China is an interesting case in world history. Although its inhabitants speak many mutually unintelligible dialects and full-blown separate languages, it has been unified by a national culture, pretty much ever sine the Han dynasty, and its bouts of fragmentation never led to "national" states along linguistic lines, as in Europe. It has always had a "Mandate of "Heaven that legitim When was the latest time that China could've fragmented into proto-national states, without any conception of chinese broader unity strong than its weak European equivalent.