I suppose the definition of China and Europe can be referring to either the cultural or political entity as a whole, although the definition can be interchangeable in some extent and not at all in some other extent.
So I agree that the arguement is leas useful in addressing the topic.
As what I interpret, the author of this thread is trying to ask about why China was a overall cultural continuity over the history, despite the vast variety of enthicity and territorial mass. Thus he is not focusing on political and administrative matters, although they also exert certain effect on culture. He may not define his question quite well so I may give some supplementary ideas according to my view.
The chinese was indeed culturally stable over the history, although social stability was not a norm. You are right on the country was facing uncountable uprising. But the uprising force, once they succeeded in establishing a government entity, they would continue to place the old chinese cultural values as moral standard. This is what makes the Chinese history interesting
The Mongolians, Manchurians and many other culturally distinct ethnicities in history adapted chinese culture and became assimilated, even if they were dominating in terms of military. The influence of chinese culture was strong and almost unshakable.
Okay, but my question is: how far does this describe the on-the-ground reality, and how much does this simply represent the idealised self-image of successive imperial elites? You say that "Chinese culture was unshakeable", but Chinese culture was neither monolithic nor uniform throughout history, even among the elite strata; you can't conflate the priorities and values of Tang aristocracy with the Song officialdom, for example. Confucian ideals were just that,
ideals, not realities; if they had been, Confucian scholars wouldn't have needed to spent two thousand years propounding them.
Consider that one of the cornerstones of Chinese culture are the "Four Classic Novels", noted for being written in an everyday vernacular rather than a high-falutin' literary style, and that none of the four are particularly Confucian in their themes.
Journey to the West deals with individual enlightentment,
Dream of the Red Chamber deals with romantic rivalry, and
Romance of the Three Kingdoms deals with heroic nobodies rising to greatness through wits and steel.
The Water Margin, above all, celebrates the rowdy egalitarianism of a band of rebels living on the margins of society, the very inverse of a good Confucian gentleman. In all four cases, some of the central relationships are horizontal, friendships between men of roughly equal generation and social standing, relationships which are absolutely secondary, but they form the core of as quintessentially Chinese a motif as the Oath of the Peach Garden. (It's hard to think of a stronger rebuke to Confucian filial piety than three non-relatives swearing to die on the same day, regardless of what their ancestors or descendants might think about it.) How do we square a Chinese culture drenched in Confucian values with one that is evidently, at the same time, fascinated by stories that run entirely against the Confucian grain?
Ultimately, this whole reductive, essentialist idea of what constitutes "China" falls apart, a long with a lot of other things in China, in 1911. If these "unshakeable" Confucian values are not filtered down from the state, but are maintained by individual family units over thousands of years, how is it that they are swept away in a few generations? What was special about this rebellion, about these warlords, about this civil war, that was able to so utterly dissolve a set of values and practices that had continued, we are told, without rupture since, what, the Bronze Age?
How much continuity (political/cultural/identity) has there been in China? Obviously the different dynasties present clear breaks, but did some underlying system survive these? It was mentioned on the previous page that the concept of 'China' is a 20th century one, but was there not an idea of the "Mandate of the Heaven" going back way further to tie different periods into one narrative?
It's not really clear that the "Mandate of Heaven" meant the same thing throughout Chinese history. It's hardly as if the Chinese were the only people to imagine political power as having divine sponsors, certainly when power was framed in terms of universal authority. It's a pretty constant theme across Eurasia for most of recorded history; early modern Europe is really pretty unusual in that everyone came to just sort of agree that power was bounded into territoriality-specific units, and even then you had dissenters like the Corsican Devil. Successive dynasties gave it more or less weight, and interpreted it in different terms, and it's not really clear that it ever really played a central role in legitimising regimes or encouraging regime change, so much as it did in allowing historians to explain regime-changes after the fact. Whether literally, by taking the Mandate of Heaven as an actual Thing, or by framing this as something that Chinese people have all believed since forever. About the one consistent rule is that it matters most when a regime is feeling insecure- when it's new on the scene, or on its way out- and start investing a lot of energy into reminding people that "look, Heaven says I'm in charge, okay?", which rather undermines the idea that it's just a persistent aspect of Chinese culture.
How much of the idea "Europe has lots of diverse politics, China is a single big one" stems from propaganda? A quick walk through the Chinese National Museum in Tiananmen square makes it clear that the communist party wants you to know that China has always been unified, any time they weren't was a temporary aberration. Popular european history, however, tends to emphasis the modern nation state as being the unit as the fundamental unit. Are these only very modern views, or has the dichotomy existed historically for much longer? If the latter, is the fact that China has been able to impose this perspective of history itself evidence that it was, periodically at least, politically unified?
That's definitely a huge part of it, but it's not just propaganda of the Communist Party. Successive regimes have developing, refining and narrowing the idea of what it means for "China" to be "unified", from a Han era in which it simply meant that the entire civilised world paid homage to the Emperor, to the modern era where it's framed in specifically national (and nationalistic) terms. It particularly picks up speed from the Song onwards, when you get the emergence of a set of institutions which survive, with a few knocks, right down to 1911, but which are increasingly defining themselves against foreign rulers, or alternatively having to rationalise their subordination to those foreign rulers- sometimes both at once, as in the nineteenth century. The whole thing becomes easier to swallow if history can be seen to revolve around a clearly defined ethnic and territorial unit, rather than just a vague area in the middle where all the best people happen to live.