Would a balkanized China be more amenable to industrialization?

Rex Mundi

Banned
Many discussions on the industrialization of Europe use China as a point of comparison; it seems to be fairly well accepted (to the extent that a proposition can be well accepted on online forums) that after a certain time, the hegemony of China failed to provide or even necessitate the impetus for technological progress that existed in Europe, as per the theory of the high level equilibrium trap. Chinese knowledge in a number of matters exceeded that of Europe for centuries, but ultimately began to advance at a slower pace.

Historically, the unification of the area now considered China took place in gradual steps, and faced reverses a number of times. Interrupting or removing this process would obviously lead to a large number of butterflies, but hypothetically speaking, would balkanizing China, and thereby providing a system of competition between various conflicting states, be enough to make a Chinese equivalent of the Industrial Revolution possible? Or were there natural/geographic factors unrelated to culture (e.g., the type of agriculture best suited to the land in China, or or the resources available without needing to resort to long-distance oceanic travel) that would make a Chinese industrialization that happens earlier than in Europe inherently unlikely?
 
It does face obstacles that Europe didn't, but balkanization and resulting competition ca help.

One problem I'd argue that China lacks the entry-level, intial uses of the steam engine. It has (in many administrations) an excellent set of internal waterways and canals, making the construction of railroads far less likely to be profitable; its textile industry is focused on silk at the high end, and at the low end there's not much profit in creating an expensive new machine to create garments that will mostly be of interest to poor peasants. They do mine, of course, and have the usual problems with flooding - but I'm under the impression mining employed a significantly smaller percentage of the workforce. It seems it would be very difficult to get rich building steam engines in China. Once you have electricity, it has all sorts of benefits, of course - but now they're playing catch-up to Europe (they're not going to discover many of the uses of electricity without the precedent of steam engines and the need to coordinate them).

A China balkanized shortly before electricity comes on the scene might see one state aggressively try to industrialize - but its objective will always be to reunify China under it. China has been a unitary state on paper far more than it has been separate, and its inhabitants regard its unity as natural and disunity as an aberration to be corrected.
 
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