Originally Posted by Deltacamelately

Fascinating topic: there is a very unreal sense in which China is the "last empire", but the indicators well suggest that sooner or later, China has to disintegrate. The division in China is already very great: the increasing wealth of the urban east and the grinding poverty of the rural population, while this may give rise to large social conflicts, 2000 years of history, marred by internal strifes, wars amongst waelords, varrying culture and present day communism and an iron grip over the common man give coherence to the recipe that makes political disintegration almost unstoppable.
The vast Western provinces: Tibet, Turkmenistan, Sinjiang are very un-Chinese and poor and empty, likewise Inner Mongolia. Tibet, incidentally has been vigourously "re-populated" by Han Chinese making it a perfect pressure cooker to prepare that recipe. To be sure, the Tibetans are very poor and very disillusioned that would surely make them secede.
Although "Communism" as a theoretical/philosophical construct is largely irrelevant now, the strong centarlised government and military are still vital: but the point to make is that change will occur altering borders, as it has been in the past, done repeatedly, with enormous bloodshed, over the last century.