Why are there dozens of stupid Chinese dialects?

Yes and no.

The Chinese see society as made up of nodes that link together via various relationships. However, the relationships are where the ontological foundation comes from, not the nodes. A man with no relationships is less real than a man with many. The result of this is that there isn't really an impetus to enforce a standardized language at the expense of others. Why? Because speaking to your boss in Mandarin is one kind of relationship, but speaking to him in Yue is another. In Mandarin, you might kowtow and defer and suck hsi wiener, but in Yue you'll be honest. These are tools, and you want many in your toolbox.

China has always had a court language, it's just that China has never had a reason to prevent people from speaking local gobbledeasiatic. This is heightened by the fact that, in order to ensure loyalty, provinces were never governed by the locals, but villages were governed by village elders. Thus, dialects are actually a source of stability because the locals get what they want (to live however the frick what they want with the government helping solve problems on their terms) and the government gets what it wants (the peasants to pay taxes and not rebel).

The map also is a bit misleading as Mandarin is spoked across the entirety of China, with the only place that it really isn't being patches of Tibet because the Han, like everyone who isn't a fricking Himalayan, cannot live at those altitudes. Rather, the question is "where are dialects spoken, and in what intensities, IN ADDITION to Mandarin".

clay pots instead of flags

Basically this
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_state

tl;dr China as a state is not based on Nationality nor even ideology as it likes claiming, but based on the civilization their people created and adherence to that civilization.

>Most Chinese peasants were illiterate.
True because the Chinese writing system is fricking ridiculous but any peasants that got any sort of savings got that confucian education if at all possible because it was their only hope of advancing their position in society. Besides, it just means that it was whatever minor clerks and government officials in town could communicate through writing if necessary; most peasants would just talk to each other through the language difference since neighboring dialects tended to be similar enough to be mutually intelligible.

It’s not a chud, it’s a seething midget shitskin poo that spams anti China shit in every Asian thread for some reason

>extremely minor
top kek
try talking to someone from kyushu or tohoku in their local dialect mr. big brain and tell me how that works for you. I think people somewhat try to overplay it to make it a parallel to the situation in China where they artificially lump a bunch of languages together as dialects for political reasons, but don't go too far and minimize the divergences in traditional dialects.
Well there's also the problem that nowadays you get dialects of the standard language that only retain a few aspects of the old dialect.
a good example of the dude you replied tos point would be the Ryukuan languages (NOT the dialect of standard Japanese spoken there) which were classified as dialects of Japanese despite the fact that they are not mutually intelligible by any means and are better described as cousin languages.

>Manchu
>Visible in the Map
Literally only 15 or 20 fricking people- all Chinese linguistic professors- speak Manchu nowadays.

The 15 million Manchu population are all Mandarin Speakers of the Dongbei Dialects.

that map is moronic, like Inner Mongolia is 70-75% ethnically Han Chinese
it's useful in the sense of having an idea of where those non-Mandarin languages were spoken but it's in no way reflective of the situation on the ground