CH: Give China A Better Option

On Legalism... It was claimed, I heard, that it actually 'won' the 'war of ideas' of China's distant past; scholars call the imperial system 'Legalism with a Confucean veneer', to 'mellow it'.
 
B
Wait, how the hell did Japan get involved?:confused:

With the 2nd, even with the whole Mandate of Heaven thing? It was an Emperor that caused China to be ludicrously isolationist, surely this can go the other way.

You're the one who brought it up. I'm still trying to figure out what you mean, especialliy with this one.

China never really went completely isolationist. Not even Japan did, really. China basically sat back, thinking it was the center of the universe and knowledge. The pesky newcomers from Europe were only good for silver until they started imposing their power on China. And by then it was too late.

The emperor can do lots of things, but imposing hundreds of years worth of cultural foundations on the population in a matter of decades with the wave of a magic wand, whether you call it legalism or the mandate of heaven, is simply impossible.

Try this for an analogy: tomorrow, Obama declares that the US will become a Buddhist nation. He lays out a logical reason for doing so and congress somehow agrees. They use the full power of the federal government to try and make it so. Will they be able to make it stick? No, of course not.
 
B

You're the one who brought it up. I'm still trying to figure out what you mean, especialliy with this one.

China never really went completely isolationist. Not even Japan did, really. China basically sat back, thinking it was the center of the universe and knowledge. The pesky newcomers from Europe were only good for silver until they started imposing their power on China. And by then it was too late.

The emperor can do lots of things, but imposing hundreds of years worth of cultural foundations on the population in a matter of decades with the wave of a magic wand, whether you call it legalism or the mandate of heaven, is simply impossible.

Try this for an analogy: tomorrow, Obama declares that the US will become a Buddhist nation. He lays out a logical reason for doing so and congress somehow agrees. They use the full power of the federal government to try and make it so. Will they be able to make it stick? No, of course not.

The mention of Japan was probably a bizarre typo on my error, my apologies.

For the rest, the problem is that an Emperor did set forth the process of isolationism originally. Yes, I'm sure there were other elements, but the Emperor was an important catalyst.

Okay, you're right, the Emperor can't instantly make China non-isolationist. But he can certainly start it on the path towards doing so.

Regardless, this can't work here unfortunately, as apparently 1900 is too late for anything.:(
 
Killer300, re: the "Mandate of Heaven" -- think of it as a conditional take on "divine right", that the Mandate could be lost by poor rule and overthrow, though of course ruling dynasties tended not like to the "conditional" part. :p

I'd add that there's a reason that there's a Chinese saying called "Heaven is high and the emperor far away"... he and his personal loyalists couldn't be everywhere at once.
 
I'm with Osakadave on this one

I'm of the opinion that there wasn't an emperor that could reverse the tide of Qing imperial collapse. Caixi OTOH did her dead level best to make sure the Qing were finsihed after her reign.
You needed a leader with a party of supporters and organizers working with a degree of autonomy and feedback the Chinese bureaucracy needed but didn't cultivate terribly well in its end stages.

Basically IMO the Self-strengthening Movement needed to have and keep some momentum or a KMT/GMD analogue to be organized and get its ground game going in the 1890's so when the Qing Empire collapses, there's a system in place that has a clear message and game plan.
Sun Yat Sen was great about the message and the game plan, but the folks enacting it weren't beholden to him in any particular way.

My POD would be that China pulls a republican Meiji. becomes a power to be reckoned with by WWI. In exchange for participating with the Allies, all unequal treaties are trashed.
China and Taisho Japan find lots of ways to modernize but also find their way in the world of imperialism. IOTL, Japan's modernization gave SYS and the KMT lots of ideas and support 1870-1920.
Being an American, I'd like the US to be heavily involved in investing in this and guiding/learning from it, be the honest broker a lot of folks hoped it would be but didn't.
Pacific Century starting 1920, not 1990! Taisho Japan and Chinese Republic form mighty economic and political bloc as forces of democracy and anti-imperialism in the Pacfiic sphere and League of Nations.
 
If you need a mass movement that is not anti-modern/isolationist to lay down the ground support for the reforms of, or indeed itself set the reforms creating the condition for, an effective Republican government...why not the Chinese anarchists? They were a significant presence, with ties to the Russian Nihilists and later reformed into more palatable anarcho-communists with their intellectual center in Canton among guys like Liu Shifu, had links to the West (the Chinese Anarchist movement including those who had studied abroad in Paris and elsewhere), and were according to the Wikipedia article about Liu Shifu among the first groups in the republican era to forge an alliance with the peasantry as the basis of their support for radical reform.

Best of all, this mass movement of modernizing intellectuals and peasants is intrinsically decentralized due to, you know, anarchism and could plausibly cause an agrarian revolution and then collapse in on itself, unable to seize power and become corrupt.

An agrarian revolution, but one done by people like the anarchists who don't hate the outside world or hate modernism, could set the conditions in place for Sun Yat Sen and other center-left republican types to form a central government with the landlords, bankers, and corrupt local officials already chastised. And plenty times in history a radical mass movement has laid down its arms only to be "betrayed" by a more reformist group in government, so you have the basis for these revolutionaries to start a mass struggle for agrarian reform and then, amidst over centralization and being talked down by sympathetic figures like Sun Yat-Sen, collapse back into the population rather than creating a civil war that would ravage the country.

Basically, I think a mass movement among the agrarian population, a Populist pressure making the local bigshots more willing to compromise with the republican government in exchange for law and order protecting them, is the way to go. And I think the anarchists are a better choice than the Communists (too well organized, would not fall apart but instead rip the country apart) or an anti-Western/anti-modernist traditionalist Harmonious Fists or White Lotus style group.

An agrarian revolution spurred on by the anarcho-communists of Canton could sort of force social reform and federalism by creating local assemblies and terrorizing the local authorities for a while, before falling apart from disorganization and by accepting the promises of left republicans like Sun Yat Sen. Thus, the republican government would have an existing segment of the populace giving their authority backbone, and existing structures in the form of surviving local assemblies leading to a federal system of government.

I imagine after the central government is well established, the landlords would be back on top locally again, but some progress would have be made and most importantly it would allow the central government to know it has a popular base and let the people know they can appeal to the central government for watered down reform, shifting from warlordism and revolutionary violence to a lengthy process of legalistic reform with a strong populist movement backing it up on the grassroots level.
 
You now, that's an excellent suggestion, and one I should've considered being an Anarchist myself, along with the presence they had in China frequently.

Additionally, it would be the scare needed to force reforms because it would force elites to choose whether they wanted to give a little to improve things, or be stripped of all their privileges, and possibly killed.
 
The problem with "pulling a Meiji" isn't one of who puts it through, but rather of having the cultural institutions in place.

During it's period of "isolation", Japan developed much more sophisticated economic institutions than China - proto-corporations like Mitsui and Sumitomo, as well as the world's 1st commodities market (which was also a sophisticated banking system).

As, I alluded to above, Japan's isolation wasn't complete. The Dutch learning was important in two ways. First, it kept Japan somewhat up to date on scientific and technological advances. But more importantly, it illustrates a general cultural difference - Japan was open to and able to learn from abroad rather than China's attitude of being the center of all that was great and wonderful in the world.

To pull a Meiji in China, solve those issues before the Europeans start getting their hooks set in.
 
See, I think a Meiji isn't really the ticket. You have intellectuals educated in the West and they were able to form mass movements - the Anarchists had contacts among the peasantry, and later of course the Communists did that very well. Plus the republicans were able to influence military commanders well enough, though that ended up biting them in the ass with the warlords. You don't really need a state instituted Westernization program, there are the mechanisms in place for a democratic political system, with different factions with different outside nations they favor and different modernizing ideologies to compete with each other.

You just need to give the republican government enough strength to hold the country together, without being so autocratic that it has to incompetently/corruptly try to modernize from the top down. It needs to be democratic enough that these mass movements will work through the system, or at least through other means of organizing such as trade unions and corporations and so forth, rather than by seceding or forming armies. Yet it needs to be strong enough that the local military commanders don't just dispense justice as they see fit as happened OTL.

Personally I think federalism, likely through an Anarchist-inspired agrarian movement, is one way of establishing this delicate balance; with the republican government able to govern effectively but facing strong popular tides from various directions that are self-organizing and participatory, thus relieving it of the burden of one man or one party conceiving of how to modernize the country and forcing it from the top down.

However it is not the only way, there are many ways potential mass movements that could lay the conditions for the center-left republicans like Sun Yat Sen to be able to form a republican government that is effective but not autocratic.
 
B/c based on my wiki-walking- after the Self-Strengthening Movement imploded in the 1880's the Qing Empire was destined for collapse.
Empress Caixi just pointed it downhill at a steeper angle and opened up the throttle for a more impressive kamikaze dive for the Qing Empire.

"Mandate of heaven" always gets IMO mis-translated as "divine right" when actually it means (to me), ruling in accordance with heaven's (Confucian and Buddhist and Taoist) principles of just and effective government to be worthy of popular obedience and support of imperial rule.
It implies a social contract between governor and governed in Confucian government that was only part of medieval Christian ruling philosophy much later ca 1300 when Magna Carta was signed and much more explicitly defined in Machiavelli and Locke roughly 1500-1600 vs ca 1000 when European national states started taking off.

A "good" emperor rules by understanding and supporting what benefits the common people w/o forcing people to do too much against their own interests.
A "bad" emperor who abuses that social contract by laziness, apathy, oppressing the common people with usurious taxes and levies of labor, refusing to keep the mandarinate honest(or selling offices to raise cash and tolerating the tax-farming to buy and keep the offices) violates the Will of Heaven.
The great strength (and weakness) of Confucian scholar-bureaucrats executing the Emperor's Will was reliance on the individual inner strength and wisdom of the bureaucrats to get their egos and agendas out of the way of serving the commonweal.

All this is just my way of saying that the Qing Empire was so far off its own cultural course (violating the Mandate of heaven) and mainfestly flunking dealing with Western incursions that it needed a reset.
 
See, I think a Meiji isn't really the ticket. You have intellectuals educated in the West and they were able to form mass movements - the Anarchists had contacts among the peasantry, and later of course the Communists did that very well. Plus the republicans were able to influence military commanders well enough, though that ended up biting them in the ass with the warlords. You don't really need a state instituted Westernization program, there are the mechanisms in place for a democratic political system, with different factions with different outside nations they favor and different modernizing ideologies to compete with each other.

You just need to give the republican government enough strength to hold the country together, without being so autocratic that it has to incompetently/corruptly try to modernize from the top down. It needs to be democratic enough that these mass movements will work through the system, or at least through other means of organizing such as trade unions and corporations and so forth, rather than by seceding or forming armies. Yet it needs to be strong enough that the local military commanders don't just dispense justice as they see fit as happened OTL.

Personally I think federalism, likely through an Anarchist-inspired agrarian movement, is one way of establishing this delicate balance; with the republican government able to govern effectively but facing strong popular tides from various directions that are self-organizing and participatory, thus relieving it of the burden of one man or one party conceiving of how to modernize the country and forcing it from the top down.

However it is not the only way, there are many ways potential mass movements that could lay the conditions for the center-left republicans like Sun Yat Sen to be able to form a republican government that is effective but not autocratic.

This. Now, if only someone could make a TL featuring this...:(:mad::p
 
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