> the roman territorial conquest for the most part finished with augustus in 27 bc.  and the empire started collapsing after the antonine plague in 165 ad, so that was less than 200 years. compare that to ancient china > this is not at all true. the centralization of power in the hands of the emperor started way earlier with augustus. nowhere to the extent that the later eastern empires did. augustus had an enormous amount of power because the roman empire at that time was also enormously powerful - while the later eastern empire was weaker in absolute terms, the position of the emperor went from the principate to the dominate, and this coincides with the power shift from the european west to the non-european east > because to the ancient chinese the concept of 'china' simply didn't exist. the only thing that did exist was the divine mandate.  we have evidence of the ancient chinese language going back thousands of years, its one of the best preserved languages in its written form. china did not have decentralized duchies but rather a centralized bureaucracy, this would not have been possible without a common han ethnolinguistic culture, at a minimum as extensive as the greco-roman cultural bloc but likely much stronger given the emphasis the chinese placed on education
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