AHC: Make China as big as possible (NECRO: DO NOT POST!)

How big can China get?


  • Total voters
    159
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.

What if An Lushan breaks off western parts of the empire to create his own Da Yan kingdom instead of trying to usurp Tang throne? Da Yan would be a Sinified Central Asian empire which eventually expands to include Kazahkstan and Xinjiang. The Yan is later conquered by Genghis and become part of the Yuan dynasty.
 
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.
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...
 
Could Borneo be demographically swamped by Chinese via an earlier POD or heavily wanked Lanfang Republic that ends up becoming part of China?
 
A China that fully industrialized before everyone else could easily conquer the entire world. So that's my answer--the entire world.

Could Borneo be demographically swamped by Chinese via an earlier POD or heavily wanked Lanfang Republic that ends up becoming part of China?
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).
 
honestly .. most of Siberia up to the arctic .. throw in some islands.. korea.. maybe napel too south east asia if you want to be greedy.. but they would be much harder to hold.

simply if they can manage to hold the land Siberia would be easy, there is nothing there
 
I discussed this in a no-Islam thread a few months back, but the Tang indirectly controlled a absolutely massive amount of Central Asia, all the way to the Caspian during the early 7th Century. If we butterfly away Islam and maybe wank Tang a tiny bit to make them more stable, there could very well be a Pax Sinica in Central Asia that could last for a century or so. I am 99% sure this wouldn't be able to last to modern times, but it could very well make China the true hegemon of Eastern and Western Asia during the Early Middle Ages. Although this would make them extremely overstretched.
 
I would say about their OTL's Qing bordee plus Korea, Japan, most of central Asia and a bit more of SE Asia (Vietnam, a bit off Laos and Cambodia and maaaaybe the Philipines)
 
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.
 
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.

I think you're underselling your own country's potential.
 
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.
 
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.

True, but the map of the Qing dynasty at their height posted earlier in this thread gives a reasonable idea of Chinese expansion. I think that isn't so unreasonable.
 
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.
We kept most of Manchuria- the Russians still walked off with Outer Manchuria.
 
I've often wondered the same thing about China. I once made a map with a super-sized China, though I didn't provid any rhyme or reason as to why it was so large:

upload_2017-6-27_7-51-25.png


Also includes Alaska.
 

Deleted member 94708

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.
 
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.


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?
 

Deleted member 94708

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?
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.

I honestly don't know why this is even an argument against Chinese imperialism; it's not as if European nations intentionally set out to subjugate the whole planet starting from 1450, and yet starting from trading posts and naval power they nonetheless ended up doing just that. I have no doubt that a China initially driven by the same logic (Indian spices, Japanese silver, European furs) would proceed down a similar path, with vastly more power behind it.
 
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