China is a place of many ethnicities and cultures, right? How are different dynasties able to unite China under centralized rule throughout its history yet the Roman Empire easily fragmented into nations after its fall?

by bluerobot27

Why is China always united by several dynasties throughout its history when no one in Europe was able to recreate the former Western and Eastern Roman Empires at their height?

ParallelPain

China always united by several dynasties

This is false, even in a limited sense of counting only "China proper". It was talked about here. And I've gone into a bit of detail in the /r/badhistory thread here.

If you take a look at the timeline I made for that thread here you can see even just China proper had multiple incredibly long periods of division.

However, as I said in the previous /r/Askhistorians thread above, while Chinese unification is vastly overstated, it's still more unified than Europe, especially in the last 700 years or so. I hope a proper expert can go into why this is the case, as all I have are theories.