What about something vaguely like this:
The Red Dynasty would be cut off from the land and have to expand towards the ocean, but it wouldn't have all the coastline, and the other states would be large enough to resist
Why did the Chinease not expand and create a colonial empire?
- Thread starter Archon of Thessaly
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The Red Dynasty would be cut off from the land and have to expand towards the ocean, but it wouldn't have all the coastline, and the other states would be large enough to resist
What about something vaguely like this:
(not this exact map by any means, I did this in 2 seconds for a basic idea)
The Red Dynasty would be cut off from the land and have to expand towards the ocean, but it wouldn't have all the coastline, and the other states would be large enough to resist
That yellow state doesn't seem to have a significant population, so it could be easily be conquered by the other states, and both the blue and red could still trade with Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and Japan. In addition, the red state could trade with Spain through the Philippines, so it could receive plenty of gold and silver from there.
I mean, your idea in general seems plausible, but the issue is specifically coming up with a reasonable scenario.
You could give the Yellow a little more territory out west and from the edges of the Red, if that would help. The Blue could vassalize Korea and ally Japan to try to cut the Red off from trade there. If this is all going down in the late 14th/early 15th century, there would be no Spanish Philippines, so the Red would have to send exploration out all their own.
Or you could divide the Yellow between the Red and Blue, if you can think of some way for Vietnam and Laos to resist the Red. Perhaps a powerful Vietnamese emperor rising in the fourteenth century who unites the region?
Depends on your use of the term overpopulation. Can China support such a population? Yes. But:
"Behind this land hunger lay a steadily worsening of the man-to-land ratio. In the era of equal-field land allotments between 485 and the mid-700s, cultivated land per household had been estimated at 80 mou (a mou or mu is roughly one sixth of an acre). By the twelfth century it was around 20 to 30 mou, and in 1936 the average for a family farm in China would be estimated at 3.6 mou. The precise significance of terms and statistics in the voluminous but various Chinese records bedevils the work of researchers, but there can be no question as to the long-term downward trend of in the man/land ratio." - John King FAirbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History
And this with rice fields being increased by all means available, and "the almost indefinite growth of rice yields when abundant labor power is available" - the law of diminishing returns still kicked in, with consequences from there not beneficial to economic growth.
As the authors put it: "The issue is not whether the population could feed itself and continue to increase but whether its overall standard of living could be maintained."
One would expect this to go further than it appears to have actually done if that was so important, though. Those things in European trade did more to develop European maritime commerce than spices and silk.
Faeelin
Banned
Isn't this a bit like saying the population of Philadelphia is within the margin of error compared to Europe's population?
The American colonies on the whole are a quarter of Britain's population, not less than a single percentage point.
So, in a word, "No. Not even remotely."
Flocculencio
Donor
True, although I think the unpredictability of China's river systems might have helped- if the population gets culled by flood and famine every 50 years then presumably a lot of energy is going to go into rebuilding internally.
I'm not sure what you mean- why would they have to go further if their needs were being met. If sufficient furs are being imported from Manchuria or sea slugs from the Philippines to meet demand then why look elsewhere?
Again the issue seems to be that Europe's available trade resources were not sufficient to meet demand and so there was incentive to engage in risky ventures to look for more.
With such an early POD and a divided China in that manner, the issue is that Goryeo (Korea) will almost certainly attempt to regain the Liaodong Peninsula, and probably end up seizing a significant amount. This will cause numerous butterflies for both Korea and China, as OTL Joseon, which agreed to pay tribute to the Ming, will not be established, and Goryeo or an ATL equivalent will probably attempt to balance relations with both the northern and southern states.
In terms of Vietnam, it took them decades/centuries to overrun Champa, so attempting to expand into Laos and Cambodia would be extremely difficult. It would be hard for the southern Chinese state to retain Vietnam given how the Ming fared IOTL, but it would still be able to assert influence over the latter.
Not sure I follow what you're saying that would help with?
I'll put it this way: Show me a European country that was content to have its "needs" met as distinct from its "wants".
This might relate to the consequences of multiple competing polities, but it seems that Europeans were more intent on gaining "more" - the "Too much is never enough" attitude.
Couldn't the Blue Dynasty force Goryeo into submission through force of arms?
So would a slightly larger Yellow Dynasty work?
Or how about this: The Red rule over the Yellow, and get their wealth through Southeast Asia. Some hostile Khanate (or wars between the Khanates) prevents the Blue Dynasty from trading westward, so they can only trade to the east. The Blue then turn to more sailing in effort to go around the Red to the South, and then make note of the Philippines and Indonesia. Seeing the potential in these places, they establish small colonies there, and eventually they cross from there to the Americas through some manner. Then they get the wealth of the Americas and reunite China.
You're talking about a dynasty that had resisted the Mongols for 40 years, to the point where the former agreed to retain Goryeo as a vassal, instead of directly conquering it like it did with other states, including China. Goryeo had also recently forced out the Mongols by taking advantage of the chaos in China, so the troops were adequately trained, and they temporarily managed to take over part of the Liaodong Peninsula before giving it up due to political strife. A unified Chinese state would have no trouble forcing Goryeo to pay tribute, but it would be much harder for a smaller one to do so, considering that it would be worried about attacks from the other Chinese states.
You'd have to be more specific.
The fact that the red rules over the yellow automatically assumes that blue will be conquered within a few years/decades, similar to how the Ming initially controlled the Yangtze before taking the north and reunifying China. You could make the blue bigger, but it would have to gain a significant amount of the coastline to resist the red, which would mean that both would have significant access to the sea.
So reinstate a divide similar to the OTL Jin/Liao and Song divide, but with the Northern Dynasty cut off from overland trade by hostile/warring Mongols and Turks, and having to rely on sea trade to get an advantage over the Southern Dynasty.
Faeelin
Banned
Why is the comparison Britain vs. America and not, say, Fujian versus overseas colonies?
Because otherwise Philadelphia is completely irrelevant to this.
Why is it that you can't provide any evidence of there being a meaningful percentage (or even a whole percent) of China's population being overseas, and yet you insist on the absolute figure as if that represents a significant - as opposed to minor - part of population of over a hundred million?
I never said it was weird for the Chinese to not move to the Americas - personally i find the idea of picking the Americas as where to settle if China is seeking more land and opportunities to be less likely than exploiting Oceania for all it's worth.
Instead of . . . well, it comes off as if the people who could do something about it didn't have any interest in it, for reasons both good and short sighted (I hesitate to say "bad", as that implies they were just dumb).
Faeelin
Banned
Okay, since I am being an asshole I will answer this seriously, and give my thoughts.
Because this is better than doc review.
You did see enormous population movements during this period. You belittle 33,000 people in Batavia, a few thousand people in Manila, etc. But these are significant population movements given that most of the settlers came from Fujian and Guangdong, China's coastal provinces where most maritime trade derived from.
This is why I am being snarky incidentally. Comparing "China" in terms of population movement to the UK makes no sense given the size and regional disparities involved.
You saw even greater movements within China; it's been estimated that 75% of Sichuan's population was made up of settlers in the 1720s, for instance.
So, why didn't they go overseas even more than OTL?
A big reason was that it wasn't secure. The Batavian, Manilan, and Muslim Southeast Asian histories are replete with massacres of Chinese whenever they got uppity or the local authorities wanted a scape goat; in that context, why bother settling abroad when you could move somewhere closer to home? Moreover, the state didn't want people going abroad. In the Qing, this was tied into South China's opposition to Qing rule, exemplified by Koxinga, the dude who took Taiwan from the Dutch.
You see this in Qing sources; the emperor had no problem with massacres of Chinese settlers in Jakarta, because they'd left China; but merchants who resided in China and just travelled there to trade were under imperial protection.
Given the population movements in OTL's China's history during this period, a stable place to settle overseas would have likely resulted in population transfers on a significant level.
Now, before we chastise the Qing as backwards and making the "wrong" choice, let's remember that it was the overseas Chinese who overthrew them in OTL...
Because this is better than doc review.
You did see enormous population movements during this period. You belittle 33,000 people in Batavia, a few thousand people in Manila, etc. But these are significant population movements given that most of the settlers came from Fujian and Guangdong, China's coastal provinces where most maritime trade derived from.
This is why I am being snarky incidentally. Comparing "China" in terms of population movement to the UK makes no sense given the size and regional disparities involved.
You saw even greater movements within China; it's been estimated that 75% of Sichuan's population was made up of settlers in the 1720s, for instance.
So, why didn't they go overseas even more than OTL?
A big reason was that it wasn't secure. The Batavian, Manilan, and Muslim Southeast Asian histories are replete with massacres of Chinese whenever they got uppity or the local authorities wanted a scape goat; in that context, why bother settling abroad when you could move somewhere closer to home? Moreover, the state didn't want people going abroad. In the Qing, this was tied into South China's opposition to Qing rule, exemplified by Koxinga, the dude who took Taiwan from the Dutch.
You see this in Qing sources; the emperor had no problem with massacres of Chinese settlers in Jakarta, because they'd left China; but merchants who resided in China and just travelled there to trade were under imperial protection.
Given the population movements in OTL's China's history during this period, a stable place to settle overseas would have likely resulted in population transfers on a significant level.
Now, before we chastise the Qing as backwards and making the "wrong" choice, let's remember that it was the overseas Chinese who overthrew them in OTL...
No, those are not significant, because we're talking about (in this theory) the idea of China colonizing, not individual provinces.
It may speak a lot about Maritime China specifically, but not about "China overall", which is why I am regarding it as a miniscule figure. It's not representative of the majority of China any more than than the American South represents a majority of the US population in the mid 19th century.
That (underlined) sounds like a significant impediment to anything larger than OTL - as it's unlikely the other places are going to happily let the Chinese come in droves and take over.
And yet you see little or no effort on the part of the Imperial government to make "a stable place to settle", for reasons that undoubtedly made sense at the time but which were not necessarily wise in the long run.
It sounds like Maritime China and - I'm not sure if this phrase is technically correct - Inland China are not meshing very well, which is hardly a good foundation for overseas empire.
Doesn't mean that the Qing were being stupid, just that if you want the government favoring an overseas empire, you need to address this, one way or another.