DBWI: Imperial China doesn't modernize

Dorozhand

Banned
What if the Xiong Dynasty and its herculian effort to transform China from an agrarian relic to an industrial powerhouse in the latter 19th century didn't happen?

Would Qing China have continued to be gutted by the westerners until it was like Africa?

Would the Japanese have been victorious in the Yellow Sea War had the Zhuoguang Emperor not embarked on his naval expansion program and army retrofit throughout the 1880s?

What would no Xiong have done to China's participation in the First World War? Without a strong China in the central powers to help the Germans gut the Russians and to defeat Japan again in the Pacific, maybe the Japanese could have taken Germany's Pacific colonies, and the Russians could have put up more of a fight. This would have great repercussions on the campaign in France.

Also, perhaps China would have fallen to republican revolution. That would have been interesting indeed, to see Chinese culture deal with such an alien idea.
 
A lot of people claim modernization was inevitable given the pressures facing China, but we can't be too sure. China would have most likely ended up like OTL Japan, with a fractured government divided up by imperial powers. Then again, Japan has a long tradition of powerful fiefs resisting central government, which may explain why the Meiji restoration was stillborn.

Such a China would become at the mercy of imperial powers almost like Africa, but it's doubtful they'll officially allow the monarchy to be dissolved.
 
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