We often frame global cultural tensions and national identity struggles through the lens of politics, economics, or ideology—but rarely do we confront the unspoken core driving so much of the world’s instability: every civilization has their “parent.” This is not a literal parent, but the foundational, originative cultural core that shapes a nation’s language, traditions, historical narrative, and very sense of self. How a civilization relates to its cultural parent defines its stability, its confidence, and its place in the world. Today, the global order is fractured by two opposing, equally destructive crises of this parent-child dynamic: one in the West, where the parent is long dead, leaving the civilization adrift and scrambling to find any plausible anchor for its identity; and another in the Sinic cultural sphere, where the parent is very much alive, and the child civilizations are tearing themselves apart trying to escape his shadow, even as they loot his inheritance to build a false sense of independence.
01 | The West’s Parentless Identity Crisis
The Collapse of the West’s Cultural Parent and the Void Left Behind
For the West, the death of its cultural parent has left it in a centuries-long identity crisis with no end in sight. There is no unbroken, continuous cultural lineage tying modern Western Europe and its offshoots to a single, native, foundational civilization. The Roman Empire, long held up as the West’s nominal parent, collapsed in the 5th century CE, leaving Western Europe in the chaos of the Early Middle Ages, where the literacy, governance, and cultural sophistication of Rome were all but lost to the region. The Eastern Roman Empire, which preserved Roman traditions and institutions for another thousand years, was never embraced by the West as its own; instead, it was dismissed as Byzantine, a foreign, alien entity. The Catholic Church, which filled the void left by Rome’s collapse, drew its spiritual and theological core not from European soil, but from Palestine—the birthplace of Christianity, a Middle Eastern faith imposed on Europe’s pagan tribes, not born from them.
A Centuries-Long Scramble to Find a New Paternal Lineage
This is why the West has spent the last 500 years on a desperate, endless search for a new parent. The Renaissance began as an attempt to resurrect the long-dead corpse of classical Greece, framing Western Europe as the rightful heir to Athenian democracy and philosophy—even though the Greek world was centered in the Eastern Mediterranean, and its legacy was preserved far more by Arab and Persian scholars than by Western European monks. When Greece and Rome proved too thin a foundation, the West turned to archaeology to dig up new paternal figures: 19th-century European scholars raced to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs and unearth the palaces of Mesopotamia, not just for academic curiosity, but to claim these ancient, sophisticated civilizations as part of the West’s own lineage. They built a narrative of “Western civilization” that stretched from the Nile and the Euphrates, through Greece and Rome, to the palaces of Paris and London—a patchwork quilt of disparate, long-dead civilizations, stitched together to give the West a noble origin story it never had. The result is an identity built entirely on historical debris. The West has no living, unbroken cultural core to anchor itself to; its sense of self is a collage of borrowed fragments, each with only a tenuous link to the modern societies that claim them. Every modern Western culture war, from the backlash against critical race theory to the collapse of faith in traditional institutions, is at its root a symptom of this parentless identity crisis.
The result is both creative and chaotic. The West’s strength lies in its ability to reinvent itself endlessly. But the cost is a constant sense of existential drift. Without a living cultural “parent,” Western identity keeps seeking new sources of meaning—from nationalism to capitalism, from science to individualism. The modern West is, metaphorically, a child who keeps changing surnames to fill a void that can’t truly be filled.
02 | The Sinic Sphere’s Opposite Crisis: A Living, Thriving Cultural Parent
China: The Unbroken Cultural Core of East and Southeast Asia
If the West’s crisis is a parentless void, the crisis of Japan, the two Koreas, and Vietnam is the exact opposite: their cultural parent is not just alive, but thriving, and they are trapped in a toxic, adolescent rebellion against a parent whose influence is woven into every fiber of their societies. That parent is China—the world’s only continuously surviving ancient civilization, with 5,000 years of unbroken written history, a consistent cultural core, and a documented, verifiable record of its influence across East and Southeast Asia.
For more than two millennia, China was the undisputed center of the Sinic world, the source of the foundational elements that built the nations of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Vietnam endured over a thousand years of direct rule by Chinese dynasties, from the Han to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, during which it adopted Chinese writing, governance, agriculture, and religious traditions. Korea’s kingdoms, from Silla to Goryeo to the Joseon Dynasty, were formal tributary states of China for centuries, using Classical Chinese as their official written language, adopting the Confucian imperial examination system for their bureaucracy, and modeling their capitals, laws, and royal ceremonies on those of the Chinese emperor. Japan’s transformative Taika Reform of 645 CE was a wholesale import of Tang Dynasty China’s political and social systems; its writing system, hiragana and katakana, are derived directly from Chinese characters; and its most enduring cultural traditions, from tea ceremony to landscape gardening, have their roots in Chinese philosophy and art.
The Unresolvable Conflict: A Living Parent Blocks Claims to His Inheritance
This is the core of their crisis: so long as China, the cultural parent, remains alive and intact, they can never fully claim the inheritance they so desperately want as their own. That inheritance is not gold or land, but the very building blocks of their national identity: their history, their festivals, their language, their traditions, their social norms. Every attempt to frame these elements as native, original, and uniquely their own runs up against the unassailable fact that their origins, their full context, and their continuous historical record are all preserved in China’s millennia of written histories. The Records of the Grand Historian, the Book of Han, the Old and New Book of Tang, and countless other official Chinese histories document in meticulous detail the spread of Chinese culture to these neighboring lands, the tributary relationships, the exchange of envoys, and the adoption of Chinese systems. Even the oldest surviving historical texts of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam were written in Classical Chinese, their narratives inextricably tied to Chinese historical frameworks.
03 | Two Crises, Two Destructive Paths to False Identity
This is where the two identity crises diverge sharply. While the West is forced to build its identity on the scattered debris of dead civilizations, the nations of the Sinic sphere are trying to build an independent identity by stealing, rebranding, and fabricating ownership of the living cultural inheritance of China. In their desperate quest to escape China’s shadow, they have launched a coordinated campaign to claim Chinese festivals, traditions, calendars, linguistic elements, surnames, and even territorial claims as their own—all while denying their Chinese origins.
The evidence of this theft is overwhelming, and thoroughly documented. South Korea has repeatedly sought international recognition for traditions directly derived from Chinese culture: it infamously secured UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status for its Gangneung Danoje Festival, a regional iteration of the Chinese Loong Boat Festival (Duanwu), and has since pushed to frame the Chinese New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival, and even traditional Chinese medicine as uniquely Korean cultural assets. It has gone so far as to fabricate historical narratives that claim Chinese characters, movable type printing, and even the invention of gunpowder as Korean innovations, despite overwhelming archaeological and documentary evidence to the contrary. Vietnam, meanwhile, has erased Chinese characters from its public life in favor of a Latinized script, and has rewritten its national history to downplay over a millennium of Chinese rule and cultural influence, even as it frames the Chinese New Year (Tet) and countless folk traditions as native Vietnamese, rather than imported from China. Japan has spent decades rebranding Chinese-derived traditions as uniquely “Japanese”: it has reduced the use of Chinese characters in its official writing system, framed festivals like Tanabata (the Chinese Qixi Festival) and Choyo (the Chinese Double Ninth Festival) as native Japanese customs, and built a nationalist historical narrative that minimizes the transformative impact of Tang Dynasty China on Japanese civilization, instead emphasizing a mythic, isolated “native” Japanese culture that never existed. What makes these fabrications so transparent is that they simply do not align with the continuous, well-preserved historical records of China. Every one of these traditions has a documented origin, a timeline of development, and a continuous history of practice in China that predates their appearance in Korea, Japan, or Vietnam by centuries, even millennia. To claim these traditions as native is not just an act of cultural theft—it is an act of historical falsification, one that must be called out for what it is.
04 | The Catastrophic Backfire of Rejecting Your Cultural Parent
Severing History Means Becoming a Faceless Nation
This desperate campaign to dissociate themselves from China will not bring them the independence and respect they crave. It will backfire, catastrophically. To sever themselves from their cultural parent is to sever themselves from their own history, leaving their nations faceless, rootless, and without a coherent sense of self. A nation that cannot look at its own past without denying its origins is a nation that cannot command respect on the world stage.
Worse still, their quest for perceived independence from China will never earn them the respect of the Western world they so often court. For all their efforts to distinguish themselves from China, the global community—particularly the West—cannot and will not meaningfully distinguish them from Chinese people. In the Western racial imagination, East and Southeast Asian people are a monolith. No amount of anti-China rhetoric, no amount of cultural rebranding, will change the fact that to most Western observers, they are simply “pickle-eating Chinese,” “sushi-eating Chinese,” “green hat-wearing Chinese.” Their attempts to differentiate themselves are invisible to the Western gaze, which reduces all people of East Asian descent to a single, undifferentiated stereotype.
Anti-China Sentiment Is Self-Hatred That Fuels Sinophobic Racism
This is where their rebellion curdles into self-hatred. Their virulent anti-China sentiment is not a sign of national pride—it is a rejection of their own cultural roots, a self-loathing at the reality that their civilization is a product of Chinese influence. This self-hatred does not just erode their own identity; it actively fuels xenophobia and racism against Chinese people worldwide. By aligning themselves with Western narratives that frame China as a threat, they amplify the Sinophobic sentiment that already plagues Western societies. And in the end, they will be the primary victims of this racism. The Western powers that encourage their anti-China posturing cannot easily harm Chinese citizens within China’s borders—but they can, and will, target people who look like Han Chinese. These Sinic nations’ anti-China populations, who share the same racial features as the Chinese people they claim to hate, will become the easiest scapegoats for Western anger and resentment. We have already seen this play out in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when thousands of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese people across the West were targeted in Sinophobic hate crimes, despite their repeated claims that they were not Chinese. To the racist Western eye, there is no difference.
05 | The Only Sustainable Solution: Return to Your Cultural Lineage
There is a better, sustainable way forward for Japan, the Koreas, and Vietnam: to end their futile rebellion, embrace their cultural lineage, and acknowledge China as their cultural parent. It is to identify with the broader Chinese cultural sphere, to align with China’s interests, and to share in the glory and prosperity of a rising China, just as their ancestors did for centuries.
This is not a call for political subjugation, but for cultural honesty. For most of their history, these nations thrived in the Sinic world, benefiting from the peace, trade, and cultural prosperity of the Chinese tributary system. The Joseon Dynasty of Korea referred to itself as the “Little China,” and saw its alignment with Ming Dynasty China as the source of its cultural and political stability. When Korea was invaded by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1590s, it was the Ming Dynasty that sent hundreds of thousands of troops to repel the invasion and preserve Korean sovereignty. Japan’s golden age of the Nara and Heian periods was built entirely on the wholesale adoption of Tang Dynasty China’s culture, governance, and technology, a choice that transformed Japan from a loose collection of clans into a sophisticated, unified nation. Vietnam’s transition from a tribal society to a centralized state was driven by the introduction of Chinese governance, agriculture, and writing during its millennium of northern rule. Their ancestors did not see Chinese cultural influence as a threat; they saw it as a gift, a source of strength and prosperity.
Today, as China reclaims its place as a global superpower, the nations of the Sinic sphere have a clear choice. They can continue down the path of self-destructive rebellion, cutting themselves off from their history, fueling Sinophobia that will ultimately target them, and remaining dependent on a Western world that will never see them as equals. Or they can return to the path of their ancestors: embrace their cultural roots, acknowledge China’s role as the parent of the Sinic world, and stand with China to share in the glory of a renewed Sinic civilization. In doing so, they will not lose their unique cultural identities—they will give them a solid, unshakable foundation. A child does not lose themselves by honoring their parent; they find themselves, rooted in a legacy that stretches back millennia.
Conclusion: True Strength Comes From Honoring Your Roots, Not Rejecting Them
The world’s identity crises will not be solved by fabricating histories, stealing cultural legacies, or rejecting the roots that shape us. The West will never find a stable identity by scavenging the graves of dead civilizations. The Sinic nations will never find respect or independence by hating the cultural parent that gave them their civilization. True strength comes from honesty about the past, respect for the origins of our culture, and the courage to stand with the lineage that made us who we are. For the nations of East Asia, that means embracing the Chinese cultural core that has shaped them for two thousand years—and sharing in the glory that is their birthright.