How to make a Maritime China rise after the Ming collapse

Have the Ming stall off defeat for 3 generations and then retake the throne. The navy was a critical component of Southern Ming resistance and a few naval heros might convince the new Emperor to give them funding. If they want to keep the accelerated funding, they need to find something to do with the ships in a decade. Traditionalists call the Ming collapse when they are kicked out of Northern China and Beijing (and 3/4 of their landmass), if you mean after the Ming are gone gone, I don't know.
 
Have the Japanese invasion of Korea go much better for the Japanese. The Japanese up to that point did not have a very large Navy but could capture the Korean Navy. Once they own that wait for the Ming to start losing Mandate, have the Japanese take over China and claim mandate. From there they can restart the age old Chinese tradition of sending out tribute voyages. The best PoD would be for Admiral Yi to not become a Naval Commander. OTL Admiral Yi is the type of commander that if you read about him in an alternate history you would cry ASB.
 
You sure you’re not thinking of EU4 here?
Slightly inspired by it, but not entirely, what I meant by losing Mandate was for rebellions caused by food shortages, caused by the little Ice age. Mandate of Heaven was a real Chinese concept and Japan could have invaded just as easily as the Manchu did.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Is there a plausible POD?
yes, just have china being split up instead of being unified by the Qing, which was a real possibiity between the 1640s-1670s

otl you had the pirate Koxinga king based in Xiaman and Taiwan and on the verge of taking Manila from the spanish relying on piracy/maritime trade for its income, he just died at a really bad time from maleria. If he lived you would have parts of the Philippines held by a splinter Chinese naval empire.

if the revolt of the three feudatories succeed in the 1670s you would have at least southern china under a rival dynasty to the Qing: and said southern dynasty will have to rely on commerce for its income, not to mention the need to buy dutch and portugese weapons to fight the Qing in the north

so you would have had 3-4 countries in what is now china all competing and fighting each other: at least 2-3 of them maritime powers
 

RousseauX

Donor
Have the Japanese invasion of Korea go much better for the Japanese. The Japanese up to that point did not have a very large Navy but could capture the Korean Navy. Once they own that wait for the Ming to start losing Mandate, have the Japanese take over China and claim mandate. From there they can restart the age old Chinese tradition of sending out tribute voyages. The best PoD would be for Admiral Yi to not become a Naval Commander. OTL Admiral Yi is the type of commander that if you read about him in an alternate history you would cry ASB.
long distance maritime tribute voyages were a one time thing which occurred during the Ming and was unsustainable because of the expense
 
Have the Japanese invasion of Korea go much better for the Japanese. The Japanese up to that point did not have a very large Navy but could capture the Korean Navy. Once they own that wait for the Ming to start losing Mandate, have the Japanese take over China and claim mandate. From there they can restart the age old Chinese tradition of sending out tribute voyages. The best PoD would be for Admiral Yi to not become a Naval Commander. OTL Admiral Yi is the type of commander that if you read about him in an alternate history you would cry ASB.
From what I've read, the Japanese did have a large navy, just most of it was transports and their naval combat revolved around boarding while the Korean and Chinese fleets used much more long range artillery and they didn't have much knowledge of the currents around Korea, which is why the relatively small Joseon fleet was able to harry the much larger Japanese fleets with such effectiveness and the Japanese completely lost any semblance of naval superiority, despite numerical advantages. That's a naval tradition issue which could be altered with an earlier POD, of course, but that means capturing the Korean navy's not that viable a strategy without defecting naval officers. After all, the Joseon did have other notable leaders who could've performed similarly, it's just that Admiral Yi outshined all of them. The war was in two phases, anyways, and the Koreans lost most of their navy in the beginning of the second and still managed to win so it's not as simple as 'Japan has more ships.'

Other than that, the Japanese invasion's a bit overhyped. Sure, they managed to march from Busan to Pyongyang in a few months but it was against Seonjo's Korea, which had literally the bare minimum for any sort of southern defense possible, and they lost everything from Pyongyang to Hanseong in a few months due to poor logistics from advancing so quickly, rivalries between commanders (seeing as the clans had been fighting one another for a century, a bit hard to avoid between the best leaders) and civilian rebellions and militias. Even with more success in the war, the countryside will still need pacification, which is difficult with Korea's hilly, semi-mountainous and forested terrain in mind, and the Japanese themselves would inevitably get embroiled in a civil war the moment Toyotomi Hideyoshi (already old) dies as in OTL, making possible a reconquest of Korea by an exiled Joseon court.

It's worth noting that, even despite the Manchu's rather brutal treatment of their subjects, they were very generous to defectors and would marry off princesses to Han leaders. After all, they didn't have the manpower to take over China alone. The Japanese showed no inclination of that sort of behavior in their Korean campaigns (which is partly why the Koreans fought so hard once they reorganized and the countryside rose up in rebellion, mainly from the raping and pillaging) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi was a bit megalomaniacal, at least if he actually had ambitions on conquering all of China, the Philippines, India, etc.

Anyways, the Japanese would then have to fight the Manchu under Nurhaci in terrain they have very little experience in in order to march on Beijing, then assault the Shanhai Pass that the Manchu weren't able to crack without defection for any 'Shundynasty-open Shanhai' analog or fight the Ming navy on Chinese turf (same logistical, artillery, and terrain disadvantages as with Korea), all the while noting the everpresent disunity and hostility between the Japanese clans (OTL lasted 260 years after the Tokugawa's victory at Sekigahara). It'd be a massive expense of manpower and money and gives plenty of opportunities for the disloyal daimyos to rise up. Either way, they'd have to deal with peasant rebellions and militias and of course the Manchu. Even then, the logistics of managing all of China from Japan is just not quite feasible in the 17th century so yeah...not much of a way to even afford tribute missions, honestly, seeing as it'd take decades on decades to actually succeed in conquering all of China. The Manchu took decades and they were fantastically lucky.

As for the original prompt, like @RousseauX said, Koxinga and the Three Feudatories had the best chance to crack Qing dominance and a more maritime-minded China. The Qing were not much interested in the navy so you need someone else.
 
Koxinga succeeds in his attempt to conquer Nanjing and overthrow the Qing in 1658/1659. Done. No need for a permanent north/south split and I'm not even sure that's possible at this time.

I've gone over this scenario a bunch of times in the past here and I'm pretty sure you could search it on Google.
 
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