> I suspect the only reason Chinese is categorized as a single language is ignorance and Eurocentrism.
Ignorance, perhaps, but not necessarily Eurocentrism. Viewing Chinese as a single language – often with Mandarin as a prestige "dialect" of it – is a common position of Han nationalists.
Attempts by some Western linguists to treat the Chinese varieties in a way that emphasizes their mutual unintelligibility and downplays the importance of the common writing system, have even been attacked by said Chinese nationalists as being "anti-China". It is very similar to how, decades ago, many Russians bristled at attempts by foreign scholars to view Ukrainian as a language in its own right, since their position was that Ukrainian and Belarusian are simply some aberrant or low-prestige forms of the Russian language.
Ignorance, perhaps, but not necessarily Eurocentrism. Viewing Chinese as a single language – often with Mandarin as a prestige "dialect" of it – is a common position of Han nationalists.
Attempts by some Western linguists to treat the Chinese varieties in a way that emphasizes their mutual unintelligibility and downplays the importance of the common writing system, have even been attacked by said Chinese nationalists as being "anti-China". It is very similar to how, decades ago, many Russians bristled at attempts by foreign scholars to view Ukrainian as a language in its own right, since their position was that Ukrainian and Belarusian are simply some aberrant or low-prestige forms of the Russian language.