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It would seem that there is exactly one China thread in the "Before 1900" section, and even that is a DBWI, despite China currently having ~20% of the world's population and historically having had from 1/4 to 1/3 of it. I find that a pity, personally, so here goes nothing (I'm planning on just following the timeline and doing the research as I go, without any long-term plan).
Before I begin: I'm not going to change toponyms from OTL ones, because they don't really have any effect to the timeline besides making it more confusing and because the POD is very prehistoric and TTL's languages are going to be unintelligible to us thanks to the vagaries of linguistics.
I'm also not going to engage in any narrative (at least not internal narrative), because we can't truly comprehend the actions of historical people even in OTL (it's an issue I have with some historical fiction - after all, the past is a foreign country) and it's worse in an ATL.
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China and the lower Yangtze in the Neolithic era: Shangshan and Early Kuahuqiao

Perhaps because Chinese cuisine is today so heavily associated with rice, laypeople rarely know much about the many other crops that were cultivated by the first Chinese farmers in both the north and the south of the country. For the former we have, for instance, the nearly-forgotten broomcorn millet, which was probably cultivated in the Cishan site up to ten millenniums ago.

In the warm and humid lower Yangtze, some form of water caltrop aquaculture appears to have developed in the Shangshan culture (ca. 9000~7000 BC) roughly concurrently with the early domestication of rice; the Shangshan site itself reveals an unnaturally large number of both
Trapa natans and Trapa bicornis shells, the oldest of which has been dated to around 7600 BC (ca. 9600 cal. BP). The seeds of both species are eaten by the Chinese today. Aquaculture became both more diverse and more important during the Kuahuqiao culture (ca. 7000~5000 BC), which followed the Shangshan in the lower Yangtze. By the Kuahuqiao era around ten aquatic genera were being regularly cultivated as a food source in the environment of the lower Yangtze: the aforementioned water caltrops (Trapa) but also fox nuts (Euryale), lotuses (Nelumbo), arrowheads (Sagittaria), water chestnuts (Eleocharis), wild rice (Zizania), water dropworts (Oenanthe), water shields (Brasenia), water spinach (Ipomoea) and cattails (Typha). Another genus, Juncus (rushes), was grown solely because of their inedible stems, which were used to make mats, baskets, and lamps.

Another Early Kuahuqiao (7th millennium BC) innovation was the invention of the tournette, or the "slow wheel." This was a significant, if not revolutionary, change in the making of pottery. Instead of making all pot completely by hand as had been the norm in both China and the wider world for millenniums, certain pots were now "wheel thrown," meaning that the potter could now rotate a simple wheel-head to facilitate making the pot. The tournette had more widespread uses as well; it was also used for smoothing, finishing, trimming, and shaving. However, not all pots were yet made with tournettes, since their intrinsic limitations meant that the wheel-thrown pot would not become ubiquitous until the emergence of the true potter's wheel.

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So here's some OTL explanation to this.
All of the cultures I just mentioned existed at the time period I ascribed to them (the source is The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age), and the POD is just that aquaculture in the lower Yangtze begins about 2500 years before it actually did (all of the plants I just mentioned above began to be cultivated in the Hemudu culture in OTL, which was from around 5000 to 3000 BC - even the proliferation of water caltrop shells is rooted in actual history). While this may seem ASB, the people of the Shangshan culture in the lower Yangtze weren't strangers to the concept of plant cultivation or agriculture, seeing as they were probably already cultivating various types of rice (some of which seems to be domesticated and resemble japonica). The climate in the region during the time was warm and humid, and it would continue to be so for a few centuries (again probably better for aquaculture - if we look at Hemudu aquaculture it began during the climatic optimum). Early aquaculture should allow a relatively larger population in the long term, which in turn leads to earlier technological breakthroughs - that's where I'm heading with the tournettes. Yangshao pots in OTL, about 6200 years old, appear to have been wheel-thrown, probably with tournettes, so it's not too unrealistic to think it could emerge somewhat earlier, considering that Kuahuqiao pottery is fairly sophisticated anyways (to the point that there's a specialized settlement around the Kuahuqiao site that was probably a pottery locus). I don't think aquaculture could make the lower Yangtze be the center of China anyways, but it's still a fun exercise especially seeing how much the lower Yangtze affected "Chinese" civilization even in OTL (for example the Six Ritual Jades come from the lower Yangtze).
Sources for this are Keightley's The Origins of Chinese Civilization and A Companion to Chinese Archaeology as well as The Archaeology of China that I already mentioned.
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