Okay -- that makes sense. And I also that another underlying cause may also be pre-existing administrative structures, which in turn are related to geographical funneling.
Those all seem like appropriate effects.
I still think that regional distinctions among the Han should be represented by different cultural groups (I don't know if you were disputing that). I realize that intellectual frameworks like "All under Heaven" are important, but I find it hard to believe that you can have a territory as huge and linguistically diverse as China without some impact on politics and the ability of local statelets to be stable, for at least a little while.
In France, for what it's worth, I think that most local separatist resistance -- such as it was -- was justified by pre-existing feudal arrangements, which don't exist in China. But mostly the impact of local identify, as far as can be traced, is that the region was more restive. In the 14th century, for example, Brittany maintained a claim to independence, but rebellions in Languedoc were mostly objecting to the quality of rule of the dukes appointed as regional governors, not the idea that the throne of France should rule them at all.
I would also point out from having spent years in two countries undergoing power vacuums -- Egypt and Iraq -- that regional identities that are heavily sublimated in times of peace and plenty can come boiling to the surface in time of turmoil. Often it's not so much a question of XXX for the XXXis, as it is "Those YYYish bastards in the capital are making a mess of things, and we'll just hold our own here in XXX until they get a better government."
So, while both language and China's regional cleavage lines (such as they were) may stem from the same root cause, I'd be very surprised if they didn't reinforce each other.
In other words, I'd like the game to model China's Han linguistic divisions as such linguistic divisions would be modeled anywhere in the world, and then have them mitigated by special Chinese national ideas, rather than have China come pre-homogenized.
China's unifying written language should not trump the difference in dialects. Wiki's article on standard Chinese mentions consistent difficulties that even the educated elites of the provinces had in making themselves understood in the capital. It is also not unique. The Arab world has a standard written language but very different spoken languages. Sixteenth-century missionaries in China explicitly compared the language of the Chinese court to Latin, as a pan-regional official language.
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