There’s a map, first posted by the Atlantic Monthly this week, that’s been making the rounds. This interactive map, credited to Beijing-based academic Patrick Chovanec, explores China’s diversity by dividing the PRC into discrete “nations.” It’s an interesting project, especially because it shows how different regions have their own internal socioeconomic logic and that “China” as presently constructed, is very much just that…a construct of multiple cultural, linguistic, economic, and ethnic zones.
In fact, the project is so interesting it’s been done before.
Here is Chovanec’s map:
And here is a map created by historian and anthropologist G. William Skinner:
While Skinner’s research is a bit wonkish for non-specialists, anyone who has done graduate level studies in a China-related field has come across Skinner and his macroregions at some point. In The City in Late Imperial China (1977) Skinner argued that China could be understood as a set of nine macroregions: physiographically discrete regions with a distinct core and periphery wherein, in historical China, the majority of trade consisted of goods shipped between internal markets rather than sent out to other parts of the empire.
Professor Skinner and his team would later create a