Why were European powers largely unwilling to create a single state like China?

White people have Asian tier brain, but also nigger gangsta/divisive mentality.

Thing is we never had an emprah so strong he was willing to kill millions to make it happen. Napoleon and rome both tried after all but the chinese may have just gotten the coinflip right to end up as one big blob over their warring states period.

>The Chinese treated people like cattle while Europeans didn't
Correct.

differences in history

Han China forged the Chinese people as an ethnicity. To this day the Chinese still refer to themselves as "Han" Also the way Rome fell in the west precluded any chance of a Roman ethnicity developing in western Europe. had Rome not fell in the west for a few centuries more or one of the barbarian kingdoms conquered most if not all of the WRE and allowed a common cultural identity to form then perhaps a china like state could have formed

>willing
Imperial rule is not an example of willing unification, all countries, especially European states, worked hard to prevent this happening to them.

Idiot.
Africans tend to be collectivist with in the tribe as well if that is what you're alluding too.
That is one good point considering Europe(minus Russia) is about the size of china. I guess the combination of conditions being so different North to South and lack of such an emperor is the difference.

If you take a look at European geography, you'll come to realize that the biggest countries are located on the Northern European Plain. This is especialy true if you look at a map from 1914. However, the farther into mountainous areas you get, like the Balkans or Iberia, the more different nation states and ethnicties start to pop up.

China's historical core, the region between the Yangtze and Yellow River, is almost entirely composed of flatland. Because of its fertile lands, most of the population lives on the North China Plain. Control the plain and you control China, and controling the plain is not particularly hard to do due to its lack of natural barriers. So you have a region that is easily conquered and unified, again and again. That an identity would develop from this eventually is very clear.

>chinese civil war

Because Europe is a collution of several cultural groups who where recently and barely unified by a common religion, and at many times schismed with one another.

"China" was a kingdom composed by a single cultural group dominated by the center-east Han Chinese, who discovered agriculture and developed state based civilization, then over 4000 years conquered the rest of the chinese tribes, only ever encountering problems with the mongolians. Over the centuries their conquests and relative stability created the notion that they were always one cultural identity by virtue of being so fucking old. Almost all pre colonial Chinese conflict was between people who though themselves part of china.

Currently China is composed of 2 or 3 cultural groups, 4 if you consider Tibet as part of china, a multiple dozen different cultures and around 5 separate races (han chinese, manchurians aka "not koreans", the mountain chinks on the west, mongolians and south-west chinese).

If you want a comparison of a sucessful china, think of the french. France had half a dozen regional cultures that were conquered and assimilated thorough centuries.

this

Europe is covered with mountains and rivers that make it easy to separate and hard for any one state to conquer

China's northern half and core of the civilization is hills and plains that form a massive arena where all the states can fight it out until only one emerges as victorious, and then proceeds to conquer the mountainous South. In all of Chinese history dynasties almost always start in the north and conquer their way south, with the exception of the Ming

>only ever encountering problems with the mongolians
You forgot the Manchus and the Central Asians

I don't know much about the Chinese formation period, but I'm willing to bet it all happened along the fertile central rivers, which allowed for a high agro output and thus population density and population expansion towards neighbouring areas until reaching natural borders. Seems reasonable that one political state would eventually happen to unify this central area sharing same cultural and ethnic background. Once this happens neighbouring areas are naturally prone to fall under political and cultural dominance, and, due to higher population density, to ethnical colonization/mestizage.

In Europe there were lots of regions that sprawled their own particular ethnical and cultural civilizations under loose political structures. Rome eventually happened to conquer a good chunk of it. But another good chunk of it was out of their Imperial control. Had Rome managed to conquer all of the Germanic lands and set up a border, say, from the Dniester to to Baltic, then the Empire might have survived as one political entity and a roman cultural unifying identity might have eventually blossomed throughout all of it. Or maybe not. That's the thing. Unlike China, were a centrally singular ethnic and cultural group imposed over the others simply by the sheer population numbers allowed by their interfluvial geographical location, Rome wasn't obviously geographically determined to come up with an Empire, and it happening was and admirable accomplishment that wasn't related to sheer population advantage over the rest of cultural civilizations.

China has spent more of it's history as warring states than it has as a unified state.

Europe in Dark Ages
>latin language and culture group
>celtic language and culture group
>germanic language and culture group
>slavic language and culture group
>finno-ugric language and culture group
>+ mongol, arab, middle-eastern influence

China during Qin/Han dynasty
>chinese language and culture group

But the point is that those warring states had basically the same cultural and ethnic backgrounds so in that sense it can be compared with feudal political structures that rose within the HRE after the decomposition of the Carolingian Empire, which wasn't in itself the reflection of a unique cultural-political human group but one of them, the franks conquering others.

Unironically because Europeans write history

Capital area will rob provinces

>China during Qin/Han dynasty
>>chinese language and culture group
I think in that time they have only united hieroglyph system, verbal languages were different from an area to another area

Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't the difference between zhou chinese and peking chinese (language) the same as between bavarian german and saxon german?

It was all chinese in origin, similar language, similar traditions (im not saying it was the same). And now try to compare Irish celts with Byzantinian greeks

Chinese powers were also unwilling to create a single state, that's why they fought for centuries.

We don't know what Middle Chinese and Old Chinese sounded like, but we do know that Mandarin is mutually unintelligible with Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Shanghainese, and various other Chinese languages.