Challenge: Balkanize China

I've recently gotten annoyed with the massive amount of TL's where China is either destined to become one massive country, or at worst divided into two-four really big countries(communist north, Xianjang, Tibet, capitalist south are the main variations without dynastic differences) despite their being a decent amount of seperate languages, religions, and cultural differences that should make balkanization to quite a few more states possible.

This is the challenge: with a POD any time after 100AD balkanize China in such a way that most of the new nations consider themselves ethnically different from each other. In other words, make the Chinese Empire go the way of Rome.

Ready? Go!
 

Hendryk

Banned
China does in fact get balkanized fairly often in AH, and, strangely, more often than India.
 
This is the challenge: with a POD any time after 100AD balkanize China in such a way that most of the new nations consider themselves ethnically different from each other. In other words, make the Chinese Empire go the way of Rome.

Ready? Go!

You mean separate into new nations? That's sort of hard to do with the Mandate of Heaven. It's not imposable it happened a couple of times in OTL but with the MoH around it means someone eventually has to create a unified China.
 
You mean separate into new nations? That's sort of hard to do with the Mandate of Heaven. It's not imposable it happened a couple of times in OTL but with the MoH around it means someone eventually has to create a unified China.
I'm going to disagree. In some ways, Rome was more unified than China(not many, but some) and they still fell to pieces and languages branched off during the dark ages to create new ones. That's kind of what I'm looking for, the people of what we know as China considering themselves a seperate nation than China. For example, an explicitly Cantonese nation.

Granted, I'm no expert on China or it's history, but I believe that's a possibility.
 
You mean separate into new nations? That's sort of hard to do with the Mandate of Heaven. It's not imposable it happened a couple of times in OTL but with the MoH around it means someone eventually has to create a unified China.

by 100AD though the idea on the MoH would not have reached all of what is today considered the boarders of modern china. Could not imperial china have been rebuffed during its early years and been forced to let any nations on their boarders continue to exist and develop their own individual cultures?

not sure if an isolationist imperial china is ASB though
 
In my, view, what really made China China was Qin Shihuang, who used a lot of hard power to unify the nation and by extension, the culture. Otherwise I think China might've turned out like India is now, with no common language.
 
China does in fact get balkanized fairly often in AH, and, strangely, more often than India.

It gets balkanised fairly often *in the same way each time*. People keep reusing the "China gets broken down into European zones of control" idea. I don't recall seeing many other ways I've seen TLs break up China.
 

Typo

Banned
In my, view, what really made China China was Qin Shihuang, who used a lot of hard power to unify the nation and by extension, the culture. Otherwise I think China might've turned out like India is now, with no common language.
One man is -never- enough to steer history that much, the 600 years preceding unification consisted of Chinese states conquering non-Chinese people and by the 4th century BC were largely of the same ethinicality, their language, however, is largely unknown.

However, China south of the Yangtze was not settled by Chinese until something like the 3rd century AD.

If you believe Diamond's theory then China proper is geographically destined to stay unified more often than not.

Even during periods of disunification China proper never fragmented too much in terms of culture and ethnically, the last time long period of Balkanization China had was before the first unification.
 
An odd idea I had: An earlier Chinese analogue to Korea's King Sejong takes it upon himself to invent a new script as part of a "help the common people" thing. It's roughly analogous to hangul in that it is alphabetic rather than logographic, while being completely different in design (perhaps it will be influenced by alphabetic scripts known to the Chinese, such as Indian scripts). This is rejected of course by the Confucian elite, but during periods of Buddhist or Taoist dominance it is able to slowly spread.

This script is much better suited for common use with printing presses, so printed books become more popular. However, a side-effect is that this script causes a greater schism in the Sinitic dialects, as literature in the various Chinese vernacular are printed using this script. During periods of disunity, this causes the fracturing Chinese state to schism along linguistic lines. Later, this contributes to the formation of nationalism, perhaps encouraged by outside powers. That nationalism eventually sees the breakup of China along linguistic lines, so a number of new nations with new identities emerge in what we would call southern China, such as nation-states of Hakka, Guangdong, Wu, Min, Gan and Xiang speakers.
 
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