He did IOTL. Zanzibar and Witu for Heligoland and the Caprivi Strip.
Ha! I knew it! Ain´t I a genius?
More seriously: Well, I guess than that it could work more or less as I proposed.
Now, let´s continue with the timeline.
Starting in late 1921, Austria-Hungary goes through a period of messy ethnic conflict, with open unrest, terrorism, reprisals by army units against real or suspected partisans, reprisals by partisans against real or suspected collaborators with the government, and so on.
By 1924, the Emperor [Franz Ferdinand I, survivor of Sarajevo, who ascended to the throne in 1917 after the death of Franz Josef I], tired of the conflict, and sensing that his remaining loyal subjects are tired of it as well, partially dissolves the nation of Austria-Hungary; only Austria and Hungary themselves remain under his rule. The other former parts of the Empire gain independence as small nations, some of whom immediately clash with one another over territorial disputes, or old or new grievances; the general sentiment in Austria-Hungary is that it is
so relaxing to be rid of them.
China, on the other hand, does not get away that easily. From 1922 on, the country is wracked by a bitter civil war fought among, most of the time, at least six different factions.
The strongest single rebel faction is that of the Communists, who are backed by their comrades in the new Soviet Union.
Among the other rebel factions, the one led by Sun Yat-sen is eventually the most successful, although they suffer several setbacks. The major turning point for them is in 1925, when Britain and Germany begin to support them with money and military equipment (particularly tanks and aircraft) [Tanks are still a new and rather unproven technology at this time; they were used for the first time during the Russian Civil War, where they were successful against lightly-armed Communist infantry on the open plains, but already showed their vulnerability in urban combat; airplanes have so far mostly been used as scouts and observers (the Russian Communists had very few aircraft, so no dedicated fighter evolved), but the Chinese Civil War will spur aircraft development much like World War I did in the OTL].
Pretty much from the start, the Imperial Chinese government is aided by Japan. This aid is coated in much noble-sounding rhetoric about "assisting another legitimate government against the depredations of bandits and terrorists" and such, but it quickly becomes clear that Japan aims to make China its puppet.
On February 20th, 1926, something happens that will have great consequences for naval warfare in times to come. A jury-rigged biplane torpedo bomber flying from a Communist airbase attacks and hits the former flagship of the IJN (Imperial Japanese Navy), the now obsolete pre-dreadnaught
Mikasa which had been conducting a shore bombardment near Shanghai. The damage to the ship is severe enough to force it to retire, and ultimately leads to it being scrapped due to its being too old and outdated to be worth repairing, but the more important result is the injury to the IJN´s pride. Having a battleship, even an obsolete one, put out of action by a flimsy and jury-rigged aircraft leads them to rethink their position on the utility of aircraft, and ultimately become the leading power with regards to the use of aerial torpedoes. Other nations also shift their doctrine towards naval aviation and away from a solely battleship-based navy, but none to quite as large a degree as the IJN.
The Chinese Civil War, meanwhile, ends in 1929, more through total exhaustion as from any other cause, and leads to China being partitioned among three powers.
The Nationalists, under the not wholly uncontested leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen´s successor, control the Southwest of China, including the port city of Guangzhou, and Hainan. Their capital is Guangzhou.
What is left of the Chinese Empire, now a Japanese puppet state, retains the Northeast of China, minus the port city of Qingdao, which it "generously ceded to the Empire of Japan in return for their assistance against the rebels" (read: which Japan seized because they wanted to, and the Chinese could not stop them) [Qingdao/Tsingtao was never a German colony in this ATL]; their capital remains in Beijing.
The communists control the rest of the country, from the coastline opposite Formosa [which has been controlled by Japan since 1895, as in the OTL] to the Northwest, where it shares a border with the Eastern part of the Soviet Union, giving the two Communist nations a contiguous land area reaching from the Black Sea to the South China Sea.
Needless to say, this situation is not particularly stable, since all three sides (plus Japan) intend to gain control of the other factions´ territory as soon as they have recovered from the first civil war.