Chinese colonies in America or Australia

i have heard people talk about Scenarios where Imperial China colonizes the Americas and i was wondering about the plausibility of this occurring. another thing i was wondering was the plausibility of Imperial China colonizing Australia instead of Britain?
 
i have heard people talk about Scenarios where Imperial China colonizes the Americas and i was wondering about the plausibility of this occurring. another thing i was wondering was the plausibility of Imperial China colonizing Australia instead of Britain?
As you can no doubt imagine, there have been zillions of threads on this (though they usually focus on the Americas, rather than Australia).

The main points as to why it is very unlikely boil down to the following:

-The Pacific Ocean is huge compared to the Atlantic. For a comparison: the distance from Brest, France to Newfoundland is about 3500 km. If you go 3500 km east from Shanghai, you are less than halfway to Hawaii, to say nothing of North America proper. And you will have been basically sailing through empty ocean most of the way; if you don't know there's land on the other end, you would almost certainly give up (or starve) before you got there.

-There isn't much for China to want, unless they discover silver or jade very early in the contact. Whereas the European Age of Exploration kicked off with an effort to find a cheaper route to the East, China already has all the goods it needs.

-China had (and still has) plenty of empty land to settle at home, so doesn't have the population pressures that might fuel immigration to a new continent; even if you have political problems, you can always run off to one of the various Mongol/Manchu/etc. tribes or try to colonize Taiwan/etc.

-Finally, there is the political orientation as the Central Kingdom and resultant snobbery towards foreigners/exploration; people make a big deal about this, but I'd argue that it's probably the least important of these reasons. Note that there were (and still are) plenty of Chinese trading communities throughout Southeast Asia/Indonesia; this didn't lead to any further drive to colonize.
 
It's plausible but the chances are extremely small. I'd rate Japan or Korea as having about the same chance of doing it.

Australia might actually have a higher chance. You just need more contact with the outside world. Makassans are the best, but anyway to get some manner of sustained contact/light colonisation of the Aboriginals that is greater than OTL is needed (I like the idea of agriculture somehow filtering in from New Guinea). You need them to find gold. Once they do that, you'll probably lure a Chinese merchant community and/or miners there. Get Australia exporting some other stuff--diamonds, the native mountain pepper, get some trade inputted into the area. Have the Chinese be concentrated in a particular area. Then have the Chinese revolt Lanfang Republic style and then you have a Chinese state in Australia. It isn't particularly likely or plausible, but it seems the best way to get the Chinese there.

-The Pacific Ocean is huge compared to the Atlantic. For a comparison: the distance from Brest, France to Newfoundland is about 3500 km. If you go 3500 km east from Shanghai, you are less than halfway to Hawaii, to say nothing of North America proper. And you will have been basically sailing through empty ocean most of the way; if you don't know there's land on the other end, you would almost certainly give up (or starve) before you got there.

Hence why any East Asian colonisation of America will have to go by means of the currents in the North Pacific, and also net the coloniser Kamchatka in the process. There's also plenty of fur-bearing animals and the rich fisheries to keep the potential coloniser interested if you go the northern route. Since we know Japanese fishermen fished regularly in the Sea of Okhotsk and at times were reported blown off course/shipwrecked in California, I'm gonna assume that this gives Japan (possibly Korea, but I'm not certain there) as equal odds as China in any discussion of colonising the West Coast, even though both have nearly infinite issues to deal with first.
 
-There isn't much for China to want, unless they discover silver or jade very early in the contact. Whereas the European Age of Exploration kicked off with an effort to find a cheaper route to the East, China already has all the goods it needs.
OTOH, there could be once they actually reach the continent. What "superfluous things" are fashionable can be unpredictable; sable furs, shark fins, and a lot of other exotic things became popular in the Ming period. Also, it's not really true that China has everything it wants (Europe probably also has everything it needs from a subsistence viewpoint). A lot of popular, exotic commodities came from Southeast Asia and by extension the Indian Ocean, it's just that there's no real scenario I can think of resulting in a need to find a cheaper route, and even if there was, there's definitely no incentive to go east.

-China had (and still has) plenty of empty land to settle at home, so doesn't have the population pressures that might fuel immigration to a new continent; even if you have political problems, you can always run off to one of the various Mongol/Manchu/etc. tribes or try to colonize Taiwan/etc.
Eh, in 1500 China already had over twice the population density of Europe and many areas were full (as in unlikely to be able to support a larger population without a technological innovation, e.g. New World crops). By 1800 China was definitely quite overpopulated in most places, despite the best efforts of the Qing government to get people to settle mountains. China had very real population pressures, and if the government had encouraged immigration the Chinese diaspora community would be much larger.

-Finally, there is the political orientation as the Central Kingdom and resultant snobbery towards foreigners/exploration; people make a big deal about this, but I'd argue that it's probably the least important of these reasons.
Agreed.

You need them to find gold. Once they do that, you'll probably lure a Chinese merchant community and/or miners there. Get Australia exporting some other stuff--diamonds, the native mountain pepper, get some trade inputted into the area. Have the Chinese be concentrated in a particular area. Then have the Chinese revolt Lanfang Republic style and then you have a Chinese state in Australia. It isn't particularly likely or plausible, but it seems the best way to get the Chinese there.
Wasn't Lanfang (and the other gongsi states) a gongsi that gained independence because Brunei was weak and they were the only force that actually mattered, and not by a revolt? But in any case, yes, this is the best chance without altering the shape of OTL Chinese colonization.


Hence why any East Asian colonisation of America will have to go by means of the currents in the North Pacific, and also net the coloniser Kamchatka in the process.
The Ainu already had significant contact with Kamchatka and theoretically had the capability to reach the Americas, so it's fairly easy for Japan to expand on this (and I don't see why you say the Japanese have "infinite issues"). Korea is far more unlikely than China without reshaping Korean history as we know it.
 
I would also add that China has a huge sparsely populated territory just next to it, i.e. Southeast Asia. This, not the desert south of it or some mysterious land across the ocean, is the most obvious target for any colonization (and the Chinese did colonize much of it in real life).
 
The main problem is psycological. To the average Chinese in say, the 14th century, even if the government was corrupt AF, and the emperors as medicore as meducore can go, China was still, without a doubt best in the world, and nowhere would even hope to match it. As you can imagine, there would be little incentive for any colonisation, amplified more so by the fact that this sense of perfection in ancient China was to some extent, true. Those deserts to the West? Ok, they aren't that far away, plus, our god-emperor wants us to go there. But across the sea? Nah.
 
Asians had known about Australia for millennia, they introduced the Dingo at least 4600 years ago and Makassar trepang fisherman were active in huge numbers on the northern coast for centuries before federation in 1901. Despite this no Asian colonisation took place, most likely because there was no benefit to it, and I assume the same would apply to China unless they could come up with some politically contrived reason like the British did.
 
I think a more interesting what if or POD is how to get the Chinese Diaspora so extreme that literally 1/8-1/4 of the people in all of asia (except for say ultra densely populated Japan/India) other than China itself as having han blood or having extreme Chinese cultural influence similar to the Koreans before they bucked the trend and made their language/culture etc.

Basically i'm talking Europa Universalis style cultural hegemon hood. China spamming settlers all over and setting up expat communities all over the western Pacific rim where they could support the local han or most sinophile elements of a society to run the local show.
 
Indonesia was more likely to colonize Australia than China. China preferred more civilized places like Southeast Asia,Korea or Japan. Note that despite Siberia being literally next-door, China did very little with it and that Mongolia colonized China first. They tended to go to places with large urban populations and set up trade as merchants. Australia and the Pacific Coast of North America would have very little to offer them.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
i have heard people talk about Scenarios where Imperial China colonizes the Americas and i was wondering about the plausibility of this occurring. another thing i was wondering was the plausibility of Imperial China colonizing Australia instead of Britain?

Wouldn't expansion - if it could be funded/staffed/sustained - be simpler going northeast (Korea/Japan), north (Mongolia/Manchuria/Siberia), northwest (Xinjiang/Central Asia), west (Central Asia), southwest (Tibet), south (Indochina), southeast (Indonesia), or east (Philippines, Taiwan, etc.)?

The Pacific isn't a minor obstacle, as noted above; and colonization only succeeds with an economic payoff.

Best,
 
Wasn't Lanfang (and the other gongsi states) a gongsi that gained independence because Brunei was weak and they were the only force that actually mattered, and not by a revolt? But in any case, yes, this is the best chance without altering the shape of OTL Chinese colonization.

The Ainu already had significant contact with Kamchatka and theoretically had the capability to reach the Americas, so it's fairly easy for Japan to expand on this (and I don't see why you say the Japanese have "infinite issues"). Korea is far more unlikely than China without reshaping Korean history as we know it.

Lanfang might not have been a revolt, but the point stands and I'd expect to see something like it in Australia assuming this scenario.

Regarding Japan, it's more the divided nature of the Japanese state and the attachment the Japanese had to their islands, plus the fact they never really colonised the lands of the Ainu in earlier times.

Another potential involving Australia and North America might be new ingredients for Chinese traditional medicine. I could see certain animals or plants becoming highly prized and thus worth a significant sum.

Asians had known about Australia for millennia, they introduced the Dingo at least 4600 years ago and Makassar trepang fisherman were active in huge numbers on the northern coast for centuries before federation in 1901. Despite this no Asian colonisation took place, most likely because there was no benefit to it, and I assume the same would apply to China unless they could come up with some politically contrived reason like the British did.

I thought the dingo came from New Guinea, because there are dingo-like dogs there?
 
The best ATL I've seen on this was by subversivepancakes- it started in 1670, so the Chinese were already aware of the existence of the New World; and it had a motive:

Next, let’s consider motive. This is generally one of the hardest parts of any Chinese-in-the-Americas AH scenario, since there’s no compelling reason for China to bother investing the resources necessary to “discover” North America and found a colony there. But for the Zheng family regime on Taiwan in 1680, there’s a very compelling reason: the Zheng troops have been decisively defeated on the Chinese mainland. Taiwan is about to be invaded by angry Manchus, who will bring the family’s twenty-year rule on the island to an unceremonious end....

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...hinese-colony-in-america-17th-century.374440/
 
As metalinvader665 points out, you don't go due east from East Asia to get to America--you go northeast, along the coast, where the currents run and land is not far away. It just so happens that this curve is roughly a Great Circle--it takes one along the northeast coast of Siberia, past Kamchatka, to either the Aleutians or the Bering Sea, thence past Alaska to the British Columbia coast then on down past Washington, Oregon, and northern California until one stumbles on San Francisco Bay.

Getting home again is a whole different problem, compounded by the fact that west-bound currents go right past Hawaii across an expanse that comprises nearly a complete hemisphere of Earth! I daresay that ships that could make it all the way to say Puget Sound could manage to beat their way against the winds and currents back to Japan or Korea, but slowly and with difficulty.

And of course the intrepid East Asian mariner does not know that if they keep on trying, eventually they can find someplace as nice as Vancouver island to consider colonizing, let alone the California Central Valley or that civilizations such as the ones in Mexico lie beyond. Given current climatic conditions on Earth, what they are doing is sailing onward into increasingly bleak and storm-tossed waters, where the shores they might put in to are chilly and although apparently well-vegetated (except in the more extreme cases) rather poor in supplies. And yet withal inhabited, by suspicious natives who are more or less well adapted to their climates and ecosystems; these natives might be exploitable to a limited extent but are poor pickings, and yet able to inflict some serious hurt on unpleasant intruders.

Thus even if we transform the socio-political setting of East Asia by a whole lot, to make them more expansionist and venturesome, they are hardly encouraged to go that way. Some desperate persons just might, and even manage to fight their way back home to spread the word of more inviting lands (and perhaps even find some gold in various places to encourage more traffic). But sooner than go east by any route, they are much more likely to turn southward. Assuming that either they have already subdued Indochina, or been checked by indigenous civilizations there and seek to leapfrog past them, they will of course encounter the Philippines and the eastern arm of Indonesia first, and these will divert and absorb their efforts. If someone pushes on farther they find New Guinea which is tough terrain for temperate-adapted people to attack. Pressing on south (from what ports?) they do find Australia. Its northern shores are crocodile and snake infested swamps and behind these lie the arid Outback; neither are inviting to people from the Han Chinese core regions though perhaps south Chinese or colonists who grew up in the territory we call Vietnam might make a go of the wetlands, maybe. If they go east, they come upon the east coast, whose northern reaches are still very tropical--perhaps tempting to the tropical born among them--and if they keep on going south they find lands the Han find pleasant enough, though they are not used to Mediterranean climates.

The thing is, all this leapfrogging past the tropical belt to the north will surely divert and detain efforts coming out of China proper. If they are amazingly successful in dominating all of it, well, "China" is now a whole new giant thing, its demographic center of gravity shifting far to the south despite the possibility that population densities remain high along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. Either the distant southern colonies and outposts, which must be somewhat culturally transformed by their very different climate, secede from distant homeland power centers and make a new belt of other nations and empires that aren't strictly speaking "Chinese" although they are very Sinicized, or the vast empire must move its capital southward, down into Indochina or perhaps beyond, and the original Han homeland plus the more recent southern belt become a set of peripheral far northern provinces, and any necessary cultural transformations will apply to the whole Empire. Very possibly now it is the northern homelands that secede, or as peripheral regions are abandoned to steppe conquerors.

So by the time the Australian east coast is within reach, very possibly the original Han people who might have been interested in settling it have a hostile tropical empire sitting between them and it, while the hotlands neo-Chinese have little interest in settling places like New South Wales or Tasmania.
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In an ASB context, where we envision WI the world were turned upside down, so China is in the Southern hemisphere, I pointed to the somewhat less severe, warmer and less stormy conditions apparently prevailing along the arc from Japan to Puget sound, and that places like Kamchatka, the Aleutians, and Alaska would be much more suitable for civilizations to develop, spreading from Manchuria and Korea and Japan on south. With more developed locals to trade with, trade networks could spread all the way to Puget sound and on to California and Mexico beyond.

We might get a similar result if sometime after the rise of civilizations, Earth warms up to the degree it did in the Interglacial previous to our own.

Even then though, China proper (moved inland a bit because of higher sea levels due to Greenland melting completely, and perhaps the Antarctic ice thinning a bit) would be a long long long way away from places like the California Inland Sea (flooding the central valley) and despite the lure of the gold on its shores, the people who interact with it and possibly conquer it would be more likely Alaskans or Puget Sound civs, which no doubt would enjoy some acceleration of civilization due to cultural imports from China (and nearer and relatively stronger than OTL Manchuria, northern Japan, Korea, and Kamchatka) including crops and draft animals--horses would probably run wild over North America again and this time perhaps be adopted as steeds by Plains Indians rather than all slaughtered for meat, and this would of course eventually transform Mesoamerica. Perhaps before any Pacific Northwest peoples get around to investing the California Inland Sea shores, the Mexicans would have extruded some branch civilization over land or coastwise to preempt them.

If in this long sequence of many thousands of years, China proper did undergo an aggressive and centrally directed expansionist phase, they'd probably be as preoccupied with Manchuria and Korea as I suggested with Vietnam and the Indonesian natives in the southward speculation, then have to work their way up the chain through Alaska, petty powers along the BC coast, and only then get a foothold in Puget Sound. California is still a long way beyond and Mexico and the Andean peoples, farther still. I'm guessing the Sinosphere proper would terminate somewhere between Alaska and Puget Sound, and beyond that would be mainly Native American civs much more developed, with draft animals and metallurgy. The West Coast natives would be partially exposed to the Eurasian pool of diseases over a period of thousands of years; they will still be terribly vulnerable if trade rises to level comparable to Early Modern Europeans in the Indian Ocean.

If we assume geography has something to do with China's persistent cultural characteristics, then even with higher sea levels and warmer climate there I see little reason it would be a lot different in such a warmer Earth scenario; their neighbors to the north seem far more likely to be the active agents of contact with North America; lacking China's deep demographic pockets and beginning contact many thousands of years before, they will be on a continuum with the American peoples and probably colonization in the sense of Europeans of OTL landing and sweeping native peoples off into a corner would never be possible; by the time the Han Chinese are showing up in galleon-junks or whatever, the Californians and Mexicans and Puget sound peoples would be nearly on a par with them; it might be possible to have domination of native civs in the manner 19th Century Europeans imposed on older empires and kingdoms in east Asia OTL, as China itself suffered in fact, but not founding some sort of New China on "virgin land." And more likely it would be Manchurians or Kamchatkans doing this domination, and putting pressure on the Chinese themselves!
 

scholar

Banned
i have heard people talk about Scenarios where Imperial China colonizes the Americas and i was wondering about the plausibility of this occurring. another thing i was wondering was the plausibility of Imperial China colonizing Australia instead of Britain?
China has a strong history of extensive non-state run migratory movements, and Chinese would eventually become a significant minority of the west coast, while Chinese blood is probably far more pronounced in southeast asia than currently given credence, with significant old minority groups scattered about.

In order to make it into a state sponsored event you need fractured situations within China. Luzon's chinese population was anciently prescribed to a flight of Chinese from the southern song during the Mongols, the Koxinga's kingdom in Taiwan was directly related to the Qing conquest. Have a partially modernized sea fairing China begin to fragment, and then have southeastern kingdoms continue to exist, but in heightened periods of material shortages and population issues as population expands, while food production struggles to hold on. It would still probably sea the Philippines and Taiwan as primary targets, but say either are incorporated, or pressures push them further east such as a confirmation that such land exists there either with a fall of the Song or the Ming, then you could get an attempt.

Its just too damn far for it to be plausible without a series of contrivances that could work, but seem forced. Granted a lot of things in history is like this, in fact the more you read into the narrative of history rather than the cold dead history of those who minimize it, the more contrivances seem to be the rule. Still, you are more likely to have an expansionary southeast Asian Chinese empire that rules through conquest, vassalage, and colonialism than you are to get a Chinese colony in California before the Europeans discover the place. Australia is more likely, but still far.
 
I would have thought some of the Indonesian or Philippine thalassocracies would be more probable colonizers of Australia. Srivijaya, Medang or Majapahit for example. Not so much state-sponsored colonization as with trading posts at river mouths that grow into towns.
 
Shrevek 23 said
And of course the intrepid East Asian mariner does not know that if they keep on trying, eventually they can find someplace as nice as Vancouver island to consider colonizing, let alone the California Central Valley or that civilizations such as the ones in Mexico lie beyond. Given current climatic conditions on Earth, what they are doing is sailing onward into increasingly bleak and storm-tossed waters, where the shores they might put in to are chilly and although apparently well-vegetated (except in the more extreme cases) rather poor in supplies

Sea otter fur- that's my standard justification, and I'm sticking to it. Over-harvesting wipes them out in a steady process from Alaska all the way down to the pleasant climes of California, and then your settlers just have to follow the established routes and outposts of the traders.
 
Shrevek 23 said


Sea otter fur- that's my standard justification, and I'm sticking to it. Over-harvesting wipes them out in a steady process from Alaska all the way down to the pleasant climes of California, and then your settlers just have to follow the established routes and outposts of the traders.

You'd also have to wipe them out in Kamchatka too, since if I recall, one of the fur-bearing species was native to there as well. There's also always beaver and other animals to hunt for fur in Alaska, but I think by the time you're exhausting significant parts of Alaskan land for fur, you'll have already discovered California, where you can actually grow rice. And unlike Russia or Spain, an Asian colonial power in that region would have a lot more reason to go south from Alaska and put a decent amount of settlers there.
 
You'd also have to wipe them out in Kamchatka too, since if I recall, one of the fur-bearing species was native to there as well. There's also always beaver and other animals to hunt for fur in Alaska, but I think by the time you're exhausting significant parts of Alaskan land for fur, you'll have already discovered California, where you can actually grow rice. And unlike Russia or Spain, an Asian colonial power in that region would have a lot more reason to go south from Alaska and put a decent amount of settlers there.

True there were other types of fur, but sea otter was specially valued in China
The most profitable furs were those of sea otters, especially the northern sea otter, Enhydra lutris kenyoni, which inhabited the coastal waters between the Columbia River in the south to the Aleutian Islands in the north. The sea otter was the most hunted during the Maritime Fur Trade during the 17th and 18th centuries. Sea otters possess a thicker fur than any other mammal, and the sea otter's habit of grooming their coat prevents molting. The reason for their exploitation was due to this 'dark [thick] and silver tipped fur'.[4] The popluarity and demand in fashion of sea otter pelts in China was one of the reasons why it was hunted to the point of disappearance.

And the otters were basically wiped out in a space of forty to fifty years. But, yes, I imagine the first settlements down the coast being supply depots for the traders, before becoming actual agricultural colonies as the value of the fur trade dwindled- until maybe one day a local colonist discovers gold in an inland creek....
 
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