Ok, how would you see china breaking apart? I'm going into this under two main assumptions, that it will be based off ethnicity - and that it will be based off dialect. So as a result, I am assuming mainly for southern china (with exceptions, see Hainan) that the southern sinitic languages will largely form coherent nations, like Canton.
Now, what about Mandarin? Mandarin is being promoted as a common language but there is still a weak mutual intelligibility between some mandarin dialects (see: Siuchanese vs Beijing dialect). How 'natural' is the classification of Mandarin chinese as a natural language, and how much of this is political wanking by the central chinese government to say 'we're a single nation when we're as diverse as the European countries really'. Given the saying that a language is a dialect with an army + navy (e.g. the 'political wanking' example) how true is it that mandarin is more mutually intelligible than hokkien or wu or whatever?
There is the same with the concept of the Han ethnicity in China, like 90% of the population is Han...but as affirmative actions for Manchus and whatnot happens (and cultural reawakening), Hans reclassify themselves as Manchurian and tre to re-learn their old languages. There are also arguments over which subgroups are Han chinese and which are not. How organic is the concept of Han chinese, and how much of this is simply 'we have a long tradition of pretending to be one ethnic group and successive governments pretend we're one single ethnic group and we're happy enjoying our Han priviledge so we don't care about pretendint to be sooo close and similar - oh look affirmative action I have a Manchurian grandfather and a great-aunt of mine is Hui

' type logic?)
Or just the government classifying people as 'han' due to.....other reasons.
I am aware my assumptions of balkanization are limited, and apparently there is a sort of provincial pride/nationalism - even if the borders of the provinces were set by the old imperial government to suppress self-determination - similar to borders set by Colonialists in Arab and African countries, but I assume the PRC reset the borders to be more natural, fitting with the influence of the USSR's titular nationality program - even if it was far from fully implemented.