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> No. China is a divided country today, if you believe the official view of both the P.R.C. and R.O.C. regimes about Taiwan as a territory of China

> If one accepts a Marxist framework of economic determinism, as many social scientists in China continue to do, the break-up of Yugoslavia was all but inevitable once regional economic disparities became as great as they were in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

I said "China proper," not "the current borders of China, including Taiwan and Tibet and all the other acquisitions over the years."

I also said that China proper had a "tradition of unification," not "uninterrupted existence as a unified state." They may split apart from time to time, but they keep coming back together.

I find it strange that you keep bringing up the "Marxist framework of economic determinism." The Marxists like to view the world through a narrow lens of economics and class struggle. This is not necessarily wrong -- but it doesn't give them the full picture.

Slovenia and Croatia were not just the richest republics in Yugoslavia. They'd also been ruled by the Habsburgs for 400 years, used the Latin alphabet, and felt a greater affinity towards Western Europe than towards their brother Slavs. And as for economic determinism, why did every other Yugoslav republic also break away? Bosnia and Macedonia are quite close to Serbia in per-capita GDP.

Yes, Yugoslavia had a 4-1 ratio in per-capita GDP among its constituent parts, and so does China. But so does Mexico. So does Brazil. So does India. If those countries haven't broken up, then clearly economics sometimes takes a back seat to other factors, like ethnicity and nationalism.

You don't have to have economics taking a back seat to recognize that per capita income levels are not the only economic statistic. Most likely at a very localized level the issues of nationalism and ethnicity manifest themselves in the graphs of networks of daily commercial and noncommercial interactions.

Other social sciences have valuable insight into the dynamics of breakups, but I don't think it is accurate to think that economics would only be concerning with difference in per capita income of different regions.

Bad comparison because squabbling in China is more like between brothers in that they are trying to gain power over the family, and not trying to break away from it. Chinese Nationalism is probably as strong now as ever, and I think the chances of breakup among the core provinces that aren't already independent are very low.

> But regional economic disparities in China are now greater, and not least in the large swaths of territory that historically have been part of Tibet and eastern Turkestan.

if that's an example of regional tensions, it's a bad one; because there's also ethnic tensions involved. 3 million ethnic Tibetans in Tibet, and about 14 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and so on in Xinjiang (living with 8 million Han - it's pretty much colonised now) won't overthrow the 1.2 billion Han.

There's so few minorities that China can afford to bribe them a lot (relaxed one child policy, reserved university places, reserved jobs - which partly makes up for the discrimination they face), and send in the troops if necessary. There still is a lot of tension on both sides, but a country the size of China isn't going to let a vast swarth of territory (with all its mineral / petrochemical wealth) go over it.

It would be better to talk about Hukou (social services linked to city of origin). Or maybe regional divides within Han China.

But the divide between rural and city people has often been a bigger deal (to >90% of Chinese) than ethnicity. Farmers starved in the Great Leap. City folk were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. Farmers now struggle to get their kids educated, while they work the undesirable jobs in cities.

Totally agree. When I lived their in 2005/06, I spent a bunch of time traveling and when I went to Xinjiang, I can only describe what I saw as an occupied country with a thin veneer of unification. Xinjiang has nothing to do with Eastern china. I've heard that Tibet is the same. By land mass, these two areas along constitute a huge portion of China. There have been many migrations into their two provinces by Easterners, who are mostly Han Chinese. Personally, I would describe what's happening in Xiajiang and Tibet as "ethnic cleansing by dilution".