原文1 China accomplished the ultimate alchemy of statecraft: compressing the vast, chaotic distinctness of an empire into the singular identity of a nation.
The wisdom of the Chinese elite has been the realization that a landmass the size of Europe, containing a linguistic and climatic diversity equal to Europe’s, could not survive as a loose federation of tribes. It had to be forged into a monolith. While Europe fractured into nation-states based on language (France, Germany, Italy), the Chinese elite spent 2,000 years artificially constructing a single "Civilizational Nation." This was not a natural evolution, but a deliberate, top-down engineering project designed to overlay a unified software onto incompatible hardware.
The foundational genius of this project was the standardization of the written script by the Qin Dynasty (221 BC). In Europe, the written word followed the spoken word; when Latin dissolved, French and Spanish emerged as separate written languages, creating separate nations. The Chinese elite did the opposite: they enforced a logographic script that was independent of pronunciation. A merchant from Canton and a bureaucrat from Beijing could not speak to each other—their spoken languages were as different as Portuguese and Romanian—but they read the exact same characters. By severing the link between sound and meaning, the elite created a "virtual" shared identity that transcended the reality of mutually unintelligible dialects.