China’s MFA talks about “5,000 years of civilization.”

The government they run is 77 years old.
If you use Beijing’s own test on Taiwan — who sits at the UN — the clock starts in 1971.

A Fudan professor, Wen Yang, gives the academic version: Chinese civilization is sedentary and unbroken for five millennia. “The West” is a third-generation reboot after Rome, barbarians, Crusades, and colonization. Western nation-states, in that telling, are barely a thousand years old in embryo.

That is a civilizational type argument. It gets sold as a government-age argument.
To make 5,000 years into state time, you need Xia as the first dynasty. Inside China, Erlitou is often treated as a Xia capital.

Outside, the default is more cautious: no contemporary Xia writing, king lists written centuries later, a real Bronze Age culture that is not automatically “the Xia court.”

Shang has oracle bones. Xia does not. Civilization sites like Liangzhu push the story older still. Complex society is not the same as a textbook dynasty.

Cultural continuity is real — script, bureaucracy, a long imperial memory. Regime continuity is not. Qin is not Han. Yuan is not Song. Qing is not Ming. ROC is not Qing. PRC is not ROC. “Unbroken state” flattens every founding into one actor who has been on stage since the flood.

Now apply one clock.
• PRC: 1949
• UN China seat: 1971
• U.S. Constitution: 1789 — older than the PRC
• UK crown and Parliament: centuries of the same machinery. That comparison never makes the slide.

They count Yu the Great.

They don’t count 1949.

They really don’t count 1971.

Civilization is old.

This government is not.
Keep the clocks apart.