The standard of civilization, the ancient scale, the society civilization is based on what in the end

Today I read a sentence that Chinese civilization is the oldest existing civilization. I was pondering the validity of this statement at first. The first thing to explore is: what is Chinese civilization. Leaving aside the word "Chinese" for the time being, the definition of civilization alone is diverse and different. The word "civilization" in English, for example, is derived from the Latin word civilis, which means city, and the emergence of cities is often taken as a sign of the beginning of civilization. However, the difference between civilization and culture is very vague, and some scholars have proposed the distinction that civilization is partial to the outside, and all manifestations of life such as politics, law, economy, education, and the achievements of crafts and sciences can be regarded as manifestations of civilization. Culture, on the other hand, favors the spiritual aspect, and encompasses ideas and customs such as religion, philosophy, and art. (Wikipedia's entry on "culture") As a result, there is a wide range of opinions on what constitutes a civilization, making it difficult to explore where a civilization begins and where it ends. On the other hand, civilizations are often categorized according to geography or type of civilization, such as Western civilization, Egyptian civilization, Chinese civilization, and so on. They are also divided into agricultural civilization, industrial civilization and so on, according to the progress from primitive to advanced. Then there are two interpretations of the Chinese civilization according to the geographical and civilization types, one is the civilization on the land of China; the other is the Huaxia civilization produced in the ancient times and its later evolution and the civilization that continues to be influenced by the interaction with other civilizations. In fact, here the Chinese civilization replaced by Chinese civilization better, since ancient China ≠ China, Chinese civilization that is one of the understanding of the Chinese words, the Khitan, Nujin, Korea, Japan, Vietnam have called themselves China is because of the belief that inherited the ancient Chinese civilization, so I thought that the Chinese civilization in Asia that is equal to the Chinese culture circle, because the culture of those countries have their origins in the ancient Chinese civilization (of course, there are still local characteristics of). The Chinese civilization in Asia is the same as what is now called the Chinese Cultural Circle.) But in addition, the continuation of civilization is also debatable, the continuation here does not mean unchanging continuity, but refers to the evolution of the same lineage. From the first geographical point of view, there should not be a Chinese civilization at all, because the Chinese civilization itself is a cultural type of civilization. As for Chinese civilization, there is no question of continuity in this regional theory, as there has been a continuation of civilization for thousands of years in the two river valleys, the Nile Valley, and other places, only that it is not the same as the one from the beginning, that is to say, there has been a cultural fault. Geographically, Chinese civilization just doesn't have a fault line (personally, I think it would have if the Yuan dynasty had ruled a little longer). Moreover, civilization is always changing, and the Chinese civilization of the Qing Dynasty was already very different from that of the Shang Dynasty. All in all, it is not possible to talk about continuity in terms of geography, and it is not reasonable to say that Chinese civilization is the oldest existing civilization. Let's first look at the ancient civilizations: Sumerian and Babylonian (Two Rivers Basin), Ancient Egyptian (Nile River), Ancient Indian (Indus River), Minoan and Mycenaean (Aegean), and Shang (in chronological order, the Shang, the starting point of Chinese civilization, is the youngest). First look at a few of the major civilizations, the two rivers civilization needless to say, thousands of years of time intricately replace the assimilation and fusion, on the Sumerian civilization or Babylonian civilization is naturally not a direct descendant of the civilization. The Indus civilization was also replaced by the Aryans or fused with the original Indus civilization on the basis of the Aryan civilization; the Egyptian civilization was the latest to die out, and gradually disappeared after the conquest of Rome and Arabia. The one that remains is the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, and after that there was a long dark period before the land of Greece was ushered into the period of Ancient Greek civilization. So I think one of the points of contention here is whether or not the ancient Greek civilization was inherited from the Minoan civilization. Personally, after searching for information, I think it should be considered as inherited, but at most there was a fusion of different civilizations, similar to the difference between Shang and Zhou (Shang and Zhou were two tribes of different cultures, but Zhou still inherited the foundation of Shang). Therefore, if the ancient Greek civilization and the Aegean civilization are considered to be one and the same, the only controversial thing in the statement "Chinese civilization is the oldest civilization among the existing civilizations" is only the Greek civilization which is a cultural type. The Greek civilization spread to the Mediterranean coast or even established colonies directly in the ancient Greek era. The Roman civilization developed from the Greek and Etruscan civilizations, while the Etruscans have a claim that they were Greeks originating from Asia Minor. In a nutshell, Roman civilization was inherited from Greek civilization. It spread throughout Europe in the following millennia (with the barbarians being assimilated by the Romans in the process, naturally). Greek civilization did not die out in Greece itself with the introduction of Christianity, but remained a civilizational exchange, a certain degree of integration, based on its own civilization. Just as many of the qualities of the Shang civilization ceased to exist later on, there was the Confucius cloud of Zhou Dao. The biggest challenge to the native Greek civilization came from the conquest of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, but the native Greek civilization was not completely assimilated. And inherited from the Greek European civilization and then even more brilliant, the first to enter the modern era, and the modern civilization generated by the European civilization has become a universal civilization, the whole world is almost invariably not assimilated, the material has entered the modern civilization of the Arab world in the half a year ago, have been in the political and legal aspects of modernization. The civilization inherited from other places is still a part of that civilization. This is also true in East Asia, where after the fall of the Ming Dynasty, North Korea claimed Chinese legitimacy, and Vietnam's Nguyen Dynasty claimed the Southern Dynasties as opposed to the Qing Dynasty, while focusing on the promotion of China in Southeast Asia. Speaking of which, I remembered that I once asked Justin Zackey about the difference between civilization and culture, but he didn't tell me. I said at the time that there is definitely a difference, for example, in Vietnam, you can call it Vietnamese culture, but rarely do you call it Vietnamese civilization. It's not because Vietnam doesn't have a civilization, it's because it was part of the Chinese civilization in ancient times, and it's part of the modern civilization in modern times. Modern civilization developed from European civilization and is universal. This may seem Eurocentric. But my point is that modern civilization is no longer the concept of traditional civilization, it was created by Europeans but at the same time this modern civilization has replaced the European civilization. Of course, there is still a culture of each nation in it, and modern civilization is not a uniform and uniform civilization. It is normal to have different cultures within a civilization, and they can have their own characteristics, such as Vietnam and North Korea within the Chinese civilization. For a country like the DPRK, modernization is like adding a layer of color on top of an already existing base color and watercolor. It is also because there are still a lot of remnants of the past civilization that countries belonging to the same civilization in the past are showing a tendency of convergence under the same modern civilization nowadays. To take a real-life example, compare a young Chinese man, a young Singaporean man, and a young Japanese man. Excluding their individual personalities, there may be almost no difference between the three except for the language and characters; they all wear modern clothes, listen to pop music and may even like the same group, watch the same movies and TV shows, eat sushi today and Chinese food tomorrow, advocate freedom and democracy, and downplay the influence of religion. This is probably one of the processes that Huntington refers to as the formation of a culture circle. In fact, the view of civilization should not be independent, segregated, or sequential. The influence of civilization and culture is holistic, coherent and integrated, and the influence of civilization is usually imprinted forever with the population, as mentioned above, several major ancient civilizations died out because their people were conquered by foreign peoples, and what happened in the past will never be forgotten. At the same time, human beings are individual and transient, and a civilization at two different moments is no longer a civilization, which means that a civilization cannot be regarded as a single living organism, and that civilizations are made up of countless human beings of countless generations. Explore this is trying to sort out a part of their own worldview and their views on civilization, I hope not to think without learning.