Provinces of China
The Republic of China, established in 1912, set up four more provinces in Inner Mongolia and two provinces in historic Tibet, bringing the total to 28. In 1931, Ma Zhongying established Hexi in the northern parts of Gansu but the ROC never acknowledged the province. However, China lost four provinces with the establishment of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Manchuria. After the defeat of Japan in World War II in 1945, China re-incorporated Manchuria as 10 provinces, and assumed control of Taiwan as a province. As a result, the Republic of China in 1946 had 35 provinces. Although the Republic of China now only controls one province (Taiwan), and some islands of a second province (Fujian), it continues to formally claim all 35 provinces (including those that no longer form part of the area of the People's Republic of China).
History of the administrative divisions of China before 1912
Chen dynasty also set up a series of new immigrant prefectures along the Yangtze River, such as the Southern Xuzhou and Northern Jiangzhou, etc. The administrative division began to mess up. Northern and Southern dynasties were eventually reunified by Sui dynasty in 589. At that time, there were hundreds of prefectures all over China. Emperor Wen of Sui thus launched a major reform on the administrative division system which changed the Zhou-Jun-Xian (Prefecture, Sub-Prefecture, County) system into Zhou-Xian system, and the traditional nine provinces would be restored.
By the time unity was finally reestablished by the Sui dynasty, the provinces had been divided and redivided so many times by different governments that they were almost the same size as commanderies, rendering the two-tier system superfluous. As such, the Sui merged the two together. In English, this merged level is translated as "prefectures". In Chinese, the name changed between "zhou" and "jun" several times before being finally settled on "zhou". Based on the apocryphal Nine Province system, the Sui restored nine "zhou".