‘The Industrial Revolution Began in China’: Bizarre Revisionist History Spreads on Chinese Social Media

Claims that China invented the Industrial Revolution and that ancient Greece and Rome were fabricated are spreading online, prompting an unusual official backlash. Chinese social media has also circulated the idea that the Tang dynasty never existed and that the Song dynasty occupied its place in that period.

Other versions of what Chinese users call “Western fake history” say that Westerners invented the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations later, and that calculus, the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution were copied from China. Some posts even deny that Aristotle existed. Another claim says the Yongle Encyclopedia, compiled in the early 15th century under the Ming emperor Yongle, gave birth to modern Western civilization.

The theories have gained momentum through short videos made with artificial intelligence and algorithmic recommendations. Qiushi, a Communist Party theoretical journal, criticized the content as an “anti-intellectual variant of historical nihilism.” It said the creators present shocking conclusions first, then detach fragments of information from their context and package them as evidence.

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The anti-intellectual variant of historical nihilism

The issue is sensitive because some of the claims also challenge China’s official historical framework. Certain accounts argue that the Yuan and Qing dynasties were not Chinese because their ruling houses came from imperial lineages outside the Han majority. The related “1644 view” treats the fall of the Ming and the founding of the Qing as a break in Chinese civilization, portraying the following period as foreign rule. That conflicts with the party’s effort to present Han and minority histories as one shared history and strengthen a common Chinese national identity.

Chinese authorities have targeted self-media accounts based on such theories since last year. State-linked outlets, including the People’s Daily website and a social-media account operated by the Zhejiang provincial party publicity department, published criticism last month. Yet the claims continue to spread in short texts and videos. Qiushi warned that large quantities of AI-generated fake historical records could enter the internet and training data, creating a cycle in which “algorithms amplify bias, bias fixes perceptions, and perceptions in turn build algorithms.” It called for mainstream values to guide platform recommendations and for repeat offenders to face legal or regulatory action.

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Algorithms amplify bias, bias fixes perceptions, and perceptions in turn build algorithms.