[tokenadult]

Social scientists in China, trained as so many of them were in a Marxist framework, are actually very frightened by the example of Yugoslavia. Regional economic disparities in China are even greater than those in Yugoslavia before Yugoslavia disintegrated. Maybe Chinese people are very different in general from Western people (but the Chinese people I know best aren't all entirely different from people elsewhere in the world), but if Marxist theory about how the masses respond to economic circumstances is at all correct, the central government of China has something to worry about.

As another participant point out in another recent HN thread, China has a long historical experience with regional splits and loss of authority by the central government. To speak of China as having a 3,000 year history (as one entity) is hardly more accurate than to speak of Rome (the empire) as having a 2,500 year history. There is some cultural continuity from the very beginning in both cases, but twentieth century Chinese history was full of years of regional warlords and a very prolonged major civil war (which arguably hasn't ended yet).