Hendryk
Banned
China had it rough in our timeline. Everything that could have gone wrong with it, did. Then it started catching up, but there is still a long way for it to go. In this alternate timeline, things go neither improbably well nor--as was the case in our timeline--incredibly bad. And, in true "butterfly effect" fashion, the one element to change for history to follow a different course is tiny: a man will simply have to die 4 years sooner.
I place the defining moment at the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911. In both our timeline and this one, the "revolution" happened almost by accident and took everyone by surprise, including Sun Yat-sen. Once in charge of the country, he realized that his lack of leverage with the former elite in general and the army brass in particular made him an unsuitable ruler, so he looked for someone with more influence and chose Yuan Shikai. Unfortunately Yuan Shikai was both power-hungry, incompetent and corrupt, and within a few months had let the country tumble into a period of anarchy that would only end in 1949 (or, as far as I'm concerned, 1978).
Well, in my alternate timeline, Sun instead picks someone who also has decent leverage and legitimacy: Kang Youwei, who had spearheaded the "100 days" reform movement of 1898 only to be undercut by Dowager Empress Cixi and forced into exile. Either this is a deliberate choice, or one simply has to shorten Yuan's life expectancy by a mere 4 years, as he died in 1916 anyway, and Kang gets chosen by default. It works either way. Kang is a classically trained scholar-official but he was progressive enough to understand that China had lost its technological and geopolitical edge to the Western world; he had read the works of Western thinkers and social scientists, and, during his years in exile, had elaborated on his reform program of 1898. His conclusions were fairly close to those of the architects of Meiji: basically, modernization simultaneously supported and limited by a native ideological framework, in China's case an updated Confucianism.
So, in 1912 Kang has power handed to him by Sun. Where does it go from here? Considering that China's history in the first three-quarters of the 20th century is one of successive worst-case scenarii, its alternate fate can only be better.
This is how I see it. Kang, once in power, declares himself first emperor of, say, the Zhong dynasty (or some other suitably uplifting name). Indeed, it makes perfect sense for a scholar like him to use the time-honored way of symbolically ushering a new political era (progressive as he is, he nonetheless distrusts the foreign concept of "republic"; and, let's face it, at the time only the USA, France and Switzerland were republics anyway). He rallies both the disgruntled element of the old regime and Sun's followers and begins the lengthy process of structural reform. Within 2 years, WW1 breaks out in Europe. This is a golden opportunity for him to increase his legitimacy among the Chinese society at large by undoing one of the many humiliations forced upon China by western powers: with Germany at war against France, Britain and Russia, little force remains available for the Second Reich to defend its holding on the Shandong peninsula, and no reinforcements can be expected. So China reclaims the territory (that includes the city of Qingdao) with comparatively little trouble, and uses the opportunity to conveniently ally itself, verbally at least, with France and Britain--much like Japan does. This victory, however small, is the confidence-booster the country had been longing for at least since 1840, and is milked for all its worth by the regime's propaganda. China may also take advantage of the situation to have French and British advisers help it modernize its army, and import modern military equipment.
Then it's 1917 and the Bolsheviks take over in Russia. The eastern part of the country is in chaos, and Kang seizes the chance to re-conquer those territories in Eastern Siberia and Central Asia that Russia had confiscated from China in the mid-19th century, thereby restoring the sino-russian border as it had been defined by the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. And just as, in Europe, the Baltic states were created as a buffer zone between the new USSR and its neighbors, China turns the whole eastern half of Siberia between the Ienisei river and the Bering Strait into a new country, Yakutia, which it treats essentially as a vassal state.
Modernization goes on during the 1920s; then the war with Japan takes place, but turns out in a rather similar way as in our timeline, with the efficient and well-equipped Japanese army occupying much of Eastern China. But the Chinese government, relocated in Chongqing, reacts to the occupation with a complete mobilization of social and economic forces, much like the USSR between 1941 and 1945, and thus reinforces its legitimacy further by the time the war ends. I think Japan would still attack Pearl Harbor, for identical reasons as in our timeline: because they were bogged down on the Chinese front and wanted to scare the USA away from involvement; because they wanted to put an end to the USA-enforced oil embargo; and because, let's face it, the Japanese chiefs of staff had a severe case of hubris.
The really interesting things, however, happen after 1945. The war in the Pacific probably ends a few months sooner, given the extra drain on Japanese energies caused by organized resistance in China. But then, there is no civil war between Nationalists and Communists (in fact, there is hardly a Communist presence in China at all), and no takeover by Mao Zedong. The Soviet influence in Asia stops on the banks of the Ienisei. Therefore, no partition of Korea, so no Korean war; no Communist guerilla in Vietnam, so none of the wars in Indochina; no Great Leap Forward and its 30 million victims; no Cultural Revolution; oh, and no Tiananmen massacre either, though that is almost incidental. Not that this alternate China would be a democracy; by 2004, the regime would probably have evolved into Singapore-style paternalist technocracy. But what's important is that a China that would be spared the madness of the Mao era would instead have been able to focus its strength on development at home and influence-building abroad. By now, much of East Asia would be under a latter-day version of the Ming- and Qing-era system of tutelage. Japan would still be part of the American sphere of influence, but those lands from Yakutia to Vietnam would once again take their political--and probably cultural--cues from a neo-imperial China.
A more detailed version is available in French, if anyone's interested. What do you think?
I place the defining moment at the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911. In both our timeline and this one, the "revolution" happened almost by accident and took everyone by surprise, including Sun Yat-sen. Once in charge of the country, he realized that his lack of leverage with the former elite in general and the army brass in particular made him an unsuitable ruler, so he looked for someone with more influence and chose Yuan Shikai. Unfortunately Yuan Shikai was both power-hungry, incompetent and corrupt, and within a few months had let the country tumble into a period of anarchy that would only end in 1949 (or, as far as I'm concerned, 1978).
Well, in my alternate timeline, Sun instead picks someone who also has decent leverage and legitimacy: Kang Youwei, who had spearheaded the "100 days" reform movement of 1898 only to be undercut by Dowager Empress Cixi and forced into exile. Either this is a deliberate choice, or one simply has to shorten Yuan's life expectancy by a mere 4 years, as he died in 1916 anyway, and Kang gets chosen by default. It works either way. Kang is a classically trained scholar-official but he was progressive enough to understand that China had lost its technological and geopolitical edge to the Western world; he had read the works of Western thinkers and social scientists, and, during his years in exile, had elaborated on his reform program of 1898. His conclusions were fairly close to those of the architects of Meiji: basically, modernization simultaneously supported and limited by a native ideological framework, in China's case an updated Confucianism.
So, in 1912 Kang has power handed to him by Sun. Where does it go from here? Considering that China's history in the first three-quarters of the 20th century is one of successive worst-case scenarii, its alternate fate can only be better.
This is how I see it. Kang, once in power, declares himself first emperor of, say, the Zhong dynasty (or some other suitably uplifting name). Indeed, it makes perfect sense for a scholar like him to use the time-honored way of symbolically ushering a new political era (progressive as he is, he nonetheless distrusts the foreign concept of "republic"; and, let's face it, at the time only the USA, France and Switzerland were republics anyway). He rallies both the disgruntled element of the old regime and Sun's followers and begins the lengthy process of structural reform. Within 2 years, WW1 breaks out in Europe. This is a golden opportunity for him to increase his legitimacy among the Chinese society at large by undoing one of the many humiliations forced upon China by western powers: with Germany at war against France, Britain and Russia, little force remains available for the Second Reich to defend its holding on the Shandong peninsula, and no reinforcements can be expected. So China reclaims the territory (that includes the city of Qingdao) with comparatively little trouble, and uses the opportunity to conveniently ally itself, verbally at least, with France and Britain--much like Japan does. This victory, however small, is the confidence-booster the country had been longing for at least since 1840, and is milked for all its worth by the regime's propaganda. China may also take advantage of the situation to have French and British advisers help it modernize its army, and import modern military equipment.
Then it's 1917 and the Bolsheviks take over in Russia. The eastern part of the country is in chaos, and Kang seizes the chance to re-conquer those territories in Eastern Siberia and Central Asia that Russia had confiscated from China in the mid-19th century, thereby restoring the sino-russian border as it had been defined by the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. And just as, in Europe, the Baltic states were created as a buffer zone between the new USSR and its neighbors, China turns the whole eastern half of Siberia between the Ienisei river and the Bering Strait into a new country, Yakutia, which it treats essentially as a vassal state.
Modernization goes on during the 1920s; then the war with Japan takes place, but turns out in a rather similar way as in our timeline, with the efficient and well-equipped Japanese army occupying much of Eastern China. But the Chinese government, relocated in Chongqing, reacts to the occupation with a complete mobilization of social and economic forces, much like the USSR between 1941 and 1945, and thus reinforces its legitimacy further by the time the war ends. I think Japan would still attack Pearl Harbor, for identical reasons as in our timeline: because they were bogged down on the Chinese front and wanted to scare the USA away from involvement; because they wanted to put an end to the USA-enforced oil embargo; and because, let's face it, the Japanese chiefs of staff had a severe case of hubris.
The really interesting things, however, happen after 1945. The war in the Pacific probably ends a few months sooner, given the extra drain on Japanese energies caused by organized resistance in China. But then, there is no civil war between Nationalists and Communists (in fact, there is hardly a Communist presence in China at all), and no takeover by Mao Zedong. The Soviet influence in Asia stops on the banks of the Ienisei. Therefore, no partition of Korea, so no Korean war; no Communist guerilla in Vietnam, so none of the wars in Indochina; no Great Leap Forward and its 30 million victims; no Cultural Revolution; oh, and no Tiananmen massacre either, though that is almost incidental. Not that this alternate China would be a democracy; by 2004, the regime would probably have evolved into Singapore-style paternalist technocracy. But what's important is that a China that would be spared the madness of the Mao era would instead have been able to focus its strength on development at home and influence-building abroad. By now, much of East Asia would be under a latter-day version of the Ming- and Qing-era system of tutelage. Japan would still be part of the American sphere of influence, but those lands from Yakutia to Vietnam would once again take their political--and probably cultural--cues from a neo-imperial China.
A more detailed version is available in French, if anyone's interested. What do you think?
). I`d been wanting to add stuff to it for a while anyway, but first I`d like to see how you like it in its current shape.