China Modernizes?

[Fabilius]

I think the idea being expressed by the post you have quoted is that Japan "proved" itself to be a power when it won the war with Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Yeah, but by then it already was a power, the Europeans just hadn´t realized it yet

Of course, a modernized China would sooner or later be tangled into a war, and a TL featuring it would probably be made more interesting by something like a chinese victory over a european power.

 

[Hendryk]

Of course, a modernized China would sooner or later be tangled into a war, and a TL featuring it would probably be made more interesting by something like a chinese victory over a european power.

Said victory can be symbolic. Even if it goes largely unnoticed in the West, it may go a long way in China. In my "Superpower Empire" TL, I had the nascent Qian dynasty kick the Germans out of the Shandong peninsula in 1914, which sounds impressive until you realize the Germans only had a small garrison of 3,000 men stationed in Qingdao, with no hope of getting any reinforcement thanks to the Entente's blocus. From a European perspective that was barely a footnote in the history of the Great War, but in China it was perceived as breaking from a century-long decline.