This unity could never be taken for granted: China has spent around half its history in varying degrees of division, which, in the light of the country’s size and diversity (far greater than that of Europe), is not surprising. As a result of its attachment to unity, China has largely escaped the intra-state wars that have scarred Europe’s history over many centuries, though its periods of disunity and fragmentation have often carried a very heavy cost in terms of war and famine, notably from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, when it was chronically divided.
