All Under Heaven - A Collaborative History of Monarchist China

Soooo, everyone who cares to be interested, let's save Imperial China!

We can start anywhere, but the general 'goal' is to prevent the disestablishment of dynastic China, be it Han or Mongol or Manchu.

Thoughts?
 

RousseauX

Donor
This could be done really easily

just have yuan shikai support the Qing dynasty over the rebels in 1911

the Qing imperial court had already lost most of its power to ethnic chinese military men and political institutions by that point, if Yuan preserved them the Qing would have survived as a support of quasi-constitutional monarchy. They would have had -no- power and being completely controlled by Yuan and the Beiyang army generals. If China is stable for the next 30-40 years they could very well end up in the same role as the German royal house in Britain today.
 
Is there a conceivable period to do it in which the emperors and nobility (I'm not actually sure if China had a nobility in the european sense) retain power?
 
Maybe, again, something with Yuan Shikai - just make him, in 1898, choose Guanxu side instead of Cixi. If Cixi and Rong Lu fail during their coup and reforms are finished, China will be already in far better position.
 
I've always had a soft spot for Guangxu and his hundred day's reform. If you can keep him alive and push through the reforms you might have a shot at preserving the monarchy. If you want a later date, keeping a baby off the throne would be a good start.
 
Okay, looks like Yuan Shikai is siding with the emperor during the coup d'etat against his hundred days reform. As I don't really know the figures and big personalities of China in this period input would be nice.
 
The right kind of reform matters too. Part of the reason underlying the Japan success/Chinese failure argument was that the Chinese Self-Strengthening Movement did not seek a wholesale reconstruction/construction of the country's institutions: for example, there was no modern police force, educational system or cabinet government OTL until the Late Qing reforms in the 1900s. Such failures might have caused the marked deficiency in Chinese 'software' (e.g. training, innovation) in comparison to 'hardware' acquisition (arsenals, ships, etc.), the latter of which was quite successful by most measurements. So you had the curious situation in the late 19thC where China had the largest fleet in Asia (before Sino-Japanese War), yet its soldiers during the Boxer Rebellion could not be expected to hold defensive lines against a bayonet charge.

Alternatively, one could also argue that Chinese reform was too radical - in that the state quickly abandoned its traditional raison d'etre of maintaining agricultural infrastructure in favor of a more commercial bent. The Chinese emphasis on sovereignty, applied here in the face of intense Western commercial penetration, led to the state devoting most of its efforts to creating native companies to compete with the West (China Steamship Co/China Merchants etc.), as well as hardware such as rail, telegraph etc. But the benefits of commercial reform rarely trickled down onto the vast majority of Chinese farmers, who were saddled with the costs of state re-prioritization in the form of bandits, floods, and famine. Again and again, rural revolt was a constant threat for Chinese governments: Taiping, Nian, Boxers (dispossessed Grand Canal porters/messengers due to rail/telegraph), and of course the Chinese Communists.

Still, if we are talking about the late 1890s and 1900s, it's probably too late to be contending with the direction of reform.
 
You will probably need to either butterfly the Manchu dynasty or have it overthrown by a non-republican movement.A 'barbarian' dynasty's prospects aren't that good.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Is there a conceivable period to do it in which the emperors and nobility (I'm not actually sure if China had a nobility in the european sense) retain power?
Probably not: modernization is anti-thesis to monarchs keeping power. The russian tsars, the german kaiser, the UK king etc all ended up losing power in the end because monarchs are fundamentally obsolete political institutions.

The Chinese nobility are the gentry-scholar class who retained power through land owning and service in the imperial bureaucracy: keeping this class of people in power is quite easy: after all they function just as well in a Republican or constitutional monarchy as the old imperial system.
 
Probably not: modernization is anti-thesis to monarchs keeping power. The russian tsars, the german kaiser, the UK king etc all ended up losing power in the end because monarchs are fundamentally obsolete political institutions.

The Chinese nobility are the gentry-scholar class who retained power through land owning and service in the imperial bureaucracy: keeping this class of people in power is quite easy: after all they function just as well in a Republican or constitutional monarchy as the old imperial system.

Asia isn't Europe, the modernization of Japan or Siam for example both saw their monarchs retain considerable amounts of power. Why is this somehow impossible in China?
 

RousseauX

Donor
Asia isn't Europe, the modernization of Japan or Siam for example both saw their monarchs retain considerable amounts of power. Why is this somehow impossible in China?
Not sure about Siam about the Meiji system was always a constitutional monarchy even throughout the war.

Even then there's a pretty big conceptual difference between a Chinese emperor and a japanese one, a chinese emperor was always closer to a European king whereas the japanese emperor is a quasi-divine coming from one line of emperors going back 1000 years.

Chinese emperors come and go and gets overthrown all the time

in practice this determine show much the constitution eventually limits your power and whether radicals are willing to just do away with the monarchy altogether.
 
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