> Fairly equivalently, why is Europe comprised of 44 countries but China is one country? Europe being composed of 44 sovereign countries is a relatively recent

> Fairly equivalently, why is Europe comprised of 44 countries but China is one country? Europe being composed of 44 sovereign countries is a relatively recent phenomenon - like mostly post WWI. For most of history these countries were under the dominion of larger empires. China did have much earlier centralization of government than other parts of the world, resulting in highly unified systems of administration, and most prominently, the shared logographic writing system. The administrative centralization of the past and present masks a lot of underlying diversity which persists to this day. However this centralization was also contrasted by periods of fragmentation, like the Sixteen Kingdoms period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Kingdoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Kingdoms