Qing Resurgent - a Chinese TL

[Onkel Willie]

I'm sure Russian nationalists and Yellow Peril paranoids will love the new status quo in Northeast Asia.

If you meant this sarcastically, then you're correct .

I would have thought the assault on Tsingtao would have been comparably bloody for the troops engaged. The Germans would be dug in with machine guns, and the Chinese, lacking artillery but awash in manpower, would resort to frontal attacks. The Japanese at Port Arthur got badly chewed up by the Russian defenses in a similar situation.

True, and the Chinese did suffer. The difference is that on the front near Ypres they enjoy no such thing as numerical superiority.

With the CEF in action almost entirely in the British sector of the front, wouldn't Chiang learn English better than French?

Right, my bad .

But France didn't really have such a taboo, compared to the anglosphere. Of course what I've heard of has mostly been white male-non-white-female unions, so the reverse could be a factor. But then also France was very short of men after the War.

I did assume that none-white male-white female unions would be considered more controversial than the opposite.

Also, religious conversions wouldn't be a big factor. France was once intensely Catholic, but by this time, laïcité was dominant. A large proportion of marriages were civil only. Any French woman who would marry a Chinaman would be pretty much secular.

Wouldn't that also depend on the region though? Some parts of France were more conservative than others.

London's "Chinatown" in Limehouse dated back to about 1890; but that was because London was a seaport. Wiki sez Paris had a Chinese district before the war, in the 3rd Arrondissement.

All I can find is that they sprang up in the early 20th century, but not exactly when.

There seems to be sequence error here: if Mao is KIA in 1918, he can't be among the postwar intellectuals. Also, it seems unlikely that as a junior combat officer he would have leisure to read and write, or resources to publish.

Dunno, Hitler spent a lot of his time reading during WW I. And a pamphlet doesn't take much resources to publish. All you need is to find someone who'll lend you his printing press.

And Japan does nothing and just lets things pass?

Well, war against somebody who was your ally a week ago wouldn't be looked upon positively. Besides that, they just got a huge piece of real estate in eastern Russia to digest, about five times the size of the Japanese Home Islands in fact. Picking on Russia, I imagine, would do much to ameliorate Japanese dissatisfaction about not getting Tsingtao.

A wise move - they were an endless source of intrigue in OTL.

Indeed.

Han or Manchu outsiders?

At this point, I imagine they'd be more Han than Manchu.

If China decides to check the bluff of Western powers, Britain and France are in no position to re-enforce the Boxer protocols.

The Japanese are though, and it'd give them an excuse to beat up China.

Why is the Japanese policy towards China completely reversed to OTL? They did have proponents of a cooperative policy with a strong China, but in OTL Japan had the power to disintegrate the whole country - here they just somehow stay put and ignore everything that happens in China?

Especially since China - correctly - fears the Japanese reaction that somehow never materializes through these stunning foreign policy coups.

Nobody gave a shit when Hendryk did the same thing in his Superpower Empire TL, which happens to have a PoD in about the same timeframe.

Also, the difference is that China has been an ally in WW I and the Japanese have seen the capabilities of a resurgent China. Besides that, declaring a war on someone you fought and bled with might be frowned upon. That could lend more weight to those "proponents of a cooperative policy with a strong China." At this point, a Japanese kick to the door won't cause the entire structure to come down anymore.

Besides that, I'd hardly call Yakutian independence a foreign policy coup. Picking on a country that's mired in civil war is easy to do. IOTL the Japanese did the same to warlord era China.

Hmm, interesting. We have a revanchanistic Russia that is going to want to take back what it lost to China. My question is, wouldn't Kolchak be viewed as a traitor by Russian nationalists, as opposed to their icon? An interesting scenario here would be a less crazy Fascist Germany, Italy, and Russia vs the European allies and China. The wild card here is Japan... might I suggest a SSJW started by the Chinese? Hell, they could even do a Pacific War against the Brits. I am interested to see where this goes.

The question is who a revanchist Russia wants to take on first. Do they want Finland, the Baltic states, Poland and Moldova back first, or are their Far Eastern territories more important to them? Sure, they look big on a map, but they're sparsely populated, underdeveloped and economically worthless.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Question: could someone make a map of what the world looks like by the early 1920s? Thank you .

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time . Also, could someone do a map?

Chapter IV: The Road to Modernity, National Unity and the Imperial Chinese Navy, 1922-1929.

​

After the initial boost provided by the Great War, China’s economy continued to grow like clockwork for most of the 1920s. In 1911, the Chinese railway network had a length of only 9.000 kilometres, completely concentrated in the east of the country. That was tiny compared to around 60.000 kilometres of track in its southern neighbour British India or to Germany, which in 1855 already had 8.000 km of rails and had greatly expanded its network since. Even in Russia, considered an underdeveloped country, the total length of track stood at 71.000 kilometres on the eve of war in 1914 (though by 1922 only half of that was useable due to the damage wrought by the Great War and the Civil War). The existing network was clearly insufficient for the needs of a modernizing China.

The war and the years that followed saw a tremendous boom in railroad construction, such as a 400 kilometre stretch from Wuhan to Nanjing and a 450 kilometre connection between Zhuzhou and Canton. The completion of the double track railroad in 1917 between Zhuzhou and Canton, after nearly a year of construction, completed the Beijing-Canton Railway that ran along the historical north-south travel route. From 1920, a traveller that disembarked from his ship in Hong Kong and wanted to go to Beijing, such as a British businessman, could simply buy a ticket for a sleeper train. He could then travel the entire 2.300 kilometre trip within 36 hours – at an average speed of 80 km/h and about five minutes or so of waiting at each stop – without ever having to get off the train. By 1920, the railroad network had more than tripled to 29.000 kilometres, almost half of which was located in Manchuria. That was the best developed, most heavily industrialized region of China, which was unsurprising given the prevalence of coal there. China developed heavy, metallurgic and petrochemical industry across all its coastal provinces, but Manchuria remained the most developed. By 1929, the total length of track had reached 75.000 kilometres.

Far more ambitious then any other construction project in China at the time was the Beijing-Urumqi Railway, with 3.000 kilometres of track. Building commenced in 1915 under chief engineer Zhan Tianyou, considered the “father of Chinese railways” and ended a decade later, when the 19 year-old Emperor and his entourage took the trip. Urumqi was boosted as a commercial and cultural centre, although the government was more concerned with strengthening its control and reducing the military’s response time in the event of an uprising. By the time Zhan Tianyou completed the largest project in his career, he had faced numerous challenges such as blistering desert heat, mountain glacier cold, wide ravines, deep gorges and furious torrents. All of the bridges and tunnels on the way cost an above average number of human lives to build. Nonetheless, in 1926, Zhan Tianyao was awarded an honorary doctorate by the faculty of engineering of the Imperial University of Beijing and he would continue to give guest lectures to students of engineering, physics, mathematics and metallurgy until his death ten years later at age 75. Another difficult engineering project was the construction of a line from Chongqing to Lhasa, via Chengdu, through the Himalayas. Like the Beijing-Urumqi Railway, it improved the government’s hold on border regions inhabited by a non-Han minority, but also proved an engineering challenge.

Such groups – mainly Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs – had been deemed “unreliable elements” after their displays of separatism during the Xinhai Revolution. Imperial Chinese thinking had never made much effort to distinguish between the concepts of nationality, culture and ethnicity. Views on ethnicity for a long time had revolved around a self-conceptualization of Han around a centre-periphery cultural divide. People outside the reach of imperial control and dominant patterns of Chinese culture were considered as others and “barbarians” (at least until China had gotten beaten up by said barbarians, and even then China had for a long time persisted in seeing itself as the centre of the universe). To the Han, foreign recognition of separate ethnicities had no bearing on their views of Chinese and non-Chinese. The nation, defined as the space upon power was projected, wasn’t separated from ethnicity, or the identity of those governed. Throughout Chinese history, being under imperial rule automatically meant being defined as Chinese.

The Han Chinese nationalist military regime that governed China propagated “national unity” on every occasion. The modernized Qing dynasty was slowly being integrated into the regime, an effort that was being made easier by a mostly Western educated Emperor (the Xuantong Emperor, in fact, had only basic knowledge of Confucian classics). Another thing that helped in that regard was that the Qing dynasty wasn’t as un-Chinese as its few remaining opponents portrayed it as. In fact, the dynasty with Manchu roots had become very Sinicized, (many “Manchu” dynasty members and officials barely spoke Manchu, if at all).

The nationalist regime used China’s imperial past as a precedent to implement a far more aggressive Sinicization policy – forcing minorities to speak and write in Chinese, to give their children Chinese names, and to hide any religious habits that were considered “foreign”. Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism were approved for the Han. Other religions and ethnicities were tolerated to a certain extent. Westerners practicing Christianity were left alone, but the ethnically Chinese Christian community was subjected to harassment as they were suspected of foreign loyalties. Muslims underwent varying levels of discrimination with Uyghurs being distrusted the most, as demonstrated by the disproportionate garrison stationed in Xinjiang province. Similarly, Chinese Buddhists were left alone while Tibetans practicing Buddhism were kept under observation. The increasingly pseudo-fascist regime had little tolerance for dissidence, including the religious kind.

In the meantime, by the late 1910s, the Chinese government had manifested the ambition to become a regional naval power. For the moment, it had no interest in building a true blue water navy, but at the very least it wanted to be able to defend its coastline. The Imperial Chinese Navy had been obliterated in the Sino-French War, the Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer War. No reconstruction efforts had been undertaken since then and the entire Chinese navy had been a joke, being incapable of anything more than riverine warfare. It consisted of small patrol boats, armed merchant vessels, some destroyers and a few obsolete light cruisers. The Japanese could easily impose a blockade on China if it wanted to without China being able to do anything about it. The question now was how a traditionally land oriented power was to build a cheap, fairly small force that could still defend China from attack by sea.

The architect of the new Imperial Chinese Navy was a man named Chen Shaokuan, indisputably the father of the Chinese navy. Chen Shaokuan was born in a village called Chengmen in Fujian Province in 1889. His father was originally a carpenter, but joined the Qing Dynasty Navy as an ordinary seaman, thus introducing him to the life at sea. At the age of 17, he attended the Jiangnan Naval Academy in Nanjing, China, graduating at the age of 20, and served aboard training cruiser Tongji. In 1910, he served as an ensign aboard training cruiser Jingqing, which was deployed to the Yangtze River during the Xinhai Revolution to shell enemy positions with her two 150 cm and five 120 mm guns. By 1914, he had already risen to the rank of commander, serving with the Imperial Navy headquarters of the navy. In 1915, he was promoted to the rank of Captain and was assigned to the scout cruiser Zhaohe. He, however, didn’t serve as its commander for long because he became naval attaché in Great Britain to observe European naval warfare in World War I.

The British donated pre-dreadnought battleship HMS Revenge – which they had been planning to scrap anyway – to their Chinese allies, who renamed her Dingyuan. The Chinese also bought HMS Wizard, an obsolete Conflict-class destroyer dating back to 1895 (given its age, its sale wasn’t a great loss for the Royal Navy, which would otherwise have scrapped her within a few years anyway). Together they formed the Chinese Naval Squadron or CNS under the command of Chen Shaokan, though completely Chinese it wasn’t because British advisors were assigned to it. The British admiralty advised coastal bombardment duties and the CNS shelled the Flemish coast, where the Germans had U-boat bases, several times. Chen, however, wanted more action and therefore, in the winter of 1915-’16, the British reluctantly reassigned him to patrol duties around the Dogger Bank, a 17.600 square kilometre sandbank 100 kilometres off the east coast of English.

Early 1916 was precisely the time that the German admiralty opted for a more aggressive strategy, consisting of frequent raids and incursions into British dominated areas. The Germans sent the second, sixth and ninth torpedo boat flotillas on a sortie to Dogger Bank in an attempt to intercept enemy shipping, deploying 25 torpedo boats. On February 1916 only four 1.270 tonne sloops, each equipped with two 120 mm as well as two three-pounder anti-aircraft guns, were operating in the area. Though they initially mistook the British ships for cruisers, they pressed their attack anyway as they had a significant numerical advantage. Poppy, Buttercup and Alyssum escaped, but HMS Arabis was not so fortunate and was engaged by three German torpedo boats. HMS Arabis repulsed the first attack, but was then assailed by six German torpedo boats and all seemed lost. The Second Battle of Dogger Bank was starting to look like a German victory, but then the old Dingyuan showed up on the horizon. The old Dingyuan fired her two forward facing 305 mm (12 inch) and some of her 152 mm (6 inch) guns and sank a German torpedo boat. The German torpedo boats used their superior speed to flee, outrunning Dingyuan which had a top speed of only 17.5 knots (44 km/h). The Dingyuan nonetheless sank two more torpedo boats before they got out of range and towed the heavily damaged HMS Arabis to Scarborough for repairs.

In November 1918, the Dingyuan steamed to the naval base at Tianjin and arrived there in April 1919, after spending New Year’s at Aden. It was also the home of the Tianjin Naval Academy, where several of the Dingyuan’s officers were given teaching positions as they were the only Chinese naval officers with experience in modern naval combat. The Dingyuan herself, being an obsolete ship, was relegated to training duties and would be sold for scrap in 1929. Chen Shaokan – though on the young side to be a Captain, since at age 30 one was at most expected to be a Lieutenant Commander – was exceptionally promoted to Rear Admiral. This was a reward for his service and the fact that he was the only Chinese captain with experience in modern capital ship combat, albeit on an obsolete pre-dreadnought. In 1919, the 30 year-old Chen was appointed to the newly created Ministry of the Navy and became the youngest member of the imperial cabinet. He was charged with the challenging task of building China an ocean-going fleet from the remnants of the old Qing navy. He submitted ambitious plans for a Chinese navy that would consist of four fast battleships, four heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, 32 destroyers, 56 submarines and 120 smaller vessels such as gunboats, minesweepers, submarine tenders, torpedo boats and replenishment oilers. Within a few years his plans would get a boost by imperial patronage since the Xuantong Emperor took an interest in the navy. He hoped to establish a strong navy as a counterweight to the Chinese army, which dominated Chinese politics at this time.

As it just so happened, Germany had four incomplete Mackensen-class battlecruisers and the Chinese government paid the Blohm & Voss shipbuilding company 65 million yuan to complete them for the Imperial Chinese Navy (given the dire economic circumstances, Blohm & Voss accepted the offer because it could use the money to keep its head above the water, financially speaking). They would fill the role of “fast battleships.” Though slightly inferior in firepower with eight 350 mm (13.8 inch) guns, in other respects the Mackensens were superior to their Japanese equivalents, the Kongo-class battlecruisers (later reclassified as fast battleships too). The Kongo-class’s belt armour had a thickness of 76-203 mm (3-8 inches) while the Mackensen-class had an armoured belt of 100-300 mm (3.9-11.8 inches). Despite their thicker armour and greater weight, 31.000 tonnes compared to 27.400, the Mackensens had a slight advantage in speed due to having four steam turbines rather than two. That gave the Mackensens 90.000 horsepower and a 28 knot (52 km/h) top speed compared to the Kongo-class’s 64.000 horsepower and 27.5 knots (51 km/h).

In 1920, construction recommenced on Mackensen, Graf Spee, Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the unnamed Ersatz A, which were respectively 12 months, 15 months, 21 months and 26 months away from completion. Mackensen and Graf Spee were completed in 1921 and steamed to China with a German crew and were commissioned as Dinghai and Shanghai upon their arrival. A new crew of Chinese sailors replaced the German crew, but the senior officers remained German for lack of Chinese equivalents, thus allowing Germany to maintain a core of experienced naval officers on major capital units outside the bounds of the Treaty of Versailles. Prinz Eitel Friedrich was completed in 1922 and was commissioned as Tianjin in December of that year. In response to Japan converting Akagi into an aircraft carrier, China ordered for Ersatz A to be completed as an aircraft carrier too, which cost the Chinese government an additional 10 million Yuan and lengthened her construction time considerably. Ersatz A was commissioned in 1928 as Dalian and was China’s first aircraft carrier, weighing 27.500 tonnes, carrying sixty aircraft and having a top speed of 33 knots.

Besides completing Mackensen-class battlecruisers for service in the Chinese navy, the Blohm & Voss shipbuilding company proved to be the lowest bidder for an order to restore and operate the Foochow Arsenal, renamed the Foochow Navy Yard. Construction commenced in 1925 and Blohm & Voss announced that within three years the Foochow Navy Yard would be able to construct any ships the Imperial Chinese Navy required. Among them were the four Fujian-class heavy cruisers, a smaller version of the Mackensens weighing 12.000 tonnes and sporting eight 203 mm (8 inch) guns in double turrets. The Tsingtao-class light cruisers were actually a design originally intended for the Imperial German Navy, but which had never been completed because later in WW I Germany had abandoned surface ship construction in favour of U-boats. The Tsingtao light cruisers weighed up to 8.650 tonnes at combat loads and sported eight 15 cm guns, three 88 mm flak guns and four 60 cm torpedo tubes. By 1930, the Imperial Chinese Navy was the sixth navy in the world in terms of tonnage, behind Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France and Italy.

One political science professor described China as a semi-great power. China couldn’t project power over great distances like the other great powers could with their navies, but the Chinese could sure bloody enemy naval forces if they played their cards right in a sort of naval guerrilla. China could also give the major powers a run for their money if they actually invaded, swamping them with sheer numbers.

During the 1922, Washington Naval Conference, the Japanese insisted on parity in tonnage vis-à-vis the US Navy and the Royal Navy, which ran counter to American motives for organizing and hosting the conference in the first place. To the United States, the primary objective of the conference was to restrain Japanese naval expansion in the waters of the west Pacific, especially with regard to fortifications on strategically valuable islands. Their secondary objectives were intended to ultimately limit Japanese expansion, but also to alleviate concerns over possible antagonism with the British. They were: first, to eliminate Anglo-American tension by abrogating the Anglo-Japanese alliance; second, to agree upon a favourable naval ratio vis-à-vis Japan. The British merely wanted to avoid a naval arms race and thwart foreign encroachment on their Southeast Asian holdings, particularly Hong Kong and Singapore. Besides that, they didn’t have a laundry list of demands, but a vague vision of what the western Pacific should look like.

Japan came to the conference seeking a naval agreement with the United States and Great Britain as well as recognition of their control over Russia’s former Pacific coast and northern Sakhalin. Knowing that in terms of capital ships the Chinese navy would reach at least 120.000 tonnes by the end of the decade, the Japanese delegation couldn’t be swayed from their demand for parity with the US and Britain. Japan knew that anything less than parity would put them at a serious disadvantage in the event of a Sino-American or Anglo-Chinese rapprochement. In the end, the British managed to argue in Japan’s favour, much to their own relief since they really couldn’t afford a naval race. Another regulation was that gun calibres on battleships and battlecruisers were to be limited to 16 inches (406 mm) and capital ships shouldn’t weigh more than 45.000 tonnes (the latter part was argued by Japan, giving them a clear advantage over the Chinese Navy, whose largest surface units weighed 31.000 tonnes). Additionally, Japan pushed the weight of heavy cruisers from the proposed 10.000 tonnes to 14.000 and the maximum cruiser gun calibre from 8 inches (203 mm) to 11 inches (280 mm).

The treaty allowed the Japanese to complete Amagi as a battlecruiser and battleship Tosa, equipped with five instead of four twin turrets with 16 inch guns. Their respective sister ships Akagi and Kaga were completed as carriers due to cost concerns in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, a 7.9 magnitude quake that devastated Tokyo, the port city of Yokohama and the surrounding prefectures of Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka. Recovery and naval expansion were fortunately helped by the discovery and exploitation of deposits of oil on northern Sakhalin and of coal, tungsten and tin in the 1920s and later also gold and silver in the 1930s in Chukotka and Magadan. So, despite the destruction caused by the earthquake and a resulting diminished naval budget in the mid 1920s, the Imperial Japanese Navy nevertheless maintained a very comfortable lead over the Chinese, for now.

 

[varyar]

Still good stuff! China's emergence as a great power should deal some nice curves into the timeline. How long until the revived empire can begin to play outside of East Asia, I wonder...

I wish I could help on the map front, but it'd be a pretty basic World A deal.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time . Sorry for the wait. I've been on a holiday .

Edit: scrapped. Better version will appear soon. I guess I got carried away there. I do love my battleships.

 

[MattII]

Battleships with diesel reciprocating engines? Wouldn't steam turbines be more likely?

 

[ghappy1000]

Update time . Sorry for the wait. I've been on a holiday .
Chapter V: The Two Dragons Unite, 1929-1940.
The Chinese didn’t stop there. The succeeding Qianlong-class battleships, laid down in 1937 and 1938 were even bigger with 65.500 tonnes, improving on their predecessors through thicker deck armour and a 42 cm (16.5 inch) main battery. Four of these gargantuan behemoths were planned. Besides ten battleships, the 1930s expansion program included eight aircraft carriers, twelve light aircraft carriers, ten heavy cruisers, fourteen light cruisers, 75 destroyers, 85 submarines and 200 smaller vessels, particularly replenishment oilers to extend the Chinese navy’s reach into the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. By 1942 the Imperial Chinese Navy was projected to have ten battleships, four fast battleships or battlecruisers, nine fleet carriers, twelve light carriers/escort carriers, fourteen heavy cruisers, twenty light cruisers, 107 destroyers, 141 submarines and 320 auxiliary vessels of various kinds such as submarine tenders and gunboats.
Numerically, the projected Chinese navy would be roughly equal to its Japanese counterpart by 1942 and in terms of tonnage it would in fact be superior. If these plans were carried through it would become the world’s third navy. That befitted China’s new status. By 1940 the Chinese Empire’s gross domestic product had exceeded those of Great Britain and Germany, displacing the latter as the world’s second economy behind the USA. China was not only the world’s second economy but also had a population of nearly half a billion, out of a world population of 2.3 billion. Only the US was superior to China economically and only the British Empire could rival it in terms of sheer numbers. A super power was about to emerge in the Orient.

How would the Chinese construct such a huge navy? And, do they need all these aircraft carriers, mammoth battleships and submarines with their country being more of a land power than a sea power? Aren't they supposed to take up the slack posed by Russia to Northeast Asia and the British and French to the Southeast? To be honest, I would say 8 battleships [including 2 battle cruisers], 4 fleet carriers, 2 battle cruiser conversions into carriers, 8 light and escort carriers, 12 heavy cruisers, 16 light cruisers, 90 destroyers, 120 submarines and 250 auxillary vessels. The 8 battleships consist of 2 battle cruisers, 4 elderly and 4 modern battleships.

 

[Avrorrange]

Hmm, interesting. We have a revanchanistic Russia that is going to want to take back what it lost to China. My question is, wouldn't Kolchak be viewed as a traitor by Russian nationalists, as opposed to their icon? An interesting scenario here would be a less crazy Fascist Germany, Italy, and Russia vs the European allies and China. The wild card here is Japan... might I suggest a SSJW started by the Chinese? Hell, they could even do a Pacific War against the Brits. I am interested to see where this goes.

I think the Russian nationalists will be more focused on retaking Poland and the Baltic States than some far away, sparsely populated land that only came to Russian possession less than one hundred years ago,not to mention losing it to it's original rulers.

 

[kung Zog]

That is not a plausible large navy for China... but whatever.


anyway, it will, together with Sino-Japanese cooperation throw United Kingdom and USA (and France quite likely) into a fit and they will start massive naval projects, that is if the Japanese don't back down on the cooperation and try to destroy the navy in port...

 

[Avrorrange]

Wait,so how is China able to afford all this battleship building on top of building all the railways,factories,modern roads,hospitals,universities,schools and buying modern military equipment for it's large army?I know China has the potential to grow really strong,but with all the corruption,internal dissent(all the republicans are likely to stir up trouble),factionalism(Beiyang clique and all that),how is China modernising so rapidly that it can become such a power in ten to twenty years despite all the aforementioned problems?

If you look at it in modern times,it took China more than thirty years since opening up to modernize to satisfactory levels in terms of education,research,infrastructure,commercial and industrial development.It's army and air force is still full of archaic equipment and the navy,which has long been neglected in favour of the other two,has only started to try and acquire blue water capabilities.

 

[kung Zog]

Wait,so how is China able to afford all this battleship building on top of building all the railways,factories,modern roads,hospitals,universities,schools and buying modern military equipment for it's large army?I know China has the potential to grow really strong,but with all the corruption,internal dissent(all the republicans are likely to stir up trouble),factionalism(Beiyang clique and all that),how is China modernising so rapidly that it can become such a power in ten to twenty years despite all the aforementioned problems?

If you look at it in modern times,it took China more than thirty years since opening up to modernize to satisfactory levels in terms of education,research,infrastructure,commercial and industrial development.It's army and air force is still full of archaic equipment and the navy,which has long been neglected in favour of the other two,has only started to try and acquire blue water capabilities.

well they don't. so this is quite a wank.

 

[Avrorrange]

well they don't. so this is quite a wank.

It still needs to be believable however,otherwise this belongs to ASB. In my opinion(I am going to explain it in EU terms),is that a wank is where a country is made a lucky nation whereas ASB is downright having the country use the console to cheat.

 

[kung Zog]

It still needs to be believable however,otherwise this belongs to ASB. In my opinion(I am going to explain it in EU terms),is that a wank is where a country is made a lucky nation whereas ASB is downright having the country use the console to cheat.

more or less, yes. I do not like to shout ASB as it tends to shut down discussion a bit too much, so diplomatically I would say that this borders it.

 

[Avrorrange]

more or less, yes. I do not like to shout ASB as it tends to shut down discussion a bit too much, so diplomatically I would say that this borders it.

In my opinion,the ability of the Chinese to build and maintain such a large fleet is like having China type money into the console repeatedly.

 

[kung Zog]

In my opinion,the ability of the Chinese to build and maintain such a large fleet is like having China type money into the console repeatedly.

I agree in general.

what is worrying me more, however, is the lack of reaction by all other parties.

 

[Karelian]

Nobody gave a shit when Hendryk did the same thing in his Superpower Empire TL, which happens to have a PoD in about the same timeframe.

I would have questioned that as well back in the day, so it's nothing personal - just the eternal quest for nitpicking about historical plausibility of a subject I've read too many books, that's all.

 

[Onkel Willie]

Update time . Sorry for the wait. I've been on a holiday .

Edit: scrapped. Better version will appear soon. I guess I got carried away there. I do love my battleships.

Should be less of a wank now .

Chapter V: The Two Dragons Unite, 1929-1940.

​

During the late 1920s, the Japanese government saw itself forced to make some tough foreign policy choices if its goals were to be accomplished. By then, its western neighbour had surpassed France, Russia, Japan, and Italy in terms of GDP and had become the world’s fourth economy, after the United States, Germany and Great Britain. Japan needed to have an alliance with either China or the United States, since it could ill afford to count two demographically and economically superior as well as more resource rich states among its rivals. After all, the Empire of Japan was only the world’s seventh economy and far from autarkic in terms of resources, unlike China and the US.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, former naval attaché to the US and a Harvard student, said: “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oilfields in Texas knows that Japan lacks the power for a naval race with America.” He feared a naval race and preferred caution over pressing for parity with the US during negotiations in Washington, preferring a 5:3 ratio over no naval agreement at all since he knew that the Americans could out-produce Japan at a much greater ratio. He, however, approved the end result of a strength ratio of 5:5:5 between the US, the British Empire and Japan. The treaty worked very well for Tokyo since it restricted the United States, which had a much greater production potential than they did. Secondly, it established the Imperial Japanese Navy as the world’s third navy.

The Washington Naval Treaty gave this branch of the armed services a prestige the army lacked. The latter, after all, wasn’t nearly the largest or most powerful army in the world, not even in the top three in 1918 in fact when the Germans were still in the fight. Moreover, the navy had been pivotal in the army’s conquest of Germany’s Pacific possessions. Sure, after the Great War the generals had had their day with Japan’s huge acquisitions at Russia’s expense, but it became clear China could undo those gains in any kind of protracted war against its eastern rival. The Imperial Japanese Army could do little to stop the Chinese from steamrolling them and kicking them out of mainland Asia; logistics would be a greater hindrance to the Imperial Chinese Army’s advance rather than anything else. To keep what it had, Japan could radically increase its army and beef up its defences at the navy’s expense as well as court the United States and perhaps Great Britain and France. But what room would that leave for future conquests, which clearly lay in Southeast Asia and the Pacific? Such a policy of voluntarily boxing itself in by courting the West would leave no room to conquer the resource rich areas Japan needed to become autarkic, which would be foolish since such expansion would be easy. After all, the Western colonial powers had been nearly bankrupted by four years of war and had suffered such losses that they were unwilling to suffer any more. Besides that, European colonialism in Asia couldn’t be tolerated forever by a country with pan-Asian ideals like Imperial Japan. A burgeoning militarist, ultranationalist Chinese Empire, in the meantime, would surely only give up Manchuria if the Japanese pried it from their cold, dead hands. If Japan was to expand and become a superpower, it would be at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Navy and it would involve walking at least part of the way with the great dragon across the East China Sea, which was equally pan-Asian.

The navy, as the more prestigious of the two branches of the armed forces, began to dictate foreign policy. Proponents of cooperation with a strong China won out. Therefore Japan decided to improve its relations with Asia’s leading land-based anti-colonial power: the Empire of China. In 1927, the 70 year-old Admiral Dewa Shigeto, retired from active service, reluctantly accepted the position of Prime Minister. Even he could not refuse a request from the Emperor (in this case the recently crowned Hirohito, whose accession to the throne in December 1926 marked the start of the Showa Era). The 124th Emperor, after all, was considered a living God as the supposed descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu just as much as the 123 Emperors before him.

Shigeto and a small diplomatic delegation travelled to the Forbidden City in Beijing and all of them, including Shigetu despite his age, performed the ritual kowtow to please the Emperor of China. The sight of Japanese diplomats prostrating themselves before the Chinese monarch would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. Now, unlike then, however, the Japanese were concerned with smoothing over past differences as much as possible and getting on China’s good side. Two countries that had been enemies little more than a generation ago reconciled: China and Japan signed a commercial treaty under which the Chinese agreed to supply raw materials at low prices to Japanese business conglomerates in return for Japanese help in developing China’s naval air arm, something the Imperial Chinese Navy was struggling with. In 1933, good relations were finally formalized into a military alliance.

After this initial success, more resources were diverted to the Japanese navy and the admiralty used the resources to greatly expand the country’s merchant navy and its sealift capabilities. As early as the 1920s the Japanese had considered a war against the United States a possibility. That’s why plans were drawn up to cripple the US Pacific Fleet in a decisive battle and seize Guam, Wake and the Philippines to form a strategic perimeter to defend Japanese conquests in Southeast Asia, the so-called “southern resource area” on which Japan’s self-sufficiency would depend. Later, these plans would come to include invasions of Midway and Hawaii as well so Japan could dominate the Pacific.

The prospect of a war in the Pacific and Asia became more likely due to the Anglo-American rapprochement, which in turn was a response to Sino-Japanese rapprochement and the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance that followed. Improving Sino-Japanese relations made the British worry about the future of the Empire, particularly its crown jewel India (not to mention that some Indian nationalists looked to Japan and China as models for an independent India). China made it no secret that it wanted to undo the “Unequal Treaties” (such as the Boxer Protocol) imposed upon it by Britain, the US, France and other Western countries (it was willing to repudiate them by force of arms if necessary). By extension, China and Japan agreed that European rule over large parts of Asia couldn’t last forever. The US government felt more secure than the British since they were separated from Japan and China by thousands of miles of ocean, but they too saw a war against Japan and China as a strong possibility. American-Japanese and Sino-American relations had soured after the two Asian powers had both snatched huge tracts of land formerly belonging to Russia. A decade later relations remained polite, but cool. The aggressive anti-Western, anti-colonial rhetoric of a rising China, as well as the persecution of Chinese Christians from the 1920s made relations even bitterer. This, in combination with Beijing’s rapprochement toward Japan, sparked a “Yellow Scare” that included discrimination of and occasional violence toward Asian Americans (infuriating China in particular, which was hypersensitive to perceived Western slights after nearly a century of humiliation). Strengthening relations with Great Britain was simply the logical response according to the ancient proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

In 1930, the Xuantong Emperor felt strong enough to renounce the Boxer Protocol and stop paying war reparations, which gave him an incredible boost in popularity and strengthened his positions vis-à-vis Prime Minister Duan Qirui. The Western powers voiced a diplomatic protest, but they did nothing, which was a major confidence booster to Imperial China. The same year the Emperor used his increased clout to bolster the position of the Minister of the Navy, Chen Shaokan, who by now had been promoted to Fleet Admiral, the highest rank in the Chinese navy.

In 1930, the Imperial Chinese Navy, the decidedly more monarchical of the two branches of the armed forces, received a major increase in funding to enact a very ambitious expansion program that would ultimately allow it to eclipse the Imperial Japanese Navy. The four Mackensens, three fast battleships and one carrier, were upgraded with oil fired boilers and more powerful engines, increasing their speed to 32 knots (59.3 km/h). Additionally, they got improved anti-torpedo protection, saw their torpedo tubes removed, got their casemates enclosed and got extra anti-aircraft guns: two 88 mm, twelve 37 mm and sixteen 20 mm anti-aircraft guns (in addition to the existing AA-battery of eight 88 mm guns).

In 1931, the Kangxi- class battleships was laid down at the Foochow Navy Yard. Her namesake Kangxi and sister ship Yongzheng were commissioned in 1934. These 41.000 tonne ships were essentially enlarged versions of the German WW I Bayern-class: they had eight 380 mm (15 inch) guns, belt armour up to 350 mm (13.8 inch), deck armour up to 120 mm over the magazine and the engines, sixteen 15 cm (5.9 inch) guns, twelve 88 dual purpose guns, sixteen 37 mm anti-aircraft guns and twelve 20 mm anti-aircraft guns and had twelve superheated boilers driving three four-blade screws for a top speed of 30.5 knots (56.5 km/h). The 44.000 tonne Qianlong-class battleships, named Qianlong and Jiaqing, were slightly enlarged versions with improved armour and a main armament of eight 406 mm (16 inch) guns. They were laid down in 1935 and completed in 1938. Additionally, the Chinese Navy laid the four Hong Kong-class battlecruisers/fast battleships, which were improved versions of the Mackensens, also with eight 15 inch guns but with thinner armour and greater speed than their battleship cousins. Early on, the Chinese admiralty decided to convert two to aircraft carriers and build an additional aircraft carrier.

Additionally, the 1930s naval expansion program projected 63 destroyers, 69 submarines and 130 auxiliary vessels such as gunboats and submarine tenders, less than the first expansion program since it paid more attention to capital ships. By 1940, the Imperial Chinese Navy would number eight battleships, four fleet carriers, eight light/escort carriers, twelve heavy cruisers, sixteen light cruisers, 95 destroyers, 125 submarines and 250 auxiliary vessels of various types. In numbers it displaced the Italian and French navies and became the world’s fourth navy.

China had the world’s largest army and fourth largest navy. By 1940 the Chinese Empire’s gross domestic product had exceeded those of Great Britain and Germany, displacing the latter as the world’s second economy behind the USA. China was not only the world’s second economy but also had a population of nearly half a billion, out of a world population of 2.3 billion. Only the US was superior to China economically and only the British Empire could rival it in terms of sheer numbers. A super power was about to emerge in the Orient.

 

[theg*ddam*hoi2fan]

Good heavens... A resurgent China allying with Japan?

Colonialism is now officially dead...

 

[Avrorrange]

It's quite provocative to call their battlecruisers Hong Kong Class isn't it?Did the British lodge a complaint?

Another thing is how's the aircraft industry?You can hardly have powerful aircraft carrier naval units without good aircraft?

At any rate,I still think China is growing way too quick to be believable considering the corruption,incompetence,decentralization,technological inferiority(although,I guess Germany's quite willing to share their technology with the Chinese to use China as a testing ground?) and general backwardness that China went through.Would you kindly make an update about the economy and how it managed to grow so big anytime soon?

 

[Alpha-King98760]

Hey Onkel Willie, you've got any plans to expand the Empire of China southward (towards French Indochina)?