> No. China is a divided country today, if you believe the official view of both the P.R.C. and R.O.C. regimes about Taiwan as a territory of China > If one ac

> No. China is a divided country today, if you believe the official view of both the P.R.C. and R.O.C. regimes about Taiwan as a territory of China > If one accepts a Marxist framework of economic determinism, as many social scientists in China continue to do, the break-up of Yugoslavia was all but inevitable once regional economic disparities became as great as they were in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. I said "China proper," not "the current borders of China, including Taiwan and Tibet and all the other acquisitions over the years." I also said that China proper had a "tradition of unification," not "uninterrupted existence as a unified state." They may split apart from time to time, but they keep coming back together. I find it strange that you keep bringing up the "Marxist framework of economic determinism." The Marxists like to view the world through a narrow lens of economics and class struggle. This is not necessarily wrong -- but it doesn't give them the full picture. Slovenia and Croatia were not just the richest republics in Yugoslavia. They'd also been ruled by the Habsburgs for 400 years, used the Latin alphabet, and felt a greater affinity towards Western Europe than towards their brother Slavs. And as for economic determinism, why did every other Yugoslav republic also break away? Bosnia and Macedonia are quite close to Serbia in per-capita GDP. Yes, Yugoslavia had a 4-1 ratio in per-capita GDP among its constituent parts, and so does China. But so does Mexico. So does Brazil. So does India. If those countries haven't broken up, then clearly economics sometimes takes a back seat to other factors, like ethnicity and nationalism.