Consequences for long-term Sino-Russian relations and border in a non-Qing China?

raharris1973

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What if someone other than the Qing is ruling China as late as 1700, what are the likely consequences for the Sino-Russian border (or the Russian border in Asia, period) and relations overall?

Here's a few candidate substitutes for the Qing:

a) A continued Ming

b) Li Zicheng's "Shun" Dynasty

c) A neo-Ming Dynasty (started by a successful takeover by a Ming pretender or ally, the Prince of Gui, Koxinga, etc.)

d) Wu Sangui's "Zhou" Dynasty (where his rebellion succeeds)

e) An dynasty started by another regional player, like Wu's fellow feudatories, or the breakaway dynasty based in Sichuan during the initial Ming-Qing transition.


With any non-Qing dynasty ruling China, will the Russians be able to keep the Amur as their boundary in 1689 (unlike OTL, where they had to cede it in the treaty of Nerchinsk)? could Russia absorb the maritime province and establish Vladivostock earlier? Could Russia do even better, dominating Mongolia much earlier than 1911, or establishing a border at the Great Wall or Yalu river?

If the Qing are merely pushed out of China proper, north of the Great Wall, but not wiped out, will they still be capable of forcing a Russian retreat from Amur territory?

reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nerchinsk










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Rob
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a) After the Tumu catastrophe of 1449 the Ming never successfully engaged in long-term operations in the steppe. There is little reason to assume that the Ming would do any better for the remainder of the seventeenth century. The main issues are threefold, and two of the issues seem unlikely to be resolved:
  • The Ming hereditary garrison system was not adequately funded, while the corrupt bureaucracy (this was an institutional issue; the Ming system as set by the founder was meant to make officials live frugally by giving them low wages, but this just encouraged corruption) could not properly transport money and supplies to the frontier. There was no centralized auditing. The Ming economy was also not sufficiently commercialized to allow for monetized acquisition of supplies, but this issue would be resolved eventually as China's economy continues to develop.
  • The Ming had little reliable information about the Mongols. They believed that the Mongols would die if they could not drink tea, for example. They did not understand Mongol institutions and misunderstood Mongol motives; for example, the Mongols consistently asked for trade for four decades and the Ming consistently refused for four decades because they believed the Mongols were inherently dangerous raiders. Deprived of trade, the Mongols raided - and when the Ming finally became sensible and allowed trade, there was a general peace on the frontier until the Ming came to an end. Basically, they thought of the Mongols almost as a natural phenomenon like plagues of locusts, not humans with culture and agency. There is little evidence the Ming would change. The Qing, by contrast, understood the Mongols and embraced them as "our Mongols," as part of the empire. Manchus married Mongols, spoke Mongolian, and fought with Mongols.
  • The Ming did not have Qing institutions such as the Bureau of Colonial Affairs (Lifan Yuan) that allowed for expedient conquest. Considering general institutional conservatism during the Ming, this is also unlikely to be changed.
b) Li Zicheng didn't, to the best of my knowledge, have much association with Mongols. He doesn't seem a candidate for a good emperor, but then again history can be surprising. The Shun are a wild card on this issue and could go either way. But the important problem of Han Chinese not understanding the Mongols is likely to remain. And since the Qing relied on Mongol auxiliaries and Mongol tactics to conquer the steppe, I doubt the Shun would have nearly the same success. Same for Zhang Xianzhong in e), though if the anecdotes have any basis I doubt Zhang Xianzhong's Xi dynasty could last very long.

c) Legitimacy would be key for a revived Ming, so I actually think there is a possibility that they may reinstate the same ineffective policies of the late Ming - after all, most of them derive from the Ming founder himself, the tyrannical Hongwu emperor. On the other hand, there could be drastic reforms based on the ideas of the statecraft scholars. Again, a wild card. But such a dynasty would be even more South Chinese in composition and even less likely to understand the Mongol way or Mongol institutions. I could well imagine catastrophic invasions of the steppe based on misunderstandings of steppe warfare or nomadic mobility ending with defensive policies based on the Great Wall.

d) Don't know enough about Wu Sangui to comment.

So in most of these scenarios, Galdan Khan would have unified most of Mongolia by 1700 and probably use Tibetan Buddhism as glue to hold the various Mongol factions together.

Could Russia do even better, dominating Mongolia much earlier than 1911
Galdan Khan would be strong enough to stop Russians from entering the heartland of Mongolia; the Zunghars destroyed Russian fortresses more than once, such as Bakan in 1710 or a fortress by Lake Yamysh in 1716, and with Outer Mongolia on board they would be much stronger. On the other hand, the Russians did take territory from the Zunghars (Semipalatinsk, now in Kazakhstan, was Zunghar land until 1718), so the Mongol-Russian border would probably be a little bit more southern than OTL. But not by much; the Mongols were more than capable of ousting Russians and the Zunghars could have resisted Russian incursion much better if the threat of Manchu conquest wasn't hovering over them.

will they still be capable of forcing a Russian retreat from Amur territory?
The Qing would probably collapse without China, so no. To quote Peter Perdue, in China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, "the marginal economy of Manchuria could only barely support its growing population, but to provide in addition for a large army on a military campaign, the army had to gather booty from its victories. This was exactly the dynamic of the typical steppe federation, which expanded explosively when it succeeded in gathering enough loot from victory to reward their successors but collapsed implosively at the first sings of defeat." Manchuria couldn't support a Qing empire for long without plunder, and without continual victories and conquests the empire would dissolve.
 
Wait if we are talking no Xinjiang,Mongolia or Manchuria as a part of China, then Sino-Russo relations would be cooler, then filled with tension as in OTL. Russia could do much better later on, but the big problem is that actual movement beyond the Urals is going to be limited, and what kind of states are going to form in those that the Qing did not conquer? Provided a native Chinese dynasty is only satisfied with keeping the northern incursions in check.
 
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c) Legitimacy would be key for a revived Ming, so I actually think there is a possibility that they may reinstate the same ineffective policies of the late Ming - after all, most of them derive from the Ming founder himself, the tyrannical Hongwu emperor. On the other hand, there could be drastic reforms based on the ideas of the statecraft scholars. Again, a wild card. But such a dynasty would be even more South Chinese in composition and even less likely to understand the Mongol way or Mongol institutions. I could well imagine catastrophic invasions of the steppe based on misunderstandings of steppe warfare or nomadic mobility ending with defensive policies based on the Great Wall.
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Do you think a split China situation is possible? That is, a Southern Ming and Northern Qing?
 
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