Currently, I'm listening to the History of Rome Podcast, and this thought came up.
From my limited knowledge, China also has a wide variety of languages, or at least versions of the Chinese language. How does this compare to the various languages of Europe?
In addition to this, how is it that China became united more often than Europe? With the possible exception of the Roman period, Europe has tended to stay divided among nation states throughout it's history, while all or most of China has frequently fallen under one state.
My knowledge in both of these areas, but especially China, are very limited, so feel free to correct any misconceptions I have.
This is a very interesting question, which from what I can gather, doesn't have a universally accepted answers. Some argues that it has to do with how China, as in the Qin empire, emerged prosperous out of a bloody civil war due to its adoption of technologies and philosophies(such as legalism) which made it, and its successor states more prepared for centralist rule. One case can also be made concerning the chinese mindset. Even to this day, the mythological yellow emperor, said to have ruled all of china, and lived somewhere around 2600 BC is said to be the ancestor of all Chinese. The idea of a unified China is clearly older than the Qin empire.
There's lots to about the subject matter, and it's very interesting. I'm sorry I couldn't provide you with the clear answer you wanted, though.
How is it that China became united more often than Europe?
The main reasoning is that Europe and China are geographically very different even though they may look similar on the map in size.
In contrast to Europe, China is a very closed off country geographically by mountains and deserts. Chinese civilization started near the Yellow River in the North China plains. This area of China is the only region where it's largely flat.
Overtime, the North China plains became the political and cultural center of Chinese civilization. All talent and major trade was driven to this region. If you look at the density map of China today, you would see the majority of the population is in this area, and to unite them all under one ruler wouldn't be a huge issue in terms of geographical challenges.
Looking at how important the North China plains were in projecting power and culture to its surrounding areas, you can see it as what the Mediterranean Sea is to Europe. In that sense, uniting the Mediterranean sea and its surrounding lands would prove quite challenging compared to uniting the North China plains.
Source: The Overseas Chinese by Wang Gungwu.
China also has a wide variety of languages, or at least versions of the Chinese language. How does this compare to the various languages of Europe?
China has a lot of dialects, which can be as different with each other as European languages. However, these dialects use the Chinese script for writing. Yet, the European languages use the Latin script for writing. However, the Chinese language does not use an alphabet, with each Chinese character representing not how one would pronounce the character, but rather just the meaning itself. Thus, the many Chinese dialects utilize the same Chinese characters, whereas the European languages all have different written languages due to the need for the latin script to represent pronunciation rather than meaning. The written Chinese and spoken Chinese thus have a very loose connection, whereas European languages require a very tight connection.
Source: The Languages of China by Robert Ramsey.