Please stop calling our legal professionals that.Isn't most of the USA like that?
Please stop calling our legal professionals that.Isn't most of the USA like that?
Taaaaaaaaang
No An Lushan Rebellion, Talas goes better... there's a lot of ways to wank the Tang. This looks like the best bet for a big China to me.
This is literally my life as a Floridian.Isn't most of the USA like that?
I assume it is like with Jamestown. For some reason, local tribes never bothered living on a swampy area without fresh water. But for some reason, these people come in and decide to settle there...This is literally my life as a Floridian.
Walk outside for a couple seconds, then go back inside, and a short while later, covered in mosquito bites. It's insane.
Southeast Asia was extremely underpopulated (as in, a quarter of China's population density in 1500). A colonial China could easily make all of Southeast Asia majority Han in a century or two (except northern Vietnam where population densities were as high as China's).Could Borneo be demographically swamped by Chinese via an earlier POD or heavily wanked Lanfang Republic that ends up becoming part of China?
OTL size.
We had been very lucky to keep it. It's only the disunion among imperialist powers like Russia, Japan, Britain and France did we keep Xinjiang, Tibet, Manchuria and many other lands.
It's been very lucky indeed for China to stay as one piece.
It would have to march over mountains, deserts, tundra, oceans, or highly populated neighboring who are already kissing their feet to get more land. They had a out as large a size as they could manage, with having a vibrant economy bringing them awe form the world. Managing to unify an area like a subcontinent isn't too bad.I think you're underselling your own country's potential.
It would have to march over mountains, deserts, tundra, oceans, or highly populated neighboring who are already kissing their feet to get more land. They had a out as large a size as they could manage, with having a vibrant economy bringing them awe form the world. Managing to unify an area like a subcontinent isn't too bad.
more land for the reich, yo
We kept most of Manchuria- the Russians still walked off with Outer Manchuria.OTL size.
We had been very lucky to keep it. It's only the disunion among imperialist powers like Russia, Japan, Britain and France did we keep Xinjiang, Tibet, Manchuria and many other lands.
It's been very lucky indeed for China to stay as one piece.
With a pre-1900 POD? Gawd...
More or less as big as you want it to be. Just following the track it was on before the Mongols derailed it and becoming an extremely high-productivity pre-industrial society would easily give it the capability to dominate the Pacific Rim and Indian Ocean. If it were to move into the colonial game in the same way Europe did IOTL (possible if domestic productivity is high enough that prosperity makes it out of the nobility, bureaucracy, and mercantile houses and drives commercial adventurism), it would almost certainly wind up directly ruling over Western North America, Australia, and maybe Siberia. There's no particular reason it couldn't expand into more limited footholds in Africa and South America, which may or may not be demographically overwhelmed.
Whether such a China (still with nearly bottomless supplies of poor, rural laborers fueling its productivity boom) would actually industrialize before Europe is debatable, but at minimum it would be sufficiently dynamic and commercial to match European innovations once they'd paved the way, meaning it is extremely unlikely that it would be kicked around as IOTL and would thus retain any demographically Han regions right to the present.
That surplus was IOTL nearly entirely consumed by the great houses; from the time of the great divergence around 1300 on, the Chinese peasantry was a non-entity and its middle class trivially small; a China which reaches a high-productivity preindustrial state in which the highest productivity areas are similar to the Low Countries in the 17th century will require immensely more of the goods which it was IOTL able to acquire by trade than IOTL.Why would the Chinese colonize so much area when trade routes bring so much to them to begin with? IIRC, China already had a very favorable trade advantage with most of the world, and combine that with their superiority complex, why bother colonizing far-flung areas? And I don't understand how China would be able to directly rule over Western North America, Australia, and Siberia when they're both far away and the Chinese seemed to favor the tributary system as a means of political domination. And with so many peasants providing a huge labor pool, does China have the incentive to industrialize?