AHC: China divided up into European colonies, WITHOUT Sinicisation of the colonisers

RousseauX

Donor
Easy - splitting the country into multiple colonies - just latinize / cyrilize the local "dialects" standard written languageS, and you get several dozens of OTL Vietnam analogs. Cutting off the hierogliphic writting system = nobody to maintain anything near Mandarin / officialized "dialect". Chinese turns into dead language.

Sinicization of EUROPEAN colonists!!! Impossible. NOTHING in the 18-19th political, phylosophical etc. chinese culture could rival the achievements of the western thought.

reference : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon -- where is the non-european equivalent of this ??? ( not mere chinese but put ALL non-euro indigenous civ-s together, pls ).
Oh god every China thread is gonna have some creepy dude either advocating the destruction of China or some shit about the superiority of Europeans.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Really don't get what you mean by sinicisation of the colonisers. That hardly ever happened with colonies IOTL.
Sinicisation of the colonizers would be the result of the necessity of Sinicisation towards the direct rule of any large scale Chinese territories on a provincial or above level.

Historically China has being governed by cooperation between the imperial bureaucracy and the local landed gentry (the lower nobility). What is notable of course is the fact that tying all of this together is the Confucian-Legalist literati tradition as well as "high art" and the prestige associated with it. The gentry have always being supportive of said tradition which probably defines Chinese high culture in the way that it's being used in this thread. This tradition is pretty instrumental in how China assembled itself back together after the fall of the Han whereas the Europe never did after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

So basically any colonizers would presumably need to find some way of ruling over pieces of China without resorting to open warfare on a regular basis. Which means it has to enlist the support of the gentry, which in turn means it pretty much has to adopt said Chinese high culture and governing traditions. Which means that it might as well as retain the imperial bureaucracy in some form (perhaps by keeping a fiction of a continued Qing dynasty with an imperial court in Beijing) as the most cost effective form of governance.

Ok unless you are an idiot like Sharkeni who probably thinks Chinese would just accept European language/culture because it's so superior. His thing is basically wrong because the gentry would resist any attempt at imposing foreign languages/cultural traditions upon them because they have too big of a stake in the existing language/cultural tradition and more to the point are probably the people who most identify with Chinese language (being literate and all) in the first place.

This is where sinization come in, it doesn't mean the immediate wholesale adoption of Chinese culture by the colonizers, rather, it means that the colonizers have to place themselves at the top of the Chinese ruling structure. Because of the smaller number of the colonizers the majority of the people running said ruling structure will still be Chinese. Which means very quickly they have to adopt at least -some- of the Chinese governing tradition in dealing with the Chinese themselves. Over time though, the conclusion is almost inevitable: some mixture of European and Chinese governing system is going to emerge, just like OTL. But the key is that the Europeans would have to adopt Chinese methods in ruling Chinese subjects.

From this perspective, in OTL the Europeans pretty much achieved the optimal solution in ruling China: simply control the imperial government at the very top and use it to advance its interests in China rather than doing the dirty work themselves.
 
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What distinguishes Han China from the Democratic Republic of China or the Chinese People's Republic?

That's probably a good basis to work from for a balkanization, though it could use some improvements. Some of the government types seem a bit random; Chinese People's Republic occupies territory that was culturally associated with Chinese Hui Muslims (I've no clue if they were the majority at the time or simply a very large minority), but that territory was ruled in 1929 by the Hui Muslim Ma warlord clique, which would probably make more sense than a Communist state. As this is 1929, Taiwan is probably still ruled by Japan.

Other than that, yeah, the maps' probably workable. It still, however, runs into the major problem of Han China and Democratic Republic of China controlling the vast majority of China's population, not really making it much of a balkanization.

I assume some sort of Qing imperial successor state? That leaves the three big China's to be divided ideologically as well.

It's a good base to start from in any case - how might it be further divided?
 
I'd make the ideological states into ethnic states, and then divide Han China into something along the lines of a PRC north and a ROC south. Potentially, you could have further colonial concessions, probably along the coast. While you're at it, might as well make Mongolia into Greater Mongolia, so it gets Inner Mongolia from the Hui state and Han China, and the Manchurian Soviet.

Past that, not much, I can see. Maybe have a tripartite Han China, Communist, Liberal Democracy, and Fascist, something like that. The truth of the matter is what was mentioned above, that China actually is pretty unified as a nation-state. Even in the territory of many of the proposed ethnic states, Han Chinese are very significant minorities, if not the majority.
 
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