WI: "Balkanized" China

Balkanized China gets put in quotations because I'm not looking to forever split China apart. My other PoD is around 1000 A.D., so from then on for maybe 200 years, is there any way anyone can think of to split China into quite a few states somewhat similar to say India or Europe? This isn't a permanent thing, some polities might emerge and fall and eventually I imagine one state will emerge and conquer the whole region again. But for a longer period than China was mostly left disunited and for a period long enough that local state differences might be exaggerated compared to OTL (such as perhaps, Cantonese speakers or Hakka speakers creating a bit more of a distinct Han > Hakka nationality/sub-ethnicity kind of thing w/e).

My aim here is mostly just out of interest of seeing another Warring States-type period to romanticize about but in the more "modern" post-1000 era. However, I am fairly intrigued by comments on here and elsewhere about the development of Chinese technology etc. A lot of the stagnation that happened to China in the later Ming and later Qing dynasties I have noticed has been blamed on the unity of the Chinese Empire; insofar that small states aren't forced to compete against each other and China has tons of natural resources (and the two big river valleys as well I guess). So no real incentive to either go out and conquer or compete with each other to advance.

I'm not sure how true or relevant that is, but let's say we use someone's PoD to temporarily "balkanize" between several dynasties all claiming to be Emperor of China, so they're out warring against each other, would China be able to avoid more of the technological stagnation we saw IOTL?
 
How balkanized do you want? China was already split into multiple states in this period - Song, Liao (replaced by the Jin in 1115), and Xia.
 
How balkanized do you want? China was already split into multiple states in this period - Song, Liao (replaced by the Jin in 1115), and Xia.

True enough, and during the collapse of the Ming and Qing they had plenty of petty warlords and provincial governors controlling vast swaths of territory independent of any central authority. For much of its history China has been balkanized arguably but it's always come together.

More than just split apart I guess, I just want to delay any central authority within a Chinese Empire for much longer than OTL. Something like the Three Kingdoms: with many small statelets, mostly Han but obviously the odd ethnic state (Dali maybe, Manchuria or something in the future). The point isn't to make it so no China can form in the future, but merely to give the grounds that many people on here have called for: many smaller Chinese statelets forced to compete to control the empire, but unlike IOTL delaying eventual unification or conquering by a few hundred years (even longer than the Warring States, and with no Qing at the end). I could tolerate I guess then, a Southern Song type polity that splits off eventually if Mongols are still around but no Yuan Dynasty or anything (deal with Mongols later, just pointing out the main thing here is to keep China disunited for longer, but not forever).

I suppose most importantly though, I want this period to have a lasting effect on Chinese politics and regionalism in China. So some of these balkan-Chinese states have to be strong enough to remain in cultural memory.
 
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