ashok mourya
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How is the cultural relationship between India and China ?
What are differences in the way people from the two countries live their lives today.
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Both India and China are large countries that gave rise to a diversity of cultures. In addition, as neighbours for 5000 years, a lot of culture has been shared and transferred between the two. As such, the cultures are very similar in a lot of ways. One could write books on this topic, so it's difficult to write a short answer. Among the similarities include:
What are differences in the way people from the two countries live their lives today.
...
Both India and China are large countries that gave rise to a diversity of cultures. In addition, as neighbours for 5000 years, a lot of culture has been shared and transferred between the two. As such, the cultures are very similar in a lot of ways. One could write books on this topic, so it's difficult to write a short answer. Among the similarities include:
- Significance of the family unit
- Attitudes toward teachers, education and child upbringing
- Both are superstitious cultures (for example, superstitions surrounding when one can cut hair, cleaning the house beforeholidays, etc.)
- Belief in luck
- Lunisolar calendar systems
- 60-year calendar cycles (thanks Mangesh Joshi)
- Associations of colours with ideas (red being one of the most auspicious, white being the colour of mourning and death in both Indian and Chinese tradition)
- Hosts and guests and how they traditionally receive each other
- Music based on pentatonic scales (India and China both each have many other styles, but both make extensive use of pentatonic scales. In particular the popular Indian ragam mohanam is exactly identical to the Chinese pentatonic scale)
- Philosophical and religious ideas (reincarnation, karma, various deities) especially with Buddhist Chinese -- mind you there are hundreds of millions of Chinese around the world who are worshipping an Indian guy, which shows the extent to which the countries have shared/imposed/propagated/traded ideas with each other
- Idol worship
- 5 elements, but 2 of them differ (China: Wood, Water, Earth, Metal, Fire; India: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Ether)
- Beliefs in traditional medicine
- Tea cultivation -- both India and China have been doing it for so long, nobody has the slightest clue who had it first
- Rice cultivation
- Food -- you might wonder why I list this as a similarity, but many people in the West see only a small fraction of Indian cuisines and a small fraction of Chinese cuisines. In reality the foods take a more gradual transition from Indian cities to Chinese cities, and foods that came from outside became common to both (naan, for example, which is common to both northern India and western China, uncommon in both southern India and eastern China). People also pay less attention to is raw ingredients. Indian and Chinese cuisines have a lot of similarities in the vegetables used, and even spices to some degree. It's the way they're used and mixed, and the cooking methods that are so vastly different that one might not recognise that there are even similarities in what's stocked in the kitchen. South Indians and Chinese regularly shop at each others' grocery stores and markets in southeast Asia.
- Language structure and grammar is different, even though Indian and Chinese languages have both imported a little vocabulary from each other
- Attitudes in a group, the amount of individualism one expresses directly, and when it is appropriate to be expressive in a social context
- Conflict resolution
- Attitudes regarding embarrassment and losing/maintaining face
- Directness vs. indirectness in personal expression
- Gestures of indication (for example, yes/no/happiness/sadness) differ between the two
- The actual theories and methods used in traditional medicine, although both have a strong belief in traditional medicine
- Chopsticks vs. hands for eating
- Soy cultivation, which India has actually done for several hundred years, but it never caught on in Indian cuisine as much as it did in China
- Cuisine differs greatly, but a lot of it has to do with cooking methods rather than raw ingredients
- The beliefs and religious/cultural significance behind holidays
- Literary and artistic traditions
- Pop culture divides the countries much more than traditional culture
