Writing in The Atlantic, economics professor Patrick Chovanec borrows from one of my favorite books, Joel Garreau’s “The Nine Nations of North America”, and makes a similar analysis of China. While we in the West tend to think of China as an undifferentiated nation, China is an agglomeration of over fifty officially-recognized nationalities (sorry, most of the text at that link is in Chinese, but great pictures) and a variety of regions that were their own sovereign states at different points in history. Chovanec’s analysis looks at the regional divisions in modern China and comes up with a very interesting portrait.