If the Chinese colonised America

A last thought: what would the "Rockies" be called by the Chinese explorers seeing it for the first time?

"East Himalayas," "Mountains of the Rising Sun" (very few journey beyond them, so the majority see the sun rise behind them), or an appropriated native name for them.

So, the best POD for an expansionist China is an Islamic conversion by 1000 AD. Australia is a more likely target of colonization than America, but let's suspend disbelief and say the Chinese do eventually reach the New World (possibly by the Japanese Fishermen proposal I noted earlier). The area of San Francisco or Vancouver seem the most likely sites of settlement or trading posts. What is IOTL Washington, Oregon, and California are settled by Chinese, and Chinese cultural influence extends deep into the Rockies and Mexico. The Mesoamericans are exposed to Eurasian diseases through the Chinese, and are better equipped to resist the Europeans later on. European settlement, without the financial incentive of easily-conquered land, is thus slowed, though colonies centered on tobacco or other drugs may prove more successful if they become a sole income source. I'd imagine more extensive Spanish or Portuguese settlement of North America (depending on who gets there first), while they go through the less-disease-exposed Cherokee/Creek and Iroquois cultures.
 
1600ish

Mountains of the Rising Sun has a nice ring.

*Washington, Oregon, and California are settled by Chinese, and Chinese cultural influence extends deep into the Rockies and Mexico. The Mesoamericans are exposed to Eurasian diseases through the Chinese, and are better equipped to resist the Europeans later on. European settlement, without the financial incentive of easily-conquered land, is thus slowed*

Agreed - I imagine a Chinese state from the ocean to the Rockies, with major population centers around the natural harbors of the Pacific Coast. Given its colonial nature, I see a heavily maritime culture -- with the acquisition of Australia, South Pacific Islands of Hawaii as a way-point for shipping between the New World and homeland China. (Or, given the distance, they give up on that and just fish the Pacific.) Either way, farming in the central California valleys would become increasingly important as the population spread.

However far East the Chinese get, I don't see a scenario where they cross the Appalachians in force before the English establish the American Colonies. Something like th 13 Colonies might still develop, so the East Coast could shake out much the way it did in the OTL. The closeness of the Chinese, and how technically advanced they became, would be a major factor in the American Revolution. A distant threat might barely factor, but a superpower just over the mountains might leave the colonists less inclined to shed the political and martial protection of England.
Can't imagine anything like OTL in the Great Plains and along the Mississippi River. Between the two North American Mountain ranges, several powers would slug it out. With all the interested colonial parties and a stronger native presence, I can see a situation more like mainland Europe than the middle America we're used to; lots of smaller pieces uncomfortably squeezed together.

Jumping ahead a few hundred years, it's easy to see a superpower on each coat, pointing missiles and bombers at each other, over the heads of several very concerned neighbors mid-continent.
 
zeezack - I'm unsure of the plausibility of Islam becoming the dominant religion in china which is why I thought it may be better to alter one of the others with an earlier POD.
 
However far East the Chinese get, I don't see a scenario where they cross the Appalachians in force before the English establish the American Colonies. Something like th 13 Colonies might still develop, so the East Coast could shake out much the way it did in the OTL. The closeness of the Chinese, and how technically advanced they became, would be a major factor in the American Revolution. A distant threat might barely factor, but a superpower just over the mountains might leave the colonists less inclined to shed the political and martial protection of England.
Can't imagine anything like OTL in the Great Plains and along the Mississippi River. Between the two North American Mountain ranges, several powers would slug it out. With all the interested colonial parties and a stronger native presence, I can see a situation more like mainland Europe than the middle America we're used to; lots of smaller pieces uncomfortably squeezed together.

Jumping ahead a few hundred years, it's easy to see a superpower on each coat, pointing missiles and bombers at each other, over the heads of several very concerned neighbors mid-continent.

On the American Revolution (or its analogue), I don't see the Chinese as a major factor. Most optimistic estimate IMO is that they get to Denver, so I don't see a US, whose initial claims extended to the Mississippi and no further, worrying too much about them.

French Louisiana, assuming it still exists despite the possible surviving-mesoamerican-state and butterflies, or an analogue controlled by Spain or Portugal, may develop its own nation. You've got a lot of good land, mostly empty aside from nomadic tribes, and control of a major river. A Louisiana Nation strikes me as the most likely Great Plains power, short of some sort of Comanche Horde in the northern parts.
 
Would there be any trade advantages for western europe once they made contact with chinese colonies on the west coast? A 'western' silk road for instance?
 
Would there be any trade advantages for western europe once they made contact with chinese colonies on the west coast? A 'western' silk road for instance?

Possible, their goal in colonizing North America was to get to China. I can see this either making a huge rush for the west (a much earlier one than OTL) or being completely useless if the Chinese are mostly peasants with minimal contact to imperial China (no imperative to trade).
 
Would there be any trade advantages for western europe once they made contact with chinese colonies on the west coast? A 'western' silk road for instance?

Perhaps gold? If the Aztecs and Incas are not conquered ITTL (Aztecs are immunized by Chinese contact, get weapons, discourage ventures into Peru), then the Europeans need another source of gold. So great caravans out of California cross the rockies and sail down the rivers of the Plains, as towns spring up to provide for them and defend them from marauding native raiders.
 
Are there any sources of jade in the Americas? IIRC the chinese value jade more than gold. Perhaps there could be a jade rush to make the new colonies more important to the chinese? It would certainly ensure continued contact with mainland china if nothing else.
 
Jade

Are there any sources of jade in the Americas? IIRC the chinese value jade more than gold. Perhaps there could be a jade rush to make the new colonies more important to the chinese? It would certainly ensure continued contact with mainland china if nothing else.

The precolumbian Indians worked a lot of Jade - again, seeing as they'd hit the Rockies in the East, I can see the Chinese colony spreading South instead, especially with the added incentive of jade. Kind of a long, skinny coastal territory from The Pacific Northwest, down as far as they could manage into the isthmus.
 
So, the jade trade keeps the colony in contact with the empire. Chinese influence expands south and makes contact with the europeans somewhere along the gulf coast. Would it still be the spanish that they run into first?
 
Hendryk did an interesting thread like this before. Depending on how early the Chinese get started, the indigenous civilizations of Latin America will be somewhat better off. I think China would likely vassalize rather than outright conquer the civilizations they ran into, "sponsoring" one civilization to expand over the entire region for them. Since the Chinese are coming from the Pacific, the Tarascans might be in a much better position to dominate Mesoamerica than the Aztecs. The Chimu might still be dominant along the coast, and with Chinese technology they'd have an upper hand over the highland Incas for control of the Andes.

We then have the chiefdoms of the Tainos in the Caribbean and the Mississippians of the Southeastern United States. Since they're too distant for the Chinese to worry about colonizing in the immediate time, they might be advantaged by disease immunity and technology trickling through to them without much direct contact. By the time the Europeans show up, the East Coast of North America and the islands of the Caribbean might be too densely populated by bolstered Native Americans for any direct settlments... Instead, a Caribbean full of Taino states and a Southeast with Powhatans, Natchez, and Creeks doing their own thing.
 
way point

Continued contact with home-base pretty much guarantees that China would try to acquire a port in the mid Pacific to break up the long crossing; a place to resupply and repair the fleet. Hawaii is a good candidate, or Midway - Australia might look pretty good if China was very serious about expansionism. In any case, I don't see any of these native populations in much of a position to resist Chinese diplomacy, or the imperial navy if it came to that.
 
This is a very interesting thread, hopefully there will also be some kind of timeline with a main story and maps.

It will be much more interesting if US predecessor's 13 provinces exists which will eventually become a much smaller US in the future combined Chinese colonies along with existing and new native american states and other european colonies.

So we will have North and South American continents with various states and colonies with very interesting and complex interactions between each other.

Which mean that if certain states/colonies are in conflict with each other, each of them will have their own backup during the war.

It might be rather far-fetched, but imagine US independence war being funded by the whatever Chinese dynasty in power that time instead of France ! ;)
 
I'm pretty sure Chinese ships would be at least as capable as European ships of crossing the Pacific. As far as I know, Zheng He's fleets did not always stay in sight of land - they crossed parts of the Indian Ocean on the Monsoon winds. Even if the size of some of Zheng He's ships has been exaggerated, many of them were probably as large or larger than the Spanish galleons that started to cross the Pacific in the 16th century, and a lot larger than the ships that Magellan first crossed the Pacific in.

The real problem, as others have noted, is motivation. Zheng He's voyages were made to lands that were well known either to Chinese merchants or to their immediate trading partners, so they had a good idea of where they were heading and to a certain extent what to expect when they got there. The Americas (or Australia) would be a different story. There would be no obvious commercial motive. China had no historical tradition of establishing overseas colonies for prestige reasons, as opposed to establishing diplomatic/tributary relations with already known foreign states. The relatively tolerant religious climate would make it very unlikely that there would be a religious group that would find the situation so hostile in China that they would be willing to consider moving to a distant land, even if it were already known about. I don't know if China had any tradition of setting up something like penal colonies, but if they did, there were probably plenty of pretty remote places within the main Chinese Empire to send the convicts (Mongolian frontier, northern Manchuria, the far west, the edge of Tibet, ...) without having to consider sending them thousands of miles overseas. The Chinese also never sent out expeditions for pure discovery purposes - just to find out what's out there - but neither did the Europeans, at least until the late 18th century and the time of Cook and Bougainville, and even those expeditions were not devoid commercial motivation.

Two possibilities occurred to me. 1. The Chinese, at some earlier point in their history (perhaps the Song dynasty), manage to learn about parts of the American continents by accident (unlikely, but possible - a ship or ships would have to get blown way off course, get pushed eastward all the way to North America, and then persist in trying to find a way back home, avoid shipwreck or other catastrophe, find the tropical currents going westward at a lower latitude, ride them all the way back to Asia, get to China, and manage to get their account widely known, with influential people taking notice). Sporadic contact is maintained for a while, then lost. When the Ming decide to send out naval expeditions under Zheng He or an equivalent figure, they first cover ground in southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean, but after they have done several expeditions to that area, they decide to send an expedition on a more daring trip to reestablish contact with the distant lands to the east and their strange peoples that are still well-documented.

A very different possibility, which shows up, for example, in Tony Jones' Monarchy World timeline, is to have China become interested in colonization much later, after the European powers have already taken much of the Americas. A series of reforming Emperors in the late 17th or 18th century decide that China can learn things from outsiders, and one of those things is that overseas colonies can be very good for trade and the economy. The western coast of north America in the 18th century could be ripe for setting up a Chinese colony - the Spanish aren't in California in any numbers until mid-century, and even after they come a strong Chinese expedition could probably overcome resistance. If they don't want that conflict, everything from northern California to Alaska is virtually untouched by Europeans, apart from vague claims.
 
This' sounding plausible now.

Another thing to consider is that some pacific islands on the way'd probably also be conquered by China instead of Spain or Britain.

Unlike Miceli, I don't see Western North American countries of Chinese origin persisting against the USA to the present. Which countries nominally owned California and Alaska, and which country are those states of now? Spain and Russia had very similar unchecked monarchic government and aristocratic culture, so I'm not seeing that China'd be different.

o Settler-oriented democratic colonies grow much faster and come to outpopulate aristocratic colonies.

o Colonial goverments could only respond very slowly, with high travel times.

o Democratic governments and armies usually outperform dictators and kings.

That's how Florida, the Texan Revolution and Mexican War went down. I'm guessing Russia wasn't comforted by that record, and decided to make some money instead.
 
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