为什么中国不断大一统，欧洲则保持了政治分裂状态？
Why did China repeatedly re-unify while Europe remained politically fragmented?
译文简介
我是一名日本历史爱好者。最近，我正在看一部纪录片
正文翻译
I am a Japanese history enthusiast. Recently, I was watching a documentary explaining that the early Habsburg domains were located near the Rhine–Danube watershed, a strategic area for trade and transport. That led me to learn about the completion of the Main–Danube Canal in 1992, which required significant engineering to overcome elevation differences and also long-term political cooperation among European states.
While reading about this, I realized that China had already constructed large-scale canal systems lixing major river basins more than a millennium earlier (for example, the Sui–Tang Grand Canal in the 7th century). This made me wonder whether there is a deeper structural difference behind these developments.
我是一名日本历史爱好者。最近，我正在看一部纪录片，其中解释了哈布斯堡家族早期的领地位于莱茵河—多瑙河分水岭附近，那是贸易和交通的战略要地。这促使我了解了 1992 年完工的美因河—多瑙河运河，该工程需要高超的工程技术来克服海拔差异，同时也需要欧洲各国之间长期的政治合作。
在阅读相关资料时，我意识到中国早在 1000 多年前就已经建造了连接主要河流流域的大规模运河系统（例如 7 世纪的隋唐大运河）。这让我不禁思考，在这些发展背后是否存在更深层次的结构性差异。
Why did large-scale political reunification repeatedly occur in China — for example after the Warring States period (Qin–Han), after the Three Kingdoms and Northern–Southern dynasties, and again with the Sui–Tang reunification — whereas post-Roman Europe did not re-establish comparable long-term political unity? Instead, Europe developed a system of multiple competing states and balance-of-power politics.
Some possible explanatory factors I have encountered include:
为什么中国一再出现大规模的政治统一——例如战国时代之后的秦汉统一、三国和南北朝之后的隋唐统一——而罗马帝国之后的欧洲却未能重新建立起类似的长期政治统一？相反，欧洲发展出了一种多国竞争和权力制衡的政治体系。
Some possible explanatory factors I have encountered include:
The geography of the North China plain compared to Europe’s mountains, peninsulas, and divided river systems
Persistent steppe military pressure on northern China
Bureaucratic continuity in China, including standardized written administration
The evolution of vernacular languages and decentralized feudal structures in Europe
我所接触到的一些可能的解释因素包括：
华北平原的地理环境：与欧洲多山、多半岛且河流系统破碎的地理特征进行对比。
持续的草原军事压力：对中国北方构成的外部威胁。
中国的官僚连续性：包括标准化的书面行政体系。
欧洲方言的演变与去中心化的封建结构。
Europe also shared a common Christian religious culture and Latin intellectual tradition. Why did this not produce comparable political reunification?
I am not asking which society is superior. I am trying to understand why these two different political trajectories emerged, and whether historians identify key turning points where the outcome might have been different.
欧洲同样拥有共同的基督教宗教文化和拉丁语知识传统。为什么这没有产生类似的政治统一？
我并不是在问哪种社会更优越。我试图理解为什么会出现这两种不同的政治发展轨迹，以及历史学家是否确定了某些可能导致不同结果的关键转折点。
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I'd like to briefly add to the answers graciously lixed by u/Pyr1t3_Radio by noting that if we look at the period from the fall of Han to the Mongol conquest in the 13th century, what we see is less a process of fragmentation and reunification and arguably more of a growing pattern of north-south division punctuated by larger imperial formations. Now, to preface, I'd stress that a large part of the argument here is built on work by Sanping Chen, D. Jonathan Felt, and Andrew Chittick that is contentious within the field of medi Chinese history, but which, at least in terms of the nature of the argument, fits into broader trends in the scholarship on later periods.
我想简要补充一下 u/Pyr1t3_Radio 所提供的精彩链接中的答案：如果我们观察从汉朝覆灭到 13 世纪蒙古征服这一时期，我们看到的与其说是碎片化与重新统一的过程，倒不如说是一种日益增强的南北对峙模式，其间穿插着更大规模的帝国架构。
首先，我要强调，这里的很大一部分论点是建立在陈三平（Sanping Chen）、费仲安（D. Jonathan Felt）和安舟（Andrew Chittick）的研究基础之上的。这些观点在中国中世纪史领域尚存争议，但就论证性质而言，它们符合后期学术研究中更广泛的趋势。
Here I use a more expansive form of the 'Northern and Southern Period' as employed by Mark Edward Lewis, which encompasses everything from the de facto collapse of the Han Empire ca. 200 CE to the Sui conquest of Chen in 589, during which what had been the territory of the Han split largely into two broad zones: a northern region where, especially after the collapse of Western jin in the early 300s, Turkic and Mongolic elites (particularly the Tabgatch/Tuoba and Sarbi/xianbei) ruled over majority Han populations; and a southern region where Han settler-colonists mingled with existing indigenous groups. Chen argues that the northern region should be seen as consisting in the main as a Sino-Sarbi Empire (Felt agrees for the most part but prefers 'Tabgatch Empire' before 528) with a succession of ruling houses, Chittick suggests that the main succession of southern states (comprising Wu, Eastern jin, Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang, and Chen) should be dubbed a singular 'Jiankang Empire' (after Jiankang, the old name for Nanjing, which generally served as these states' capital.)
在这里，我采纳了马克·爱德华·刘易斯（Mark Edward Lewis）所使用的更广义的“南北朝”定义，即涵盖了从公元 200 年左右汉帝国事实上的崩溃，到 589 年隋灭陈为止的全部时期。在此期间，原汉朝疆域大致分裂为两大地带：
北方地区：特别是在 4 世纪初西晋崩溃后，突厥和蒙古裔精英（尤其是拓跋部和鲜卑人）统治着汉族占多数的人口。
南方地区：汉族定居殖民者与当地土著群体混居。
陈三平主张北方地区应被视为一个以鲜卑-华夏（Sino-Sarbi）为主体的帝国（费仲安在很大程度上表示认同，但在 528 年之前更倾向于使用“拓跋帝国”一词）；齐思敏（Chittick）则建议将南方诸政权（包括吴、东晋、刘宋、南齐、南梁和南陈）统称为一个单一的“建康帝国”（得名于南京的旧称建康，该地通常作为这些国家的都城）。
In Felt's model, these were diverging state lineages in which notionally Han cores increasingly adapted in proximity to non-Han neighbours, particularly in the realm of political culture. The flourishing of Chinese elite customs among the Tabgatch and Sarbi should not disguise the continued orientation of these polities towards the steppe, while Chittick argues that the Jiankang states acted in ways that much more strongly resemble the ruling strategies of Southeast Asian polities. States either side of the Yangtze responded to very different kinds of pressures moving in very different directions.
在费仲安（Felt）的模型中，这些是不断演变的国家谱系，其名义上的汉文化核心在与非汉族邻居的接触中日益产生适应性变化，尤其是在政治文化领域。拓跋和鲜卑精英阶层中汉式习俗的兴盛，不应掩盖这些政权持续向草原转型的导向；而齐思敏（Chittick）则认为，建康政权的行为模式与东南亚政权的统治策略更为相似。长江两岸的国家应对着截然不同的压力，并朝着完全不同的方向演进。
What changed were the Sui and Tang conquests. Both empires' ruling families came from the same culturally and ethnically mixed frontier milieu on the fringes of the Tabgatch/Sarbi imperial zone. The Sui usurped the leading northern state and then conquered the south; the Tang usurped the Sui. While these empires frxd the northern conquest of the south as reunification after chaos, in so doing they were trying to rewrite history: the southern empires were prosperous, generally stable states; they had expanded their reach far beyond what had been Han control (making the 're' part of 'reunification' a bit questionable), and they had – to Chittick anyway – never seen themselves as contenders for hegemony over an imagined unified empire. However, the Sui-Tang hegemony brought the south back into the orbit of the north, but this was a north that had been profoundly reshaped by its encounters with the steppe compared to what it had been in 200.
改变这一切的是隋朝和唐朝的征服。这两个帝国的统治家族都来自拓跋/鲜卑帝国边缘地带，处于那种文化和民族融合的边境环境。隋朝篡夺了北方主要政权的权力并征服了南方；唐朝则篡夺了隋朝。
虽然这些帝国将北方对南方的征服描绘成乱世后的“统一”，但这样做其实是在试图重写历史：南方的帝国曾是繁荣且普遍稳定的国家；它们的势力范围早已扩张到了汉朝控制区以外（这使得“统一”中的“重新”二字存疑），而且——至少在齐思敏看来——它们从未将自己视为争夺一个虚构的统一帝国霸权的竞争者。
然而，隋唐的霸权将南方重新带回了北方的轨道，但此时的北方，与公元 200 年时相比，已经因为与草原的接触而发生了深刻的重塑。
But then the Tang collapsed and fragmented, and after about sixty years of contest between both successors within the imperial realm and polities on its fringes, the Song Empire emerged as the clear hegemon, holding most of both the former Tabgatch and Jiankang realms, but not all. Nicolas Tackett has argued that even the early Song had begun to develop a sense of a more limited construction of the ideal shape of the empire owing to its relationship with the Khitan state of Liao. Unlike the more expansive, steppe-oriented Tang, the Song empire moved towards something more insular, resembling a kind of incipient nationhood. Yet the collapse of Northern Song in the face of the Jurchen onslaught at the beginning of the 12th century again created a north-south split, albeit with Southern Song being much more firmly Sinitic than the Jiankang states.
但随后唐朝崩溃瓦解，在帝国疆域内的继承者与边缘政权之间进行了约六十年的竞争之后，宋帝国作为明显的霸主崛起，占据了原拓跋帝国和建康帝国的大部分领土，但并非全部。
尼古拉斯·塔克特认为，由于宋朝与契丹辽国的关系，即便是早期的宋朝也已经开始对帝国理想版图产生一种更有限的构建感。与更具扩张性、面向草原的唐朝不同，宋帝国转向了某种更内敛的模式，类似于一种初期的民族国家（nationhood）。然而，12 世纪初北宋在女真人的猛攻下崩溃，再次造成了南北分裂，尽管南宋在华夏化程度上比之前的“建康诸国”要稳固得多。
The Jurchen jin empire in the north and the Han Chinese Song empire in the south developed specific legal terminologies to distinguish each other's peoples, in a process that Mark Elliott regards as potentially having implications for ethnicity. Critically, this status division continued under Mongol rule: the Yuan may have theoretically re-established a united China, but it used distinct terminologies for former jin subjects, who were called Hanren (Han people) regardless of their actual languages and customs, and former Song subjects, who were called Nanren (southern people). It was, perhaps, only under the Ming that the conceptual division between north and south was firmly and definitively erased. However, unlike the Song, the Ming empire was one that was much more universalist in its ambitions, as demonstrated by David Robinson: its desire to usurp the full scope of the old Mongol mantle may not have been matched by its ability, but that ambition remained there.
北方的女真金朝与南方的汉人宋朝发展出了特定的法律术语来区分彼此的民众，马克·欧立德认为这一过程可能对族群认同产生了深远影响。
至关重要的一点是，这种身份划分在蒙古统治下得以延续：元朝在理论上可能重新建立了统一的中国，但它对原金朝臣民（无论其真实语言和习俗如何，均被称为“汉人”）和原宋朝臣民（被称为“南人”）使用了不同的术语。
或许直到明朝，南北之间这种观念上的隔阂才被坚定且最终地消除。然而，与宋朝不同，明帝国在雄心壮志上更具普世主义色彩，正如大卫·鲁滨逊（David Robinson）所论证的：明朝想要全面继承旧蒙古帝国衣钵的“欲望”或许与其“能力”并不匹配，但那种雄心始终存在。
What I hope I've illustrated is that perhaps it is not useful to think of the period between the Han and the Ming as the repeated reunification of a natural geographical-political unit. Rather, what happened was the emergence of two distinct regions which were occasionally brought under a kind of personal unx: a northern region that was consistently shaped by its proximity and vulnerability to the steppe; and a southern region that was shaped by its insulation from it, in the early period by adapting to a more Southeast Asian milieu, and in the later period by becoming a self-conscious bastion of putatively 'unspoilt' Chinese civilisation.
我希望我已经说明了这一点：或许将汉朝到明朝之间的这段时期，视为一个自然地理-政治单元的反复统一，并不是一种有效的思考方式。相反，实际发生的是两个截然不同区域的兴起，它们只是偶尔被置于某种君合统治之下：
北方地区：因其邻近草原并易受攻击，其发展始终受到这种地理关系的塑造；
南方地区：其特征则源于对草原的隔离。在早期，它通过适应更接近东南亚的环境而形成；在后期，它则成了一个自觉的、维护所谓“纯正”华夏文明的堡垒。