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If you ask most chinese people in the interior of the country what they hate the most most of them will talk about the treaty ports, a collection of around 80 ports on the chinese coast that have been more or less governed by westerners since the 1860s for most of them, with some ports having been in the system since the first opium war.

This system has been deeply resented, but their efforts to end the ports in 1918 ended in a blood bath, and the uprising of 1950 and the resulting use of weapons of mass destruction on chinese cities still scars the chinese psyche. In my opinion the system is unjust, that said these concessions have been in affect for over a hundred years. Many people in them no longer speak chinese, are not longer capable of reading chinese, and don't think of themselves as chinese. These natives point out that there have been reforms and most of the people elected to rule the treaty ports actually live there, that they have more civil rights living in these concessions then living under the often times brutal Neo-Qing rule, or dealing with one of the many quite frankly horrifying warlords.

There have been points in time where the system could have ended, a general european war early in the 1900s that seemed possible mutliple times but just never materialized, the revolts of 1918, and 1950 working out, or numerous other things.

So in your opinion what would the world look like if the treaty port system had ended?
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