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What if the Great Jin failed to conquer all of China in the 12th century? I know it's difficult to save the broken and disorganized Southern Song, which collapsed into warring factions almost instantly, but what if a more prominent Song royal had managed to escape the fall of Dongjing and provide a more undisputed unifying force around which Song elements could have rallied? Southern China is a very rich land and a tough nut to crack when it is united, and the Jin managed to defeat Song through simple divide and conquer, playing the loose factions agsinst one another, attracting dissenting officials and scholars, sick of Song's ineffectuality and corruption, to their cause all along the way and providing from this a wellspring of talent to draw an effective bureaucracy from to rule all of China capably. Things could have gone very different if a surviving Song scion had rallied the generals and princes together and dug in a real defensive position. The real interesting thoughts come from the implications of a Southern and Northern Dynasties period in the next few centuries, just as the Buryaad were beginning to rise in Central Asia and just as the Jin Renaissance was beginning IOTL.
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