If you speak English, you are actually speaking Chinese, according to one group of unconventional scholars who argue that all Western language and culture derives from the Middle Kingdom.

Last month, the First China International Frontier Education Summit was held in Beijing. At the meeting, the World Civilization Research Associaton (世界文明研究促進會) was founded by a group of Chinese scholars who presented their China-centric research to the world for the first time.

Afterward, a reporter questioned the association’s founders about their claims, with Secretary-General Zhai Guiyun explaining that English can be shown to come from Mandarin because of the similarity of words:

“Yellow” comes from the Chinese words for “falling leaves,” 叶落 pronounced yelou.

“Shop” comes from the Chinese word 商铺 pronounced shangpu, meaning the same thing.

“Heart” comes from the Chinese word 核心 pronounced hexin, meaning “core.”

While Zhai acknowledges that a few similarities like these could be a simple coincidence, he says there are far too many of these examples to be anything but evidence of origin. Zhai notes that while English may not sound like a Chinese dialect, many currently accepted Chinese dialects sound quite different from each other, not to mention Japanese and Korean.

In fact, Chinese was the source of all Western languages currently spoken — French, Russian, German, etc. — according to Zhai, having been derived from English and Chinese.

Zhai and his fellow scholars claim that their findings are based on decades of research which have concluded that the people who first spoke English lived in the Indus River Valley, which was ruled at the time by China’s Yellow Emperor.

These people then migrated westward and lived as primitive barbarians until contact again with China brought them out of their long dark age. Zhai says that prior to the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe had no history, only myths and legends, claiming that the ancient civilizations of Greece, Egypt, and Rome were all fabrications to cover up this humiliating past. He says that Confucius was the patron saint of what is called the Reinassance.

While this may all sound a bit improbable, Zhai’s group continues to go even further, claiming that China is the source of all Western culture, asserting that Europe’s economy, science, technology, education, and philosophy of the 18th and 19th centuries were all stolen from China.

Even Marx’s ideas, they say, actually came from the Middle Kingdom.