More thoughts on the future of the Wu, to add to the ones I've posted before:
In the AH I've read (which is both "a lot" and "not as much as you'd think") every "present day" China under a "native" ideology ends up being some form of conservative Confucian, likely a monarchy too. So one would think Daoism or Buddhism or some dug-up Hundred Schools philosophy could be the answer, dressed up to produce some progressive or even revolutionary rival system... but since their thoughts on proper governance combined add up to far, far less than the two millennia of Confucian theory and practice, trying to weld your desired ideology out of those will probably just produce some fairly common Western ideas in silken garb, probably introduced by a "bold new thinker" self insert character. Even to reach a new result, it's best to start with where the conversation is already at, and that's Confucianism.
So it's worth saying that Confucianism is a very optimistic system. No irreversible Fall of Man-- the state of perfection described in the mythologies of the sage-kings can be attained again, and the only question is how. Daoism comes as an investigation into sagehood in particular-- even worldly authority or the pursuit of it might be something that gets in a seeker's way. Confucianism starts instead with social relations, considering the perfection of the past as the sum of the ideal relationships among people-- which are rediscovered and preserved through ritual. And preserved in books of course, which begs the question of what would happen if those books were destroyed-- but the evolution of Neo-Confucianism at the turn of the millennium also involved a metaphysical turn that placed the principles it was trying to (re)discover within the human mind itself. The wisdom of the past is reduplicated in every person, and the goal of study is not only social progress but self actualization-- in fact even the study might be optional (since human potential is so great), although that line of thought never made it into state orthodoxy. It was pretty popular among the people though, since no matter how much a new dynasty might promote itself by establishing new public schools, there were never enough and since maintaining them was a local concern, many localities just... didn't.
So, that's nice-- but since the perfect system of antiquity was an absolute monarchy, reaching perfection again requires that as well. There is the caveat that Confucian scholars expect the king to be respectful of advice, to a degree ranging from presiding over a collective leadership to complete abdication of day to day responsibilities-- but even that is only provisional, as a truly perfect king would himself be the perfect scholar as well. There wouldn't be any need to appeal to any alternative source of sovereignty, much less "the people"-- leading to a situation like OTL's Imperial Russia or China, where even though a particular state ideology/religion is totally unrivaled for centuries its proponents are so accustomed to appealing upward that they don't build any kind of popular institutions at all, and so are powerless against any sudden change in government.
So, how do you wrest some kind of alternate system of governance from this? I've thought about it in the context of other timelines, or projects of my own that I'll never write, and I think the answer is pessimism-- a suspicion that the door to perfection is closed forever, or at least that the path won't be the same as before. That's a very hard sell-- made easier in OTL by the disasters of the 1800s and apparent success of foreign systems, but that doesn't apply in TTL's strong and industrializing China.
But really, I think industrialization is enough to bring about such an ideological crisis, even without a backdrop of weakness and humiliation (see also: Imperial Germany's social welfare laws). Industrialization challenges the status quo on several fronts:
1. The assumption that in a subsistence-agriculture economy (there are definitely other profitable activities but this is how most of the population gets by) that the people will take care of themselves as long as they're not taxed too much or driven out of business... doesn't really apply when increasing proportions of the population now depend on wage labor and provision of services by others in an urban environment. A village is no longer a self sufficient world unto itself, it's almost absurdly dependent on outside forces now.
2. A traditional econony means traditional social relations, and ones that can be analogized to family ties-- in a subsistence agriculture household the workforce is of course the family itself. Not so for the industrialized economy, where a new array of very temporary social ties determine how things work.
3. The winners of industrialization and their far more numerous supporters (either out of conviction or just because it's their job) will expect and likely receive a high priority in state decision-making, but there will be no philosophical basis for their prominence. There should only be the ruler and his people, with the provisional intermediate category of scholars striving for a better system-- so then what is this other intermediate category of people with seemingly
no program or concern outside of currently popular issues, or even nothing besides their own gain?
This is most similar to Japan's case-- the emergence of a class of soldier-landowners with no direct parallel in China or Korea pushed the "official" government of Japan (its laws derived from those of the Tang dynasty, and in force until the Meiji Restoration) into irrelevance, while the provisional networks of authority intended to regulate the affairs of this new class instead turned into the actual government of the whole country.
4. Absolute power is of course best in clean hands, so personal incorruptibility plays a very important part in the education of future holders of power. Personal morality is so important to making absolute power tolerable that any time not spent on it is a distraction at best and a derailment at worst. But as the laundry list of things to learn grows ever longer and careers become increasingly specialized, will it still be possible to maintain that well, even if the system guards its privileges closely, at least it produces people who can be trusted with power? Granted, this isn't really a point against Confucianism as such, since even liberalism gives itself the benefit of the doubt on a lot of things. Its checks and balances might help save the system from destruction from within, and provide the best guarantee for peaceful transfers of power out of any system. But although "elections produce democratic results" is it more democratic for a legislator to vote their conscience or to vote along with their party? Even on something so important, there are no uniform expectations.
5. A scholar excluded from power could convince himself that while people may not be ready for his ideas or personality now, his time would come-- either the ruler's favor would fall on someone else, or there would be a rebellion in need of advisors and promising a swift ascent to the heights of power. Sure enough, the Ming of OTL ended up being a very ideological project in that way, with a group of Neo-Confucians seeing in a particular peasant rebel an instrument to remake society-- only for that rebel to decide he'd learned quite enough to carry on the rest of the revolution himself on becoming emperor, and everyone else had better make way or lose their head. Of course, in an industrializing society the world seems to be different every decade, and change is only accelerating. When one wrong move could have fatal consequences, can a scholar wait patiently for the winds to change in his favor (literally something Confucius and contemporaries were praised for doing) or should he, with whatever allies he can find, defy this wisdom and take matters into his own hands?
The system could still remain the same as before, with significant additional requirements (e.g. that scholars concentrate on more modern subjects as well)-- or even this could be considered insufficient, as advocates of popular advisory councils point out how top-down governance and favoritism determining what the "top" looks like ensure that good ideas (setting aside what ideas are even considered good by which segments of the population) may not always bubble to the top. Although, as Iran's government shows, one can allow the existence of popular councils while subjecting them to the oversight of a very different system. Or, for something more radical-- if a perfect society is the sum of its relationships, maybe change could be bottom up instead of top down, and so the people might displace the ruler as the ultimate source of sovereignty. More radical still-- if it's private property that stands in the way of a proper relationship between ruler and people and/or in the way of the people's prosperity, then private property should be abolished! (Japanese militarism in its early 1930s form, forced to develop a program for governing Manchuria, manifested a hatred for private... well, private everything while repurposing Confucian vocabulary to describe its ideal society.) Or in some Hegelian turn, an authentically Confucian approach to some problem could abstract itself out of Confucianism entirely, becoming a "secular" ideology that conserves its strict internal rules while priding itself on universal applicability... though for that it would need to criticize every single rival system, which might lead them to make some interesting analogies between Confucianism and Islam*.
Should there be a limit to how crazy things get? I don't think so. No revolution is final, or totally free from the prospect of Restoration. If England can follow up all the wild possibilities of the Civil War years by just turning back into a kingdom again for the next four hundred years, I'm sure China can do whatever it wants and still settle into whatever state is canon for TTL's present day. Plus, there's the possibility of lines of inquiry not fully explored in China instead reaching full fruition elsewhere.
*How would such an analogy go? Perhaps something like this. In the East Asian triad of faiths there's one to supply precepts for government, one to guide the striving of the anxious soul toward an end to its troubles, and one to inquire into the nature of the world and existence in general. Of course there's significant overlap but generally each has its niche and together they are complementary. The other premier civilization of MiaJ-world, of course, substitutes complementarity for unity within a single school, Islam. Governance, the fate of the soul, and the nature of creation are all within its domain. However, within this unity there are many tendencies-- there are scholars who make prescriptions for the state like Confucians, those who build autonomous institutions like the Buddhists, and those who retreat from the world in search of better answers like the Daoists. The unity of Xihai civilization contains three very different spheres of activity, and they remain distinct within. Of course there's another side to Xihai, the Christian side-- but is Christianity also a complete package? Perhaps not, since even when Catholicism tried to make inroads into China it attacked "paganism" while leaving "law" alone... law can remain pagan (Roman, Confucian, Napoleonic) while Christianity focuses on the spheres claimed by Daoism and Buddhism. So then, if this is the universal tendency of human belief (and a TTL observer may think it is, fallacies and all) then some new belief aspiring to replace all of the above must surpass the failed experiment of Christianity, and have not just two but three spheres of activity (a metaphysics, a psychology, and a sociology) within itself-- and each must be the most prolific and fruitful of its kind in the whole world. The result, I hope, won't necessarily be an atheist ideology-- only one with answers different to those traditionally believed.
