Occasionally I chat with people about China, in comparison with Europe. Many view China as a political entity that managed to maintain its unity even as Europe split into a great many competing states, often engaged in warfare.
I think this picture is patently false.
Sure, Europe has sovereign states, separated by borders. And sure, Europe has a multitude of languages, different ethnicities. On the other hand, while the Roman Empire may have officially ceased to exist many centuries ago, its unifying influence did not vanish. On the contrary, Europe’s traditions, customs, institutions, legal systems and religion, languages and writing systems remain dominated by the continent’s Roman heritage. Come to think of it, my own name (Viktor) is a Latin word!
And it’s not like folks in China all speak the same language. Look at this amazing map that I just came across, showing the multitude of languages spoken in different regions of China:
So what about those devastating wars, then? Europe was, after all, at the center of two world wars just in the past century, and there were plenty of conflicts (e.g., Napoleon) in prior centuries as well.
Yet all these conflicts are dwarfed by some of the wars the Chinese waged among themselves in the past. Wars with millions, even tens of millions killed were not uncommon, at a time when there were far fewer people in the world to begin with than in the 20th century. Measured by the death toll relative to the size of the human population, the two world wars of the 20th century were minor skirmishes in comparison with conflicts like the Three Kingdoms War or the An Lushan Rebellion.
So perhaps there are more similarities between China and Europe than at first meets the eye. We must not let the concept of state borders (themselves a relatively modern invention, a product of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that established the modern concept of state sovereignty) mislead us.