The united Chinese nation first emerged in 221 BC after Qin Shi Huang, king of the petty-kingdom of Qin in modern-day Shaanxi Province, forcibly united the fragmented Chinese kingdoms of the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) and proclaimed himself the first Emperor of China, elevating himself above the previous nominal rulers of China from the Shang & Zhou dynasties who called themselves 'kings'.
Qin Shi Huang was a notoriously brutal ruler and the dynasty he established barely outlasted him (his incompetent son and heir, Qin Er Shi, ruled for three years before the Qin collapsed entirely in 207 BC), but the importance of his act of unifying China cannot be overstated. The Qin gave China a strong central government and bureaucratic administration, a standardized writing system and currency, and even lent China their name ('China' was derived from 'Chin', a corruption of 'Qin' in western lands). They made it possible for the Han dynasty to reunite the North China Plain within five years of their own collapse, and the Han would go on to use the consolidated resources and administrative apparatus of the Qin to fuel their own wars of expansion into Korea, across the Yangtze and westward as far as the Tarim Basin, spreading Chinese cultural influence across much of mainland East Asia.
But what if...China was never united? Perhaps Qin Shi Huang is defeated in his war with Chu, the largest of the Warring States and one of the most powerful - but he manages to hurt Chu badly enough that it, too, does not have the strength to fill the power vacuum left by his death and unite China under its own banner. Thus, 'China' remains a fragmented collection of petty kingdoms, all with their own customs and traditions, with no ability to expand far beyond the North China Plain.
What are the medium to long term effects? In four words: too many to count. A world without a united China would quickly cease to resemble our world at all. No united China means no Silk Road, no Great Wall, no Chinese influence pervading mainland East Asia from Korea to Vietnam and later into Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.
What we recognize today as Han Chinese culture would be limited to the North China Plain (presuming the divided states of the Plain don't get destroyed entirely by northern nomads such as the Xiongnu with no Great Wall to stop them), while the lands south of the Yangtze would still be dominated by the tribes & kingdoms of the native Yue people. For that matter, there wouldn't be a single Chinese culture or writing system either: the Warring States all had their own dialects and scripts which reflected local influences, which were only eliminated after the Qin conquest.
Another result of Chinese disunity would be continued diversity in intellectual discourse in China. Qin Shi Huang infamously burned texts and purged scholars that failed to step in line with his government's official philosophy of Legalism (which supported his autocratic style of governance), ending a period of intellectual flowering known as the 'Hundred Schools of Thought'. Without Qin authority becoming supreme throughout China, or a united Chinese civilization emerging at all, many of these suppressed schools of thought and philosophy would not have been lost forever. Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism would still have many competitors, perhaps chief among them Mohism (a philosophy that promoted austerity, self-restraint and rationalism which was historically absorbed into Confucianism after the Qin came to power).
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