Every country puts a premium on political unification. Every country has fought internal wars to achieve it. China’s own internal unification effort is one of the world’s most heinous, stretching back across four millennia and dozens of discrete conflicts. The most recent major dustup—Mao’s Cultural Revolution—killed at least 40 million people, twenty-five times the number of Americans killed in all wars. The Chinese belief in the necessity of internal political violence, repression, and propaganda didn’t manifest out of nowhere, but is instead viewed as a necessary reality to avoid
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