AHC/WI: "Chinese style" European history

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China, in some ways, is more ethnically and geographically diverse than europe.

If China has the geography to be unified, than Europe from Brittany to Astrakhan has as well.

And if Brittany-to-Astrakhan can be divided, China so can be as well.

China is geographically diverse? Er...not as much as Europe. For all intents and purposes, when I say 'China', I don't mean Northeast China, Mongolia, Xinjiang, or Tibet - I'm talking about China Proper, the origin of the Han people.

Apart from southern China, northern China is relatively flat. This is reflected in terms of dialects, since Mandarin is everywhere in northern China, while dialects like Min and Yue are more common in the south.

The geography itself lends power to northern China, since it's a much more cohesive block, which allows them to conquer the south. Where would this block be in Europe?
 
It's not geography - China has as many rivers and mountains as Europe. It's not culture - look at the differences between Cantonese and northern Chinese culture.

It's simply history.

China unificated for the first time in 1600 BC. Europe, at this point, was nothing more than a wasteland.

A good start to have Europe follow the same way is to have the Roman Empire lasting longer. Preserve Rome until a point if no return and then start to disunite it if you want. But first make sure that a Roman identity spread from Britanny to Illyria.

Er, no, China proper doesn't have as many rivers and mountains as Europe. Europe is unfortunate because its mountains are in inconvenient places, blocking any relatively homogeneous civilization from developing in a large enough area. The northern Chinese plain allowed for this, and I suppose you could get the Eastern European steppes to fit this role, though it'd be hard to cross the Carpathians (and developing this would be hard, too).

And before you say that Yue people and northern Chinese people are different, please explain how. My parents are southern Chinese, and they certainly don't see this divide between north and south that you speak of. Everyone writes using almost exactly the same characters.

(Before I hear someone saying that 'everyone uses the Latin alphabet in Europe', well, an alphabet is radically different from characters, just to let you know)

Also, about this 'Roman identity'...I don't see how that's going to help. Do you mean the prestige of Latin as a language? That doesn't really change much, since it was prestigious IOTL, almost as much as Chinese was in East Asia.
 
China is geographically diverse? Er...not as much as Europe. For all intents and purposes, when I say 'China', I don't mean Northeast China, Mongolia, Xinjiang, or Tibet - I'm talking about China Proper, the origin of the Han people.

Apart from southern China, northern China is relatively flat. This is reflected in terms of dialects, since Mandarin is everywhere in northern China, while dialects like Min and Yue are more common in the south.

The geography itself lends power to northern China, since it's a much more cohesive block, which allows them to conquer the south. Where would this block be in Europe?

Mandarin is actually, a very late invention.

And yes, the plains facillitate a strong agruculture and a large population and allows the North to conquer the South since time immemorial.
 
Is there any way (theoretically or in practical terms) for the Carolingians and the ERE to have both titles pass to a single person through marriage? Is there any circumstance in which this would be desirable? I feel like once you have Francia, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Anatolia (plus potentially the ERE holding onto the Exarchate of Africa), securing Spain, Egypt, and the Levant would be all that would be necessary to re-establish total dominance over the Mediterranean.

In theory it is possible (Ottonians rather than Carolingians, but still) but there are many problems. The Eastern Romans regarded the Frankish HRE as barbaric. More critically, governance of the time was emphatically centrifugal, making anything resembling a strong, expansionistic central government unlikely to last. They would have trouble in both raising levies and extracting sufficient resources in the long term, as the historical HRE proves.
 
And before you say that Yue people and northern Chinese people are different, please explain how. My parents are southern Chinese, and they certainly don't see this divide between north and south that you speak of. Everyone writes using almost exactly the same characters.

Exactly, by the way some of these Americans that I met speak it's as if "southern Chinese" are an oppressed race under the Beijing government or something.
 
As there are different dialects of Chinese, there were different languages within the Roman Empire.

But Greek and Latin were languages understood by most offials.
 
As there are different dialects of Chinese, there were different languages within the Roman Empire.

But Greek and Latin were languages understood by most offials.

Most linguists argue that South Chinese varieties are actually languages, not dialects. It is partly just a matter of semantics, but the point is that they really differ significantly from Mandarin.
 
Most linguists actually argue that the distinction is pointless from any scientific viewpoint :p

As I technically qualify as a "linguist" (at least, someone who teaches about linguistics, and is currently preparing to present a paper at a linguistics conference), I fully know. ;)
I personally strongly prefer the more neutral form "variety" or, in more formal writing and in some contexts, "lect" (which is unfortunately impossible to use in my native language, since the equivalent form would homonym with a word meaning "bed"). However, the distinction, while indeed without scientific basis, is useful in its roughness to express the relative overall difference among more or less distant varieties. And it can be employed usefully when talking about perceptions about language by speech communities (in this case, it makes sense to say that South Chinese varieties are seen as "dialects").
In my own field, this gets very confusing because there is an established branch of knowledge that is called "Arabic Dialectology" while the majority of the scholars recognize that the label of "dialect" for the relevant varieties is misleading/inappropriate.
This is easy to paper over in academic discussion, but confuses the hell out of my undergrads. ;) .
 
Most linguists argue that South Chinese varieties are actually languages, not dialects. It is partly just a matter of semantics, but the point is that they really differ significantly from Mandarin.

I never said the opposite. In fact, the linguists support my reasoning, since as Europe has different languages, China has them too.
 
It's been said, but making sure Rome survives for another couple centuries should do it. At that point everyone around the Mediterranean is just as Roman as everyone in China is Chinese, and there you go.
 
China is geographically diverse? Er...not as much as Europe. For all intents and purposes, when I say 'China', I don't mean Northeast China, Mongolia, Xinjiang, or Tibet - I'm talking about China Proper, the origin of the Han people.

Apart from southern China, northern China is relatively flat. This is reflected in terms of dialects, since Mandarin is everywhere in northern China, while dialects like Min and Yue are more common in the south.

The geography itself lends power to northern China, since it's a much more cohesive block, which allows them to conquer the south. Where would this block be in Europe?

I think France-Germany-Poland is the best candidate-there are few natural barriers separating these three countries from each other, especially the further north you get. If you can just come up with a scenario where the whole North European Plain is united into one ethnicity, I think you'd be a long way towards the OP.

As others have mentioned, a surviving Roman Empire would probably be the best way to do it-have the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest go the other way. Rome continues to colonize the area between the Rhine and the Elbe, which, by AD 300 or so, is much better economically developed than it was IOTL, with a majority Latin-speaking population. Later, in the early 4th or 5th century, Rome undergoes a dynastic crisis which results in a general from around the Elbe becoming emperor. He moves the Roman capital to Trier, and over the next few centuries, further colonization efforts target OTL Bavaria and Austria, eventually linking Byzantium and the eastern parts of Rome to Trier.
 
Suddenly overwhelmed by an intense desire to see the Roman version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. WRE Wei, ERE Wu, NRE Shu?
 
After seeing the map, I agree that a developed North European Plain would help.

Suddenly overwhelmed by an intense desire to see the Roman version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. WRE Wei, ERE Wu, NRE Shu?

:eek::eek::eek::D:D:D:eek::eek::eek:

...same. Though ERE Wei fits better.
 
After seeing the map, I agree that a developed North European Plain would help.



:eek::eek::eek::D:D:D:eek::eek::eek:

...same. Though ERE Wei fits better.

Ah yeah, you're right, I got those two mixed up in my head. ERE's matchup with the Sassanids seemed to match up well with Wei vs. Goguryeo in my mind.
 
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