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'.
Wait, how the hell did Japan get involved?
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.
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.
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.