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?