Isn't the culture more like: There were many attempts to violently force the political union of a large group of people for the ambitions of a warlord, but in the end, it never working out? The provinces have also always acted fairly independently, which is still the case today right?

AFAIK the culture is more like loyalty to your family and village, and "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away". Heck even the languages of china are mutually unintelligible. Maybe in the end, china should split up into several separate countries, like the khmer region split up into thailand, cambodia, laos and vietnam. Maybe it should be split up into beijing-land, shanghai-land, guangzhou-land, tibet and xinjiang-land.