Monday, March 18, AD 2024 10:08pm

How Many Countries Are There?

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Donald R. McClarey
Admin
Tuesday, October 29, AD 2013 5:41am

Brilliant!

Ben Franklin to James Wilson in the musical 1776 during the vote on independence:

“Every mapmaker in the world is waiting for your decision.”

In the same musical the comment about revolutions put into the mouth of Ben Franklin usually equally applies to new nations:

“Revolutions come into this world like bastard children, Mr. Dickinson – half improvised and half compromised.”

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, October 29, AD 2013 12:32pm

As for Communist China, they could easily break up and form five or six nations and return strips of land back to nations they took it from such as Korea and Mongolia.

What are these nations? Well there is East Turkestan, the brewing rebellious Muslim province that has no connection ethnically nor linguistically to the Han Chinese.

There is of course Tibet.

Tibet and Sinkiang are exceedingly low density territories. The slice of Sinkiang which is either predominantly Uighur or predominantly Kazakh has about 6 or 7 million people living in it. IIRC, Tibet has about three million inhabitants. There actually is no supralocal area where Mongols or Koreans constitute a majority. Less than 1% of the population of China lives in these ethnic minority zones.

About a third of the population does live outside the Mandarin language zone. Not sure whether the various dialects are coterminous with identity formations. Decentralization would certainly be a necessity there given the massive population, but not so sure the people on the ground would aspire to political fragmentation along the lines of Germany prior to 1870 (or 1806).

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