Why is China unified rather fracturing into different countries like Europe?

Why is China unified rather fracturing into different countries like Europe?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianxia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#History
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Europe is hard to unify. Terrain hinders the size of an Empire. There are mountains ranges in Europe that separate the region as well as the Mediterranean and English Channel which protects Italy, Britain, Iberia and the Balkans to an extent.

>There is no mountain range between Germany and France

For most of its history Germany was dense forest, marshes and bogs which made it difficult to invade. If you look at the nations that rise up in Europe you can see they're based on their geographical surroundings as much as anything.

>What about Russia

The reason they needed to constantly expand so much is because they have none of these natural borders which could protect them from outside threats and so they are forced to expand or wait to be invaded.

Look at China borders, mountains to the west, tundra to the north, forests to the south, pacific to the west. They have the same issues just on a larger scale.

No germans

>For most of its history Germany was dense forest, marshes and bogs which made it difficult to invade
It was more of a population and development thing. Population density was generally gradiented in middle europe(france>germany>poland) but none of that was a hard border the way the pyrenees are.

I think if we're talking about medieval times, it was a real problem of just moving armies around with the inferior agriculture of the time (little food means hard logistics). People like charlemagne did manage to conquer middle europe, but their successors couldn't keep it stable
Meanwhile in early modern times, the logic of power politics meant that any state too strong would be picked upon by its neighbours, and the geographics of it meant that no state could conquer all of its rivals. Just think of napoleon, conquering most of continental europe but failing to defeat england and russia for geographic reasons.

One reason is the writing system. In Europe, writing is tied to language, this makes written cultures opaque to outsiders and encourage cultural chauvinism and with it, a rejection of outside rule. In China, by contrast, the same writing system is used by all different language groups, this makes their literature mutually comprehensible which is a powerful unifying force, and this allows one group to administer the whole of China without the difficulties of translation, and without the (mostly written) imperial edicts seem less "foreign" (since they're written in "your own" language).

They have mongols to the north, turkic muslims in the west and north east Indians in the south and somehow Germans are worse than them.

Really China is just the area between the two big rivers and a few coastal cities. The rest is just desert and mountains.

>Chicken and Egg
Most of european writing was in latin anyway for a long time. It diverged because it was politically fractured, not the other way round.

There's a big difference between having to learn Latin so you can read texts written in Latin, and having to learn Chinese glyphs and being able to read everything written in any language.

do you even geography?

Do you? None of what that user said is wrong.

were did I go wrong

implying north indians could invade

He didn't tho, you just inferred that.

>They have mongols to the north, turkic muslims in the west and north east Indians in the south

Nice try, samefag.

>inb4 you close browser or reset router

>HURR
No, moron, you're just being called out by more than one person because your stupidity is that obvious.

okay but im still right though. i guess you're both dumb asses.

>Most of european writing was in latin anyway for a long time
That's actually not true.

As someone else said the unified writing system was a big one. Chinese script is logographic rather than phoenetic, which is to say each word has its own glyph. So for example the Chinese word for rabbit is written like this 兔子, and no matter how in your language rabbit is pronounced it will always be written the same, because the pronunciation does not have any bearing on the writing. So no matter what your spoken language is, if you write it using the Chinese glyphs then anyone who can read Chinese will be able to read it, even if they can't speak a word of your language. That's a very powerful unifying force.

Another factor was the success of the Tang of building a unified empire in the medieval period that exceeded the Han. Charlemagne and Justinian both tried to reform Rome, but both failed.

they used to invade, they are simply chinamen now

c

Please stop with this meme that the disparate states and regions of china were as distinct as in Europe

We know it's sameposting

Europe is unified though

China is the biggest paradox of human history.

Ethnic homogenity I guess. Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, and the Ryukyu Islands all were once under the control of China but are know all independent states except for the Ryukyu. In China proper there are a lot of different ethnic groups but most of them are completely blown out in terms of population when compared to the Han Chinese. Not to mention that China sort of is seperated into two different states when you consider Taiwan.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianxia

The Chinese People(s) have successfully memed themselves to think that a unified state was central to their existence. And its absence meaning that the world was not in order.

Geography is a pretty shit way to understand Chinese unification. By that logic: China proper itself would be 3-4 countries.

United China and the Han ethnicity are both giant memes created to keep a diverse and decentralized empire together in the era of modern nation states. Prior to modern nationalism people in China identified with their family or clan and their village.

> As someone else said the unified writing system was a big one.

In Europe as in China, reading was only done by the noble/educated class, so Chinese writing presented no special benefit over Latin script, which all the noble/educated people in Europe read.

Logographic language is easier to unify cultures.

If anything that would strengthen China though. If people don't see themselves as meaningfully different from the ruling class then what reason would they have to rebel and form smaller states? There are really only two reasons to rebel. Ethnic nationalism which as you just said people didn't really identify with until the modern era, and a revolt of the nobility like the 80s year war, nobles wanting to get out from under the thumb of their rulers. The Chinese state was mostly ruled by non-noble court eunuchs following the end of the Warring states period and they couldn't form independent states for the same reason they couldn't be emperor.

Nope.jpg.

1) Chinkscratch is logographic. Meaning it divorced from spoken language. If Official A who speaks Mandarin writes something in Characters, Official B, who speaks in some Southern Tribalnigger language and totally has 0 knowledge of mandarin but is educated in the script, can still understand him because they agreed that a set of symbols represents a concept instead of a spoken word. 天 is character for the concept of "Tian" in Mandarin, Teng in Turkic-Mongol, and "Heaven." All mean the same thing.

Latin Alphabet meanwhile only works if everyone spoke the same language. You could say "hey Latin existed in medieval Europe" but this leads us to #2.
2) The only one spouting Latin was the Clergy. Depending on their education, the Nobility either could or couldn't, and mostly spoke a local lingua Franca or some "high" version of a local language.

Yeah, I still don't buy it. Learning ten thousand chink runes is no easier than learning latin.
Also
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#History
this here seems to suggest that the unifiied script was an effect of political unification, not a cause (but the entire thing is mighty complex and I don't know much about chinese history.)

>I still don't buy it.
It's not because it was easy/hard to learn, but how the script crosses linguistic barriers extremely fucking easily.

Look at it this way: Veeky Forums is evidence how Latin Alphabet works only because I'm speaking to you in a common language (English). If I write my shit in Latin Alphabet still but in my own language, you wont understand me at all.

If we had a set of symbols that we agree upon as standing for certain concepts, I have no need to learn your language, or you, mine, or a common language altogether.

>this here seems to suggest that the unifiied script was an effect of political unification
You're right, but its not the whole picture.

Instead of running after people's languages and forcibly changing them, the Qin just made everyone agree to a single writing system instead. Which was in the end far more stable and less divisive than what a forced linguistic change would entail.

>Tundra to the north

I think you mean desert and steppes

You need to cross all of the siberian taiga to reach a tundra biome.

Also the south border is mostly hill country, forest by itself isn't such an effective barrier to invasion.

>Manchuria
>China proper
MANCHURIA IS TUNGUSKOREAN

During the Qing Dynasty, the Manchus LARPed as Chinese so hard, the only ones who were able to speak Manchu was the Imperial Family.

Right now in Modern China the only determiner for being called Manchu is your name. But there are millions of "Han" Chinese in China who are ethnically Manchu but their ancestors long dropped the act along the way.

Three, the Pearl Delta is pretty important.

it was far from homogenous even after the Han. The lineal ancestor of modern Chinese culture was obscure in the southern half of the country until the Tang period.