AHC: Have China permanently fractured into smaller states

Historically, one of the main aspects of Chinese civilization has been how all of China's periods of disunity have ended in some sort of reunification of China, so what scenario could have brought about a permanent division of China after 1 CE where the core region of China breaks up into multiple states akin to Europe in a permanent manner with the varieties of Chinese seen as different languages. Bonus points if you have non-Sinitic peoples be a major cultural and ethnic portion of this China as well.
 

Dolan

Banned
longer survival of Southern Song, Stronger Tibetan Empire, and Northern China having a long period of Warring States and Nomads.
 
Keep Era of Warring States going much longer so then Chinese begin think fractured East Asia being normal thing. Or make collapse of Qin Dynasty messier and China fall to new Era of Warring States.
 
Keep Era of Warring States going much longer so then Chinese begin think fractured East Asia being normal thing. Or make collapse of Qin Dynasty messier and China fall to new Era of Warring States.
I'd also agree that "earlier is better" in regards to Chinese disunity being set as a historical and cultural precedent, and that a Warring States Period PoD would be our best bet. However, it is to be pointed that the OP asked for a PoD after 1 AD.
 

Dolan

Banned
I'd also agree that "earlier is better" in regards to Chinese disunity being set as a historical and cultural precedent, and that a Warring States Period PoD would be our best bet. However, it is to be pointed that the OP asked for a PoD after 1 AD.
Shu-Han being pressed further west, but with their long term survival, alongside with Sima-Jin being unable to conquer either Shu or Wu would end up with at least North-South China divide being normalized.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The obvious way to go, especially if you want a POD after 1 AD with the aim of having a unified China seen much like the Roman Empire, is to have China fracture messily after the fall of the Han Dynasty. And then stay fractured. In fact, things were a total mess when the dynasty was dying, and the Three Kingdoms Period actually brought about more order. Also, that term is a misnomer, since it was actually three competing imperial claims. So the whole "unifying the empire again"-goal never went away.

Counter-intuitively, if you prevent the Three Kingdoms Period, and instead maintain a lengthy anarchy of warlordism in the ruins of the Han Dynasty empire, then you get what you want. Eventually, the competing lesser states coalesce into stable form. None of them is big enough to take on the others, and none is large or prestigious enough to restore the Empire. The biggest players may continue to claim (or at a later point re-claim) the Imperial legacy, but as in Europe, they will never unite the whole cultural sphere again. They'll be more like the Carolingians and the Byzantines, whereas many other states will also exist within the former realm that was Han.

That pretty much exactly equates the Han Dynasty to the Roman Empire. And post-Han China will be very much like post-Roman Europe. As various border peoples invade or migrate (Viet peoples in the South, Tibetan peoples in the West, Mongol/Turkic peoples in the North), several of the post-Han states will increasingly see their culture change in way that increasingly set them apart from their (other post-Han) neighbours. The concept of a unified empire will dilute, and at most, a shared observation of a socio-religious background will keep promoting a sense of unity. (Interestingly, I vaguely suspect that Neoconfucianism would be somewhat less suited to that role than Christianity, so post-Han China may ultimately end up less united than OTL "Christendom" was during the Middle Ages.)

I maintain that preventing the unification that ended the Warring States Period would be the more effective way to ensure that China stays split up (prevent the state-enforced Han-era notion of unity from ever forming), but the above gives you good odds of getting the same result some five centuries later.
 
How do those look on a map?

china-physical-map.gif
 
What about the various Miao-Yao and Tai-Kadai peoples of South China along with the Baiyue? What becomes of them in such a scenario?
 
The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, plus the southern and central mountains make great geographic barriers for one.
The rivers are horrible as barriers, and would make as much sense as dividing Egypt by the Nile or India by the Ganges. Far more plausible is for states to emerge which are centered around the river: Sichuan is an excellent example, and Huguang works as well. It's likely that the entire North China Plain will be dominated by a single polity, specifically by the king who controls the point around Zhengzhou and is able to divert the Yellow River downstream as he sees fit. The Yangtze Delta might resemble the Netherlands, with its squabbling and loosely federated city-states. The south coast might plausibly become a string of coastal kingdoms.

It changes so slowly that for a pre-modern state it's manageable
The Yellow River could entirely change within a single Monsoon season, and a cunning king will definitely exploit this to his advantage.

Once he dominates the North China Plain and his kingdom is at peace, his #1 priority will be to protect the entire Yellow River watershed for himself, and his #2 priority will be to fend off nomadic invaders from the north. This means 1) conquering everything south of the Gobi Desert and 2) complex politicking among the nomadic tribes. Walls, after all, don't work *cough* Trump *cough*.

This means that everything north of the Qinling mountains and a point just north of the Yangtze Delta is likely to be dominated by a centralized state, at least as a default setting. Everything south of it could be a collection of entities, which may or may not be vassalized by the northern giant.
 
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The rivers are horrible as barriers, and would make as much sense as dividing Egypt by the Nile or India by the Ganges. Far more plausible is for states to emerge which are centered around the river: Sichuan is an excellent example, and Huguang works as well. It's likely that the entire North China Plain will be dominated by a single polity, specifically by the king who controls the point around Zhengzhou and is able to divert the Yellow River downstream as he sees fit. The Yangtze Delta might resemble the Netherlands, with its squabbling and loosely federated city-states. The south coast might plausibly become a string of coastal kingdoms.
That such a bad comparison, the Nile is virtually the only place where the population lives in Egypt so dividing it by that it's impossible considering the desert is a way better geographic barrier, the Ganges on the other hand is arranged in a way that the borders also are harder to maintain but that's not the case with the Yangtze.

Sichuan exist as an entity because of the mountains, not the Yangtze, the Yangtze can make a very good barrier, not as an hard border but as a strategical border.
 
The Yangtze cannot serve as a border because it's navigable for much of its course and is often surrounded by cliffs or narrow valleys. Therefore a king must dominate both of its banks at least between chokepoints in order to survive.

Sichuan would make an excellent independent state because it's entirely surrounded by mountains yet contains many rivers (which all merge into the Yangtze) bringing water and sediment from Tibet. There's probably nowhere else in the world that's both naturally defendable and fertile to this extent.
 
There are many possibilities.

I don't know enough about the post-Xin and pre-Eastern Han era to comment, but I have read that Emperor Guangwu (the first of Eastern Han) was a very competent military commander, so much so that he drafted plans for his generals and expected them to follow them in detail and they actually worked, one of the few times in history a monarch micromanaging the military ends well. If Guangwu had been butterflied away somehow (perhaps died of a freak accident or illness), what else could happen? I have no idea.

I hear that the Three Kingdoms era is not very plausible, as all three rulers are focused on reunifying the Han state and thus would go to extraordinary lengths to do so rather than settling down to rule their own realm. I don't know enough to affirm or contradict that.

The most obvious place to start would be the post-Jin era, which was extremely turbulent. If you wanted a two-state order, you could go with a Tuoba state in the north and a semi-Han semi-indigenous people, such as the order between the Tuoba Wei and Liu Song, which lasted for sixty years. Instead of having the Northern and Southern dynasties period end with the Northern Zhou being succeeded by the Sui and conquering Qi, Liang, and Chen, you could have a sort of north-south equilibrium emerge in which each state recognizes the other, sees itself as legitimate and the other as barbarian and different, and thus would rather leave the other state be rather than risking ruinous conquest. The border I most often see in north-south orders is the Huai river. A multi state order might be more difficult to construct. It would require knowledge I don't have, but I still believe there is a possibility that the Sixteen Kingdoms period could result in at least two or three states besides the Eastern Jin: one based in Shu, one based in the northeast (perhaps with Jinan or Ye as a capital), and one based in the northwest (with Chang'an as a capital).

I don't know enough about the Sui-Tang transition to make intelligent comments there except that I hear it was pretty devastating and not to be underestimated.

The 5 Dynasties and 10 Kingdoms is an area I know about, however, and I do happen to know a bit about them. I've read that some historians compare the Tang collapse and post-Tang era to the collapse of the Frankish Empire, which has, IMHO, at least a few similarities among many differences. Though the southern states were the most divided, they actually had a pretty stable existence through that period: Shu was briefly conquered by the Later Tang but quickly regained independence and the Wu were replaced by the Southern Tang, but otherwise, states like these as well as those like Southern Han, Chu, and Wuyue were stable enough. The North, though united, was far less wealthy due to continued warfare and the machinations of the Liao during the Later Jin and Later Han. Perhaps if the Liao are successful in their occupation of the North, which was too difficult for them to swallow IOTL in any case, the north will effectively be neutralized and the south will be able to build itself into independent and defensible polities. Not until the Later Zhou did the rulers of the north see themselves as Han and grow strong enough to make inroads against the south and against the Liao.

It's arguable that the Song period was one of a "disunited China". The Liao and Xi Xia were contemporaries of the Song, and the Liao especially humiliated the Song by asserting a dominant "elder brother" status and demanding tribute. The Jinn that conquered the north humiliated Huizong and Qinzong after the Jinkang incident and were seen by many, including the Mongols, as the legitimate successors to the Mandate, and the name "China" or "Cathay" is thought by many to have come from Qidan, or Khitan, the ethnicity of the Liao. Thus, it is best to see the Song-Liao-Jin period as a period of disunited "China".

After this period things become more difficult as my knowledge on these matters peters out. I will mention that the Mongols technically claimed still to be the "Northern Yuan" and repeatedly defeated the Ming (see Tumu crisis), and so could be called a "Chinese" successor state at a stretch. Other than this, however, it seems kind of difficult, as there is such a tradition of unity. Perhaps an ideological divide like the Communist-Nationalist divide?

What drives me nuts is when people say "China's unification was inevitable". Prove it. Reason says that when you make an assertion, you have to prove why it's true, rather than forcing me to prove that it's not true. What I can say to claim that China's unification was not inevitable is that there were long periods of disunity and that many Chinese states have recognized the legitimacy and even ascendancy of one another for decades and even centuries. I know that the human and resource cost of conquest is immense. Just look at the population decrease during the Three Kingdoms period. Yes, I know it doesn't mean tens of millions died necessarily, some could be off the record due to poverty so extreme they were forced to evade government taxation. But the fact that the majority of the Chinese population perished during that time or was driven to destitution, during a time of sixty years of near continuous warfare, points to the enormous cost of unification. If the three states had settled and acknowledged each other and made peace, might that have saved lives and resources? It's a question that should not be answered lightly or spuriously. And that's just one example. Unfortunately, I don't have time to say more.
 
The best way to do it would be to get rid of Ghengis Khan and the Mongols. At the time the Song, while powerful, were a purely southern dynasty and both unlikely to be conquered by anyone other than the Mongols and unlikely to reconquer the North. Since the North was still dominant, this is a good platform for a multi-nation Chinese empire.

The T'ang ITTL become just a much more successful version of the Frankish empire. For that matter, the second way way to do this is to either nerf the T'ang or prevent the Sui. I'm reading about the period now and it seems the Sui unified China at the time when it was divided into three kingdoms, and the two non-Sui ones were collapsing internally.
 
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