In an article headlined '‘India culture controls China’ remarks a trick to boost national pride: experts', China's state-owned Global Times on October 25, 2017, said Chinese experts had on October 25, "slammed an Indian official's remarks that China has been culturally controlled by India, saying the official is trying to boost the country's national pride". The article claimed that India's Home Minister had said that Chinese scholar Hu Shi (1891-1962) wrote that "India culturally had controlled and dominated China for more than 2,000 years without sending a single soldier. That is the effect of India." He added If China has been controlled culturally by any country, it is India and this fact was accepted by Hu Shi. Zhang Yiwu, a Professor of Culture at Peking University told Global Times that by saying India's influence on Chinese culture, Hu was referring to the spread of Buddhism during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) in China. Hu Zhiyong, a research fellow at the Institute of International Relations of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, separately said it is true that Buddhism originated from India, but the religion thrived in China after it was localized to make it better adapt to the Chinese society. Zhou Wei, Chief of the Institute for Religious Studies at the China Tibetology Research Center, was quoted by the Xinhua News Agency in August as saying there are more than 1,700 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, 46,000 monks and nuns and up to 400 living Buddha in China's Tibet Autonomous Region. It quoted experts as saying Buddhism has little to do with contemporary India, whose mainstream religion is Hinduism. Zhang Yiwu noted "It is also inappropriate to use the phrase 'culturally control and dominate' as culture simply integrates with each other, and China, as a country with a great civilization, hasn't and will not be 'controlled or dominated' by any culture."He pointed out that Chinese civilization features various schools of thought, including Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism.
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