th century, China began to publish the world's first printed government bulletin, first called "Palace Copies" ("Dichao"), and then "Capital Bulletin" ("Qingbao").
Since 1050, a set of separate characters has been introduced. Its inventor was the blacksmith Bi Sheng - "a man in cotton clothes", as stated in the encyclopedic essay of that time. The font was first made of baked clay, and from the 14th century they began to cast from bronze. The cash register consisted of 7 thousand different letters.
This is how, according to the description of the same encyclopedic composition, a set of movable letters happened: “... he took viscous clay and carved written signs on it with a height of the rim of a coin and made a separate letter for each sign, burned it on fire to make it solid. Previously, he prepared an iron plate and covered it with a mixture of soybeans of new resin, wax and paper ash. Intending to print, he took an iron frame and put it on an iron plate, then he placed letters in the frame, close to one another. When the frame was full, it formed a single printed board. He placed it over a fire in order to slightly warm up and soften the gummy composition; then he took a perfectly smooth board, placed it on the board with the set and pressed so that the surface of the set became so flat to the grindstone. If they wanted to print only two or three prints, then this procedure was neither quick nor convenient, but when tens of hundreds or thousands of copies were printed, it went with the speed of spirits ...
For each written sign, he had several letters; for common characters ... he names more than 20 letters in order to have a margin when they are repeated on the same page. If there were rare signs that were not prepared, he immediately cut them out and burned them on burning straw; in an instant it was ready ...
At the end of the printing, the letters on an iron plate were again held over the fire in order to soften the sticky mass; then he made a blow with his hand, so that the letters fell out by themselves and were not at all soaked or stained with glue. "
Modern Chinese is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It is spoken by almost a billion people. The Chinese hieroglyphic writing perfectly matches the structure of a language that has no grammatical forms: no cases, no tenses, no inflection. It is convenient to convey in hieroglyphs and similar-sounding words, differing only in pitch
However, Chinese writing has so many characters that it becomes cumbersome and difficult to master. To understand the simplest text, you need to know at least two thousand hieroglyphs, and to read modern texts of average complexity, you need to memorize up to eight thousand hieroglyphs.
All this is a serious obstacle to the spread of Chinese literacy among the masses.
In China, there have been repeated attempts to create an alphabet that could convey the sound of Chinese speech. One of them appeared in 1918 ("zhu-yin tzu-mu"). It consisted of 40 letters and was used to record (transcribe) foreign names and names. There were also other alphabets - "goyu lomazzy" (romanization of the state language), "latinhua xinwenzi" (latinized new letter).
The transition to alphanumeric writing makes it difficult for the many dialects common in the country. And although the basics of structure and vocabulary are common for all dialects, they differ fundamentally in sound and somewhat in vocabulary. A Beijing and a Cantonese, for example, can understand each other using hieroglyphs, but they read them differently. It would be much more difficult for them to understand each other if they used phonetic writing.
And one more, perhaps the most important reason is preventing China from switching to phonetic writing. This is an inevitable break with the old centuries-old culture, embodied in hieroglyphic writing. The peculiarity of Chinese characters is that they receive additional stylistic and semantic shades both from the graphic structure and from the combination with each other.
All this makes a sudden transition to a new alphabet impossible.
Such is it, "Chinese literacy" - a kind of synonym for ingenuity and incomprehensibility.
14-10-2001Andrey Devyatov
EXPLANATION REQUIRED
Over the past quarter of a century, China has become a paramount figure in world politics and economics. This applies not only to the People's Republic of China as a state, which today in many respects is comparable to the United States of America, the undisputed leader of the second half of the twentieth century. This applies primarily to the entire "Chinese world", which includes Taiwan, Singapore, and Chinese communities around the planet. In the near future, the "Chinese world" claims not only that the PRC will become the "second superpower in the world," as the Soviet Union once did, it asserts a different model of human development, different from the "Eurocentrism" we are accustomed to.
Perhaps my many years of experience working with China and in China, part of which is summarized and comprehended in this publication, will help readers, according to the Russian proverb, "see the forest behind the trees" or at least think about how to behave in this Chinese "forest" so that, once you get there, you don't get lost, pick up a basket of berries or mushrooms, preferably edible, listen to birdsong and not meet a hungry tiger. After all, one cannot fail to see that this "forest" is rapidly expanding, striding across the planet. And one cannot but recall the warnings of the Shakespearean witches to King Richard that he will have to perish after seeing the walking forest - a meaningful metaphor for the entire "Western" civilization, of which our country, for some reason, decided to become a part.
However, for the Chinese, including for Chinese politicians, such a rejection by Russia of its own traditions was not only an expected step, corresponding, as will be shown below, to its image and designation, but it is perceived there completely differently. No struggle between “communism” and “democracy”, no confrontation between “liberals” and “patriots” - all these words behind the “Great Wall” have no meaning. and not economic, but natural-cyclical, even symbolic influences.And only a lack of understanding of these patterns causes non-Chinese people to develop various "theories" stuffed with specially spoiled words.
"Who knows - does not speak (does not argue), and who speaks (argues) does not know"- says the saying of the sage Lao Tzu, which has become a proverb. There is no contradiction here, for knowledge in the Chinese tradition is associated not so much with the sounding word, with speech, as with the sign of the written word, with the image of the word-hieroglyph. And if we compare in this respect the "book of books" the Bible with the Chinese Book of Changes "I Ching", then this comparison will reveal the equivalence of their symbolic meaning for the respective civilizations. Perhaps, causal reasons will also be found for many seemingly superficial and accidental analogies between the manifestations of the "biblical" and "Chinese" world order.
Of course, the statement about the hieroglyphic symbolism of Chinese thinking, in contrast to the literal symbolism of "biblical" thinking, will only be figurative and rather crude, although basically true, an approximation to the essence of the matter. For a more complete picture, the involvement of other symbolic systems is required, most of which - for example, the system of music, dance, or the mathematical system - are quite specific and accessible only to specialists, among whom I certainly do not include myself or my readers. Therefore, here we will have to confine ourselves to elucidating, first of all, the spatial and temporal system of Chinese thinking, its, in the terminology of MM Bakhtin, "chronotope".
The differences between the Chinese way of acting and the norms inherent in European culture are quite obvious and easily observable. But the underlying features of the Chinese way of thinking, on the contrary, are difficult to "decipher". How many times, with all my professional knowledge and experience, I had to give up my hands in powerlessness before the wall of Chinese "silence" and "not doing" ... How many times what the Chinese said meant nothing compared to what they left behind the scenes ... And it remained only to console yourself: "What do you want? These are the Chinese, not the English."
Returning to the biblical tradition, it should be noted that the Chinese, better than any other nations, fulfilled one of the old biblical covenants given by God after the Great Flood to the righteous Noah: to be fruitful and multiply, to populate the Earth. Other ancient civilizations: the Sumerians and Egyptians, like the Chinese, who created ideographic writing and statehood 2-4 thousand years ago, had already disintegrated by the beginning of our era. And the Chinese persisted and multiplied, assimilating everyone who came into contact with them. Modern India also has a billion people, but does not form a single civilization. 12 re! ligii and 18 major languages in India are not a Chinese cultural and ethnic monolith. It is little known that modern Chinese are dominated by one (2nd) blood group, and genetically, from any incest with a Chinese, a Chinese is obtained. To this day, there is only one ethnically expressed group of half-Chinese Macanians living in the former Portuguese colony of Macau (Portuguese blood is strong!). A Negro with a Chinese immediately gives a Chinese, and even Jews, who have kept their tribes all over the world since ancient times, yield to the power of Chinese blood. The only Jewish community that emerged in Kaifeng in the 19th century was completely enveloped in three generations, and the rabbis, who consider anyone born to a Jewish woman a Jew, make an exception for children from Chinese fathers and do not recognize them as Jews. To be fair, I should note that in 1999 in Hong Kong, at the Furama Hotel on the sixth floor, I saw a working synagogue, which was also attended by Jews of Chinese appearance (and only a Jew can be a Jew). However, I have not heard anything about the return of such Hong Kong Jews of Chinese appearance to the Promised Land in Israel.
"Give me a foothold - and I will turn the world" - so, according to legend, once said Archimedes. In search of a "fulcrum" for understanding how the world is "turned upside down" in the Chinese tradition, I drew attention to the compass - a purely Chinese invention, invented over two thousand years ago (II century BC), recognized and accepted by the whole world to use. It is known that in Chinese a compass is "an arrow pointing to the SOUTH (!)". Although for all other peoples, it points to the north. Such obvious opposites in the spatial orientation of thinking are usually not given serious importance and, in my opinion, completely in vain.
The self-name of China is zhong guo, "the middle state." China for the Chinese is the unconditional navel of the Earth. Already as the greatest ethnic monolith on the planet, China may well consider itself a natural, natural reference point for the entire world. Which he, however, does - but for completely different, and no less fundamental, reasons.
The trouble? After all, this is, understand
The mainstay of happiness! Lucky?
So this is where the trouble lies!
Do not separate good and evil.
Jia Yi (201-169 BC)
OTHER WORLD MAP
If China is the center, then the rest of the world will be the outskirts. This is exactly how the Chinese perceive this division: zhong / wai. When I set up a joint venture at a resort in Beidaihe, for me it was a Sino-Russian one. That is how I called him in communication with the Chinese. And those verbally and in writing stubbornly called it middle-borderland, each time avoiding the meaning of "Russian." The translation of the zhong / wai pair into languages with alphabetic writing, of course, will be translated abstractly conceptually: "Chinese-foreign". But for the Chinese themselves, behind the pictorial hieroglyph "zhong" there is a representation united into a symbol: center, middle. Not sounds and letters, but a picture of a hieroglyph only with the reading of "zhong" pulls Chinese thought towards this concrete symbolic meaning.
Having looked closely at the names of other joint ventures, I noted that owls in all foreign languages! local enterprises were called Sino-American, French, German and others (with the obligatory indication of the name of the country of the foreign founder). In Chinese, instead of the name of the country, officially and unofficially, the same meaning wai was used for all cases (external, external, alien, peripheral, foreign). The bifurcation of a single legal entity of a joint venture in the names of the countries of its founders among the Chinese has a "middle-marginal", in fact, the meaning of dividing the center into its own civilization and the foreign civilization of the neighborhood.
So China is the center. Further from the center in the vicinity is the inner circle of countries that have found a clear symbolic meaning in Chinese hieroglyphic names. Below I give only a detailed commentary on the halo of meanings of hieroglyphic symbols used in Chinese names of countries of the world in accordance with the meanings of hieroglyphs in dictionaries ["Kangxi", "Tsi Hai" and edited by IM Oshanin].
To the left of the center (if you face south) are the "Land of the Rising Sun" (ji ben - Japan) and the "Land of morning freshness" (chao xian - Korea).
At its zenith, the Sun shines over the "Middle State" itself (zhong go - China). The maximum warmth and light goes to the "Country of the Extreme South" (yue nan, formerly an nan - Vietnam) and the "Flourishing [abundant] state" (tai go - Thailand) located outside the middle.
Then follow: "Distant possessions" (mian dian - Burma). "State of heavenly faith" [Buddhism, dissolved in sincere, natural folk beliefs of Hinduism] (tianzhu go - India). And the "Western storehouse" [true, preserved intact, spiritual values] (xi tsang - Tibet).
In the northwest, the "Middle State" is covered by the "Western Border" (siyuy - Turkestan), which is now called the "New Border" (Xinjiang).
And in the north is the "ancient country of the setting pre-dawn moon", "Dark antiquity" (men gu - Mongolia).
Behind the outlying countries of the circle closest to the center is the far edge of the world, inhabited by peoples completely alien to the center. Among these peoples, only five great powers were awarded the title of state (go) with a semantic and hieroglyphically fixed name.
To the left of the center - "overseas devils" (yangui) arriving in China from the sea, they are also "devils from the outskirts" (weigui). In hieroglyphic meanings, symbols, a single picture of the West (overseas devils from the outskirts of the world) among well-read Chinese, apparently, looks like this. From the individual onslaught of males selected in mind and energy (in go, "the state of outstanding talent" - England). Through the written law regulating personal needs (fa go, "the state of the logic of law" - France) and a good order with moral influence by personal example (de go "state of a moral example" - Germany). To prosperity in a beautiful, hasty, tasty country of emigrants (mei guo, "beautiful state" - the USA).
By the way, the Iberian civilization, which colonized all of South and Central America, nevertheless, did not receive the title of Go from the Chinese. True, Portugal, which created a colony of Macau in the Chinese south three centuries before British Hong Kong, is literally called the "Country of Grape Experts" (putaoi), and this is true. This specific meaning of the name places overseas Portugal in the Chinese hierarchical system of the world right after the symbolic meanings of the states awarded the title of Go.
To the right of the center, on the far land outskirts, live peoples under the general name "Informed" (Huizu - Muslims) and "State of surprises [delay and instantaneous changes]" (ego - Russia).
All other transcendental peoples! the title "go" (state) or meaningful and understandable for the Chinese names of their countries "did not deserve", and therefore are called sound meaningless transcription. With the loss of historical grandeur, the meaning of the name and title of Go in the twentieth century lost first India, and after 1991 - and "new Russia".
But now the title of Go has been awarded to Japan (the hieroglyphs "ji ben go" are inscribed on the gates of the Japanese embassy in Beijing) and South Korea (since the 90s it began to be denoted by the ancient hieroglyphic name "han go", given to this country by the Chinese back in the days of the first sea expedition of Qin Shihuang). Schematically, the picture of the world in Chinese can be drawn as follows (see Fig. 1). 
As you can see, this geography does not just "overturn" the projections of the Earth's surface "according to Mercator" that are familiar to us - it qualitatively differs from them precisely in the presence of a central reference point, the presence of a "middle state" of zhong go, and not a central axis between two conditional poles of the world : northern and southern, - according to the archetype of the "rotation of the Earth" only conditionally and temporarily passing through the "zero" Greenwich meridian.
That is, the world map in Chinese does not imply the presence of a "bipolar" or, even more so, a "multipolar" world. And China in it is not at all a “shining city on a hill”, as President Reagan envisioned the embodiment of the “American dream,” not even a “sea that absorbs all rivers” - its ideal function is different. This is a kind of "center of gravity" against which all outskirts must be balanced. Indeed, in the Chinese sense, the right, traditional, totalitarian East (one billion of the combined population of Russia and the Muslim world) is balanced by the "golden billion" of the left, invariant, liberal West. There are other spatio-temporal "axes of balance" passing through China and bearing a direct "geopolitical meaning." However, you cannot understand him! timeless, as interpreted by the Chinese tradition.
The emperor sends troops to the north of the desert,
So that the enemies do not threaten to water the horses in our rivers.
How many battles are ahead of us - and how many have been so far?
But our love for our homeland is stronger and stronger than anything else.
Li Bo (701-762)
ANOTHER TIME
The widespread fashion for "oriental" horoscopes, which arose in our country with the beginning of "perestroika", made available to our compatriots the outer side of the traditional "Chinese calendar" (Yin-Yang Li, Syali, 60-year cycle). The concepts of "year of the dragon" or "year of the rat" have become firmly established even in the philistine vocabulary. But, of course, the inner meaning of this unique chronology system continues to remain practically unknown and incomprehensible. All other countries of the world (except for China and two or three other countries of the inner circle that used the Chinese calendar) use time reckoning systems based on the natural periodicity of the movements of celestial bodies visible to the eye: the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the stars. According to Plato, "number opened the eyes", astronomical logic (equinoxes and solstices) is visible. But the length of the day (the revolution of the Earth around the axis), the month (the revolution of the Moon around the Earth) and the year (the revolution of the Earth around the Sun) do not correlate with each other as whole numbers. The celestial spheres do not lend themselves to earthly symmetry and run into an infinite irrational number p.
Therefore, in the reckoning of astronomical time, it is necessary to make insertions (according to the Sun - add days in leap years, according to the Moon - additional months). And the solar calendar from the Nativity of Christ (based on the ancient Egyptian), and the Muslim lunar calendar from the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina, and the lunisolar calendars of the Jews, ancient Babylonians, Greeks, Romans - all contain artificial additives in linear time.
The Chinese traditional calendar has not a natural astronomical, but a calculated and symbolic basis, where the natural cycles of the Sun and the Moon are used only to determine the time of the beginning of reckoning (determining the first day of the new year, the beginning of the dynasty, the traditional calendar as a whole from the second new moon after the winter solstice - zheng sho, around February).
The Yin-Yang calendar of the Chinese is a mathematical conjugation of the natural asymmetry of the non-coinciding durations of the astronomical cycles of the Sun and the Moon (the celestial circle) with the symbols of the natural symmetry of the seasons and the cardinal points (the earth's square). The Chinese time base is not linear. The sequence of years unites "circles" of exactly 60 years in each. The cycle step unites three generations of 20 years each, because grandfathers, children and grandchildren live in the family at the same time. This is the natural size of family happiness, joy for offspring and reverence for parents. This nonlinearity of the Chinese people's sense of time (not the duration, but the order of the sequence is measured) is extremely important for understanding the specifics of Chinese thinking.
So, the year with the number 2000 from the birth of Christ in the Chinese cycle is designated by the serial number "gen chen" and carries symbolically! e meanings of "white [metal] Dragon". The previous Chinese year of the "white dragon" with the same number "geng chen" from the birth of Christ was 1940, and even earlier 1880, 1820, 1760, 1700, etc. Using this example, it is important to note once again that the chronology from the Nativity of Christ is carried out using numbers with the meaning of direct linear increase - translational movement. And in the Chinese cycle, there are no numbers, and the years follow in the order of numbers, without increasing in number.
Likewise, in Chinese grammar, there is no linear division of the category of time into past, present, and future. It is necessary to specifically either add the words "yesterday", "today", "tomorrow", or mention some dates, or the names of characters from history, and officially the motto of the reign is required to record the past.
Chinese history is written down in detail based on the mottos of the reign of emperors, because cyclical signs are an order without increasing numbers, but a landmark! reigning in the time of the past is possible only according to the mottos of the reign. That is, the binding of the 60-year cycle, which does not have continuous numbering, is done not by number, but by the image of a historical person - the emperor. So, for example, Mao Zedong was born on the 19th day of the 11th summer moon "gui si" (black [water] Snake) in the 19th year of imperial rule under the motto Guangxu ("brilliant heritage"), which corresponds to December 23 A.D. 1893 If the motto of the reign is not indicated, then the year of the "black snake" is both 1833 and 1953, and so on into the past and the future in the period 60 AD.
It is noteworthy that all modern Chinese periodicals, including all newspapers published in hieroglyphics for the Chinese in Moscow, necessarily contain the date of the traditional calendar to combine the text with Chinese history, and the date from the Nativity of Christ in them matches the cycles of Chinese history with world events.
The tendency of the Chinese people to enter into the chronicle everything that happens and the extremely historical self-consciousness of the Chinese are explained, apparently, precisely by the cyclical perception of time. Antiquity has not disappeared anywhere - it has simply changed. It is noteworthy that the Confucian tradition also believes that the plan of the Path of Heaven is recorded precisely in Chungqiu (Spring and Autumn) - a brief chronicle of political events in the kingdom of Lu, recorded by Confucius himself, and not at all in the text of the I Ching Book of Changes. To search for the key to the truth in history — this is the most characteristic feature of the Chinese world outlook. And historical examples are more important for the Chinese than the teachings of the sages.
Watching the time in Chinese means standing with your face to the perfect and your back to the future, the expected. And "next time" means to take a step down (sy) with the left shoulder forward in this position. Xia (down) also has a meaning to the left (for example, a less honorable place to the left of the host with the protocol, clockwise, seating of guests at the table; the most honored guest sits to the right of the host, occupying, as it were, the highest position in relation to the head of the table).
The foregoing in the Chinese mind is above and in front, on the right hand, and the next is below and behind, on the left hand. Last year was shan nannies, and the year before last was qian nannies. The next year is Xia nannies, and two years later, Hou nannies.
The future comes from this position, and the Chinese have nowhere to rush in this world. A wish for a "bon voyage" in Chinese means "move more slowly, measuredly, sedately", and "bon appetit" - "eat slowly, take your time." The warning of danger, the Chinese road sign "attention", is not a Western call to "increase vigilance" (!) Or an order to "stop" (STOP), but a Chinese instruction to first "slow down" (white hieroglyph "man" on a red background) and only then look around, and then act (stand up completely, accelerate or maneuver). This sense of time by the Chinese and the gradual timing of their actions are very specific.
China is surrounded. The dawn of January is sad:
He comes with the burden of misfortune, he is related to the darkness.
I sing a New Year's song, with a secret desire for grief,
That, perhaps, in old age I will see peace on earth.
Huang Zunxian (1848-1905)
DIFFERENT LOOK, DIFFERENT ELEMENTS
In Chinese, the previous one is on the top (shan), and the next one is on the bottom (xia). Tomorrow is expressed in meaning the next morning, when the moon leaves, the sun rises and light (min) is born. The same that will come later, after tomorrow, later, coming in one, is expressed by the meaning from behind, from the rear (hou). And what happened before happened before, on the contrary, it is in the foreground, expressed in meaning from the front, from the front (qian). Such a picture clearly takes place in Chinese landscapes with an aerial perspective, where a person's observation point in height is located somewhere in the middle, between transcendental heights (heavenly pattern) and abysses of waters, mountain ranges, wide plains (terrestrial relief). Moving a person from a higher point of observation to a lower one hides from the field of vision part of what is in the background, leaves part of the known beyond the horizon, erases the clarity of outlines and takes away the past.
The unknown, which is outside the field of view of the observer, is located below and behind. In the specifics of Chinese thinking, a person's return to the past, as well as an upward ascent to the mountain, from which an aerial perspective opens, is impossible. Descent down a steep mountain is possible only with your back forward. Moving to a lower level of observation brings closer, enlarges the details, adds what is to come.
The outlying peoples of China have a different, linear perspective. For example, in the paintings of Western and Russian artists, the point of observation of a person is on the ground with an endless linear expansion of space into the distance and upward. The past is behind and below "in the depths of centuries", and the future is ahead and above "at the highest stage of development." Moving a person to the next point of observation will be a step forward facing the still unknown in the senses (not covered by sight). With each next step forward, the unknown becomes known, and the horizon moves away. The future is leaving the earthly position of observation. This creates an incentive for human activity, makes you hurry in this life, sets you in motion.
In the cycle of time, the greatest circumferential speed of life will be among the peoples inhabiting the distant neighborhoods. On the near outskirts, the rate of change is slower than on the distant ones. And in the center the speed of being is the smallest. Life revolves in a screw of time around the center. The acceleration vector of all that exists is decomposed into tangential, centrifugal and centripetal acceleration. The first pushes the being to the outskirts, and the second gradually pulls it into the center. The center, China, calms and absorbs, digests and assimilates whatever is dragged on.
At the same time, the spaces - the perfect and the expected - are lined up along the landscape in an inclined line, oriented, like the compass needle, from north to south (with declination to the right). The imaginary diameter of the circumference of the land (lu jing) among the Chinese is precisely the "stretch from north to south".
"Highest antiquity" (shang gu) is located above the center (shan) under the point of the new moon, in the north, where Mongolia or further (where the first day of the first moon of the chronology, permafrost, dinosaur cemetery, antiquity - gu). The expected, therefore, is located in the south and below. This is how another axis of balance is formed: the decrepit, obese North and the developing, lean South.
The circle is a symbol of the sky, a symbol of eternity. And he is the main figure of the spatio-temporal structure of the world in Chinese. The "space-time" system is formed by elements and their interconnections. For the Chinese, the space is formed by five elements (wu xing). The word "elements" in Greek means "elements", "fundamental energies of the cosmos." Among the Chinese, the elements overcome each other in a circle and in the order of overpowering, allegorically correlated with the names of the following elements:
…< Дерево < Почва < Вода < Огонь < Металл < Дерево < …
The elements conventionally occupy the four cardinal directions and the center. The turnover of time starts from the Tree (East, blue). Goes to Fire (South, red). It passes the central position occupied by the Soil (the Earth, as the element "that", carries the meaning of Dust, the beginning and end of all that exists, the color is yellow). And then it continues through Metal (West, white) to Water (North, black). The Air Release is absent in the Chinese tradition. This is how Chinese time moves in a spiral, repeating sixty-year cycles of the traditional calendar: from top to bottom, with "right-hand thread", scalar (that is, as if in steps, having a numbered graduation, a scale).
Scrolling down, alternately 5 elements in their two states gives 10 six-membered periods of "heavenly trunks" and 12 five-membered periods of "earthly branches". The trunks are indicated only by abstract cyclic signs that carry the "naked" meaning of the sequence number that is not associated with anything on earth, and the branches, in addition to the cyclic signs, are symbolized by the names of animals and endowed with meaningful qualities.
For non-Chinese people, the number is still linear, since it is indicated by a number or letter of the alphabet in ascending order of the number. So, for example, among Europeans, the numbering of seats in the auditorium in a row follows sequentially from left to right in ascending order of number from one. For the Chinese, even the linear numbering of the chairs in a row with numbers follows from one in the center in different directions, not in ascending order, but in the order of distance from the center: odd numbers to the left, but even numbers to the right.
What about the orientation in the double hypostasis of the Five Elements? The position of the North-South line, as well as the right and left of it, remains always unchanged. The terrestrial orientation is kept within the boundaries of the near circle, and the celestial orientation refers to the outskirts of the far circle. So, if you naturally stand on Earth with your head up and facing South, then the West will be on the right (Tibet, Turkestan), and the East will be on the left (Japan, Korea). This is how the Chinese see the outskirts of the inner circle from the middle. But if you extend your gaze to the distant outskirts, you will have to look at it as if from heaven, without turning over your shoulder, and therefore head downward, facing the North (approximately the same way as from orbit, flying over China, the equipment of the satellite view reconnaissance sees the Earth) ... In this position, the West will be on the left (all Western "overseas devils"), and the East - on the right (Russia and all Muslim countries). The East is where the Sun rises from, only at mid-latitudes. Already on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, 160 kilometers from the Arctic Circle, at the beginning of July the sun sets and immediately rises - in the north! In the circumpolar Tiksi and Khatanga, in summer there is already an "eternal day" under the non-setting Sun, which describes spirals. With such a view from the "Celestial Empire", Japan will find itself together with the countries of the West, while Russia - in the East, which is manifested in real Chinese politics. To call it geopolitics would be only partly correct. Rather, it is the celestial policy of the Five Elements.
And I, old man, let me doubt
That countries need to expand their borders.
Doo Fu (712-770)
INSTEAD OF CONCLUSIONS The fact that the Chinese see the far outskirts precisely with a heavenly orientation is enshrined in the names. New World: America is the Western Continent (Sidalu), and the Old World: Eurasia is the Eastern Continent (Dundalu). In other languages known to me, there are no such meanings in names.
Both the Earth and the Heavenly sphere have only two poles - North and South. There are no East or West poles. In relation to Europe, America is the West, but in relation to America, Russia is also the West. In purely geographical terms, it is impossible to describe the border between them. In the course of history, each numerous people inhabiting the distant environs of the Celestial Empire, from time to time believed that the axis of the world passes through it, and the area of their possession represented the center of tranquility, beyond which barbarism and chaos reigned. In the Chinese picture of the world, any nation is represented! It is not the axle, but the spoke of the wheel of history. And like a spoke, closing in on the Chinese "navel of the Earth", each outlying people can consider themselves to be located in the middle in relation to the western and eastern neighbors, to occupy a middle position between them. The geopolitical doctrines of "German Central Europe", "Russia-Heartland", "American Atlanticism", set forth, for example, by Alexander Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics", do not strongly contradict the Chinese picture of the division of forces on the outskirts. They are only built with an orientation to the north, painted from the position of a terrestrial linear perspective, and therefore have a conditional center of history, shifted in relation to China somewhere in Siberia - approximately where the Chinese have "the highest antiquity" (Shangu). And all these circumstances, in my opinion, must be taken into account in any: even political, even trade interaction with China and the Chinese. However, the own patterns of such interaction are a separate topic.
The ridges ascend to heaven - but is the height mortal?
Four exits at the Gates of Heaven - but why the Gates?
Qu Yuan (340-278 BC)
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