Plausibility Check: More settler colonialism worldwide?

You ever heard of the unparalled invasion? Its a plausible Europeans conquer China scenario

It exists but isn't plausible. Japan did a biological warfare campaign against China in the 30s/40s and didn't win, why should Europeans win in even earlier decades?

Still begs the question of why not just dispose of the excess population in the Americas/Australia instead of seeking genocide/ethnic cleansing/mass murder on people who would otherwise make a good market for our products or cheap labour to make said products. Even the strongest American Indian groups were a lot less effort to brush away than an ethnic cleansing campaign in China might be.

Even Kenya-levels of white settlement would be hard to get in China, simply because you need to do something about the Chinese, and by "do something", I mean a violent and brutal ethnic cleansing campaign to allow Europeans to insert themselves. And that's pretty expensive for any would-be colonialist.
 

Magical123

Banned
It exists but isn't plausible. Japan did a biological warfare campaign against China in the 30s/40s and didn't win, why should Europeans win in even earlier decades?

Still begs the question of why not just dispose of the excess population in the Americas/Australia instead of seeking genocide/ethnic cleansing/mass murder on people who would otherwise make a good market for our products or cheap labour to make said products. Even the strongest American Indian groups were a lot less effort to brush away than an ethnic cleansing campaign in China might be.

Even Kenya-levels of white settlement would be hard to get in China, simply because you need to do something about the Chinese, and by "do something", I mean a violent and brutal ethnic cleansing campaign to allow Europeans to insert themselves. And that's pretty expensive for any would-be colonialist.
I believe they campaign itself takes place in the 70s.
 
Maybe if the mongols exterminate North China, replace the population with Mongolians, then do it again to large tracks of South China, by the time European Empires are dominant there will largely only be depopulated plains in China? That's like double colonization if Europeans take it from them then.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
More the Indians, since they seem to have settled in East Africa in even larger numbers than the British did, since many were labourers on the colonial railroad projects. Idi Amin did a nasty purge against them.

Thanks for this information!

They were there and could be there in greater numbers (maybe 10% of the present Filipino population at most).

Why not more than 10%< though?

The Americas--in the Middle Ages. And not just China, but Japan too. Some believe the ancestors of the Ainu helped contribute to the gene pool of the American Indians. In any case, the route from the North Pacific has been well-travelled since the Neolithic. Either nation could establish settlement in the New World. I think Japan, maybe with a successful Kenmu Restoration or a political evolution which generally avoids military rule and thus an "eternal Heian era" (so to speak) might be the most likely to do so. Any East Asian colonialism is hard, but contrary to popular opinion, if any East Asian colonialism in the Americas is to occur, the Japanese are at least as likely as the Chinese.

OK.

But for East Africa, if the British (or Germans, or whoever) want to import Chinese labourers (I believe they did to some extent) instead of Indians, they sure could. And like with the Indians, certain individuals will rise into the middle class in the colonies.

Actually, I was thinking of Ming China following up on Zheng He's voyages and travels by creating Chinese settler colonies in Africa.
 
Thanks for this information!



Why not more than 10%< though?



OK.



Actually, I was thinking of Ming China following up on Zheng He's voyages and travels by creating Chinese settler colonies in Africa.
I just read a short time ago about a real Chinese Fleet that travelled and chased off Pirates as far west as East African shores and the Indian Ocean. This fleet existed not too long before the Spanish and Portuguese began exploring what was then called the New World. So the possibility of Chinese colonizing areas outside of Asia were plausible.
 
Mongols have no capacity of exterminating all of China. That's something on the order of hundreds of millions of people. And like the Japanese centuries later, surely they'd find something in China worth keeping around instead of wasting the time mass murdering about 1/6 (or more?) of the world's population.

Philippines are densely populated. The Chinese mode of colonisation predominantly was to settle in urban areas and act as providers of services. This implies pre-existing urban areas--like in pre-Columbian America, you'd expect to find the Chinese in Mexico or the Andes rather than California or the Northwest. When it came to less settled areas like Taiwan and Outer Manchuria, the Chinese were much slower to settle there, although many did indeed settle in Manchuria during the China (and the Russians engaged in efforts to scrub Outer Manchuria of its Chinese heritage). They also had Xinjiang as well to settle in, but that wasn't quite "pacified" until the Qing.

With this in mind, what do the Chinese have to gain with settler colonies in East Africa where Zheng He visited? They'd just assimilate into the local order anyway. Although maybe at a far stretch you could get something like the Lanfang Republic. But Africa is very far for China when Southeast Asia and Indonesia is so much closer.
 
Mongols have no capacity of exterminating all of China. That's something on the order of hundreds of millions of people. And like the Japanese centuries later, surely they'd find something in China worth keeping around instead of wasting the time mass murdering about 1/6 (or more?) of the world's population.

Philippines are densely populated. The Chinese mode of colonisation predominantly was to settle in urban areas and act as providers of services. This implies pre-existing urban areas--like in pre-Columbian America, you'd expect to find the Chinese in Mexico or the Andes rather than California or the Northwest. When it came to less settled areas like Taiwan and Outer Manchuria, the Chinese were much slower to settle there, although many did indeed settle in Manchuria during the China (and the Russians engaged in efforts to scrub Outer Manchuria of its Chinese heritage). They also had Xinjiang as well to settle in, but that wasn't quite "pacified" until the Qing.

With this in mind, what do the Chinese have to gain with settler colonies in East Africa where Zheng He visited? They'd just assimilate into the local order anyway. Although maybe at a far stretch you could get something like the Lanfang Republic. But Africa is very far for China when Southeast Asia and Indonesia is so much closer.
The Mongols can indeed exterminate huge swaths of the population, they can´t thought outcompete them locally with their different lifestyle, farmers will come back and grow stronger in numbers in a century or so.

I´m not sure this is true, relatively spekaing compared to the rest of East Asia. The Chinese can do that but they probably wont, it took the Dutch to colonize Taiwan.

Zheng He is not going to start Chinese colonialism IMO but more of a enlarged Sinosphere if anything.
 
Glory, prestige, and/or resources, no?

Why would China need prestige or glory when it's self-evident they are the greatest country in existence? The entire world looks up to them and pays them tribute. Or at least that's what should be happening everywhere.

Resources...just need to "remind" the local Swahili, Somali, etc. to pay their mandatory tribute to the Son of Heaven. More Chinese helps build those ties to keep reminding them to pay up.
 
Of the stuff I've seen here the ones that look doable are:
-Taiwan: if the Europeans are able to get there before mainland Chinese settlers en masse then why not?
-Manchuria: the Qing kept it pretty empty until their fall so plenty of usable farmland and not many people. Then there was a big land rush after the fall of the Qing. More colonialism in China could lead to settlers in Manchuria.

A lot harder due to the population but Japan had a lot more settlers in Korea than most people realize. IIRC Seoul was 25% Japanese at one point, although the vast majority of the countryside was still Korean. If you have a combination of a smaller Japanese empire in the early 20th century (so more focus on Korea), supported immigration and enough brutality to drive a lot of Korean rural farmers into Manchuria (and nothing on the other side of the border to keep them away) then you could see a very large Japanese presence in Korea.

You could see Chinese immigrants (of which there were a lot until they were kicked out under the dictatorship) forming a middle class in between the Koreans and the Japanese, they did a lot of small scale urban commerce under Japanese rule.
 

Deleted member 97083

Why would China need prestige or glory when it's self-evident they are the greatest country in existence? The entire world looks up to them and pays them tribute. Or at least that's what should be happening everywhere.

Resources...just need to "remind" the local Swahili, Somali, etc. to pay their mandatory tribute to the Son of Heaven. More Chinese helps build those ties to keep reminding them to pay up.
It's possible to have a "Mandate of Heaven"-like ideology and still be expansionist. The Assyrian Empire and post-Diocletian, pre-Christianization Roman Empire had a similar conception of emperorship. Or, get rid of the traditional concept of empire by introducing something radical like the Taiping Rebellion.
 
@Viriato has talked about this subject quite extensively. You could have had higher number of settlers in Africa had WWI been avoided though most likely it would have been people settling Libya. Why Libya? Close to Europe, had oil and was sparsely populated at the time. Quite possibly Algeria too if the French had been more aggressive in shipping people over there so French outnumbered Arabs. Most other places were a non-starter either due to distance, climate, or population density.
 
If Japan was as strong as Germany and dedicated to exterminating China, could China have stopped it without outside influence?
Killing hundreds of millions of Chinese would be a massive waste of resources, which would probably be more fruitful in educating the Chinese to believe that they were Japanese all along.
 
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