AHC: Divided China, united Mediterranean

There's an interesting book titled Rome and China, which reiterates the point that the Classical Roman state and the first Chinese empires were quite similar in many aspects. They both claimed universal empire; they were both centered on a relatively easily unifiable core area, the Mediterranean and the North China Plain; they both expanded into barbaric peripheries, Western Europe and South China; they even collapsed in similar ways, with the North or the West occupied by barbarians while the South or the East retained traditionalist regimes. But these similarities do not last, because the Sui reunify China while the Mediterranean continues to fracture.

So here's the AHC:

1. Have China never be unified after the 4th century.
2. Have the Mediterranean be unified for most of the time after the 6th century.
 
Isn't this kinda met by the 3 Kingdoms period of China? If we include the upheaval after the death of Emperor Ling up the formal usurpation by Wei, what if we make the Jin Dynasty worse as well?
 
Isn't this kinda met by the 3 Kingdoms period of China? If we include the upheaval after the death of Emperor Ling up the formal usurpation by Wei, what if we make the Jin Dynasty worse as well?

Considering what happened to the Jing Dynasty,how much worse could it have been?
 
There's an interesting book titled Rome and China, which reiterates the point that the Classical Roman state and the first Chinese empires were quite similar in many aspects. They both claimed universal empire; they were both centered on a relatively easily unifiable core area, the Mediterranean and the North China Plain; they both expanded into barbaric peripheries, Western Europe and South China; they even collapsed in similar ways, with the North or the West occupied by barbarians while the South or the East retained traditionalist regimes. But these similarities do not last, because the Sui reunify China while the Mediterranean continues to fracture.

So here's the AHC:

1. Have China never be unified after the 4th century.
2. Have the Mediterranean be unified for most of the time after the 6th century.

For no. 2, butterflying away the Plague of Justinian would be a good start. Without it the Romans would be in a much better position to hold onto Italy and the Balkans, as well as to defeat the Muslim invasions (assuming Islam isn't butterflied away, of course). Then at some point in the future they could overthrow the Visigoths and take control of Spain and southern France, giving them control over the whole of the Mediterranean littoral.

In the long run, this would also mean that the Mediterranean remains a single cultural unit as in Late Antiquity, instead of being divided between Christian and Muslim zones IOTL. Such cultural similarity would generally make unification more likely, even after the Roman Empire starts to crumble.
 
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