AHC Most successful Chinese colonialism?

If the voyages of Zhen He weren't the height of Ming Era Chinese exploration but just the beginning how far could Chinese exploration and colonization have gone?
 
The real prospect of exploration were the Philippines, Malaysia, Borneo, Indonesia, the eastern coast of Africa and Australia.

I don't think they would colonize, they were more interested in trade and some natural resources not easily or plentiful found in China
a) they would have an extensive network of trading posts for ivory, dyes, spices, pearls, cotton, textiles, exotic animal skins or feathers.
b) perhaps some private ventures like mining tin, iron gold, silver and semiprecious stones were chinese workers would be used.
c) plantations for cotton, hemp and jute
d) financial services (lending and banking operations)?

In some cases like the eastern coast of Africa they would directly trade manufactured chinese goods for the local resources or products.

There would a major development of naval technology with faster and bigger ships and improvement in cartography and navigation in the high seas.

Note: Not considering Menzies' book that is completely ASB and lacking of evidence.
 
Last edited:

Skallagrim

Banned
That depends a lot on certain assumptions one might care to make. Allow me, please to argue (as I have argued before) that all cultures are subject to a developmental push-and-pull effect: that which Arnold Toynbee called "challenge and response". This seems a weird aside, but I promise that it's very relevant.

We all know (and most of us are irritated by) the oft-heard story that Chinese culture was stagnant, frozen, and generally devoid of innovation by the time the Europeans exploded outward into the world. Dynamic Europe, until c. 1500 or so generally less developed than China, rapidly overtook stagnant China and the rest is, as they say, history. That this last bit happened is not disputed (yes, scientifically and technolgically, Europe did evidently overtake China). The problem is that people then back-project this state of affairs unto Chinese history, and conclude that China was inherently stagnant and unable to develop. Quite respectable historians have put forward this theory, telling us at great lenghth that the Confucian mindset (its focus on balance and order) inherently causes stagnation. They conclude that China was doomed to stagnate.

This approach to Chinese history would force us to believe that no matter what, China was constitutionally unfit to dynamically colonise (as the oh-so-dynamic Europeans did). It would lead us to think that even if China had embarked on colonisation projects, they would be "novelties". Half-hearted attempts, not really getting broad support at all. After all, China already had its celestial and earthly order perfectly arranged, wanted for nothing, and had nothing much that it wanted to do outside the spheres of its own civilised oikoumene (to borrow a Greek term that catches the gist of what I mean). So if we were to believe the "stagnant China" approach, the asnwer to your question would be "not very far at all". And this has, for a long time, been an implicit assumption in Western histories of China.

I happen to disagree with that assumption. The aforementioned cycle of "challenge and response", I believe, entails that cultures are often victims of their own success. If everthing is in order, stagnation follows. But stagnation itself is a weakness, which leads to problems (challenges) which then demand a dynamic response (or they kill you, if you fail to respond). China has seen periods of great challenges (war, fragmentation, upheavals of all sorts), all of which were overcome (by innovation and transformation), and led to subsequent periods of order (unification, peace, properity), all of which lead (in the long term) to stagnation. This happens to all cultures, everywhere, and is not somehow unique to China. Europeans simply ran into a China that was at the apogee of unified period, clearly going into stagnation. And so, European historians painted all of Chinese history in the light of that view.

Why is all of this so damned relevant to the question at hand? Because colonialism itself provides a whole basketload of challenges for a culture, which demand dynamic responses. Europe was in part so very dynamic (changing, evolving) in the period 1500-1900 because the very enterprise of colonising the world and encountering all sorts of unfamiliar things demanded such dynamism. The resulting attitude, plus the immense wealth provided by colonialist ventures, financed the enormous leaps that Europe subsequently made-- which allowed to bound past China and India. (No colonialism, no industrial revolution-- at least not so soon and not on such a large scale.)

Now... if China had begun an age of colonialism (just before the Europeans), China would have met all those challenges, would have been forced to develop dynamic responses (generally fostering a dynamic/innovative attitude), and would soon have taken possession of immense amounts of newly-gathered wealth. I daresay that a Chinese industrial revolution, in roughly the same time-frame as the OTL European one, would hardly be out of the question. In any event... Europeans sailing aroud Africa to reach the Oriënt would -- to their surprise -- run into their Chinese counterparts soon enough. As a result, China would be in a far better position to fend off European encroachment, and conversely, at least everything beyond the Indian subcontinent would be denied to the Europeans.

I daresay that the Chinese had very bad luck in OTL. The Europeans happened to befall them at a very inconvenient time. In this ATL, the Chinese would be in a period of cultural uswing instead (just like Europe during the same period), and would meet the Europeans on equal footing. Instead of the Europeans carving up nearly the entire globe during the period 1500-1900, they'd have to console themselves with "merely" half that.

Because the other half would belong to China.
 
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