It would be akin to Italy claiming that they are Romans...sure Romans lived there, but there is a whole lot of history between then and modern day state that would make this claim at best tenuous.
Mussolini was fond of making that claim. Wikipedia says "the entire Mediterranean was redefined to make it appear a unified region that had belonged to Italy from the times of the ancient Roman province of Italia, and was claimed as Italy's exclusive sphere of influence."
it's an excerpt from a book, that presumably has a lot of things to say about China. Why focus on that to elevate some petty point that China does not have 5000 years of history. So what? it still has millennia, counting only written history.
It's a bit tiring to see the average tech guy on HN demonstrate their critical thinking about everything China. Being able to write some code and read your own country's propaganda does not mean you're well equipped to talk about other countries.
Every place has millenias of history. The countries in the American continent start to count from when they were invaded by Europeans, that's their (our) loss.
>The countries in the American continent start to count from when they were invaded by Europeans
That's because it is hard to learn about pre-Columbian America because we have very little writing from that period -- mainly because they didn't write much down compared to for example how much was recorded in writing by people in China 3,000 years ago.
That there is history in the region is not really in contention, but rather that the concept of single "China" has endured millenia as a single civilization, and not the multi-cultural, multi-national, mileau that it was.
> mainly because they didn't write much down compared to for example how much was recorded in writing by people in China 3,000 years ago
Civilisation in the Americas started later than in the Old World. Columbus also arrived in the wake of wide-ranging ecological disasters in Meso-America and the ancient Pueblan territories.
Pardon my ignorance but why is a culture's existence for millennia such an extraordinary fact that it has to be seen as a myth or popaganda? Did humans just pop out of nowhere?