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Originally Posted by Marcus H.
This might be off-topic, but I wonder what would happen if China, like Russia, gets divided into five or so nations...
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This is the wet dream of some of China's neighboring countries. They are scared of the historical and current political unity of the Chinese peoples because it makes for a powerful, hegemonic state, and so would like to see China in more bite-sized chunks.
Unlike the USSR, of which about 25% of the population was not of the Rus' culture (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus) and 50% non-Russian, China proper is not so easily divided. In China currently 8% of the populace are not Han Chinese. The first step obviously would be to take off Xinjiang and Tibet, which would create two new countries. Then you could give Yanbian prefecture, populated by a plurality of Koreans, to the DPRK, or, since the DPRK is BS, make it a ROK exclave. Stretching things further, take the Guangxi Zhuang region and make it independent. Then take Yunnan, which contains 27 of China's 56 ethnic groups, and make it into a tribal confederation thing. But what then? Even after all this, you would have only taken off about 100-125 million of China's 1300 million and only marginally affected its geography.
EDIT: I suppose over an extended period of time you could nurture a separatist sentiment in the unintelligible dialect-speaking parts of China like Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, and stuff, but it would require first destroying the locals' conception of themselves being just as Chinese as the northern, Mandarin speaking peoples. Remember that Cantonese is and was considered to be a proper Chinese dialect and was almost chosen over Mandarin to be the national language when the ROC was created.