DBWI: What if the Jurchen had conquered China swiftly?

Dorozhand

Banned
Perhaps a China that was quickly unified by the Jurchen, instead of being divided between the Qing and Southern Ming until the 1860s, could have held up against the Europeans. Obviously the Lotus Wars and the Ming Restoration (and thus the Hui Dynasty) would have been butterflied, but some other alt-conflict between Qing China and European economic interests would have certainly occured, and may have gone more in China's favour.

If Zuo Liangyu hadn't crushed the usurper Ma Shiying's army, then the Ming may have fallen into civil war and Shi Kefa wouldn't have been able to annihilate Dodo when he tried to attack Yangzhou. No Zuo Liangyu to restore order in court, and no Shi Kefa to hold the Yangtze and consolidate the Southern Ming realm under the Hongguang Emperor, and the Qing may well have rolled over the rest of China by the end of the century.

One wonders if the Chinese would still have rebelled against the Jurchen at a later date and established another Han Chinese Dynasty. Unlike the Hui Dynasty, this one wouldn't have been a European puppet, and may have been able revitalize the country's culture and military in an earlier version of OTL's Xiong Dynasty.

Also, without the distraction of the Southern Ming, the Qing may have been able to end the tragedy of the Xi Dynasty before it and its succesor states completely depopulated Sichuan.
 
An unified Qing China would allow more people to be diverted to the Qing's more ambitious projects, like more of Northeast Asia, or even parts of North America.
 
Perhaps a China that was quickly unified by the Jurchen, instead of being divided between the Qing and Southern Ming until the 1860s, could have held up against the Europeans. Obviously the Lotus Wars and the Ming Restoration (and thus the Hui Dynasty) would have been butterflied, but some other alt-conflict between Qing China and European economic interests would have certainly occured, and may have gone more in China's favour.

If Zuo Liangyu hadn't crushed the usurper Ma Shiying's army, then the Ming may have fallen into civil war and Shi Kefa wouldn't have been able to annihilate Dodo when he tried to attack Yangzhou. No Zuo Liangyu to restore order in court, and no Shi Kefa to hold the Yangtze and consolidate the Southern Ming realm under the Hongguang Emperor, and the Qing may well have rolled over the rest of China by the end of the century.

One wonders if the Chinese would still have rebelled against the Jurchen at a later date and established another Han Chinese Dynasty. Unlike the Hui Dynasty, this one wouldn't have been a European puppet, and may have been able revitalize the country's culture and military in an earlier version of OTL's Xiong Dynasty.

Also, without the distraction of the Southern Ming, the Qing may have been able to end the tragedy of the Xi Dynasty before it and its succesor states completely depopulated Sichuan.
Is there any particular reason why the Jurchens are not called Manchus in this timeline? The name change occurred in 1635.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
An unified Qing China would allow more people to be diverted to the Qing's more ambitious projects, like more of Northeast Asia, or even parts of North America.

The massive naval expansion program of the Qing was begun only as a measure to strangle the Southern Ming, and to compete with the Ming Navy, which Zuo Liangyu and the Jianrong Emperor had worked to rebuild. Without the Southern Ming as impetus, the Qing may never have taken interest in the navy.

Furthermore, the defeat of the Cossacks in the Okhotsk War and the subsequent northward expansion of the Qing under Kangxi were (at least initially) due to the Qing's shortage of shipbuilding wood. If the Qing had never taken interest in shipbuilding to begin with, they might never have seen a need to expand into the wastes of Siberia, let alone Fusang. All of the ambitious projects undertaken by Kangxi were due to the single-minded desire to crush the Southern Ming.
 

Dorozhand

Banned
Is there any particular reason why the Jurchens are not called Manchus in this timeline? The name change occurred in 1635.

The Southern Ming continued to refer to the Qing as Jurchen, and when the Southern Ming were restored by European intervention in the 1860's, the historiography universally used the term. By then, the Europeans also referred to the Qing as Jurchen, and the subsequent Hui Dynasty and Xiong Dynasty historiography complied.
 
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