[seanmcdirmid]

The mountains are hit quickly. Take a train from Beijing to Guangzhou, and you are in mountains from Hubei on down (and even Hebei is mountainous in the north). In fact, this is China's major problem: it has too many mountains and not enough arable land (of course, they can and do terrace the mountains to grow things on).

Geography alone doesn't really explain China's early unification, since they had more barriers than Europe to deal with. My hunch is that it is more of a fluke in history that could have happened in Europe also (and did with the Romans).

[girzel]

Sure, I don't think it's a silver-bullet explanation, just one that you hear frequently. I still think it holds water, to a certain extent -- the central plains have continually been the cradle and heart of Chinese civilization. And one of China's most culturally fruitful periods, Warring States, occurred when even the central plain was fragmented, which would seem to uphold the theory of the article.

I think spread out over enough time, these pervasive environmental factors do have a real influence. You could see the unity of the Roman Empire as being Europe's fluke, and the disunity of the Warring States as being China's.

But again, it's really all speculative.

[SolaceQuantum]

If you look on the wikipedia page, a "true" unification of China as people identified as Chinese didn't occur until about the revolution in China, where it was necessary for a strong centralized government to control all of China. Beforehand it was more considered like warring states, each culture very distinct. Some of it still remains today.

[seanmcdirmid]

If that's the case, then China still isn't unified. The emperor was a strong central government, but, which is true even today, often "tian gao, haungdi yuan."

Warring state periods did occur during history, but stable and strong political unions were the norm in most of the dynasties.