Well, the question is mostly who do you think would be able to rule China, but also which do you think is the most interessant to develop. (Feel free to suggest other people that I wouldn't have mentionned)
This might be what you are looking for. There are some speculations that the Jie were of Scythian origin.The Scythians, or any other boosted steppe-dynasty conquest earlier in Chinese history would be interest.
Koreans is my vote.
For a long time Korean settlement seems to have extended quite a ways into modern Manchuria and the Liaodong peninsulas. You also have Korean states that extended their rule over that region, such as Goguryeo and its successor state Balhae amongst others. I’d say the best chance here is for Goguryeo to capitalize on the Sui disintegration and get involved in the struggle. I’m not familiar enough with the details to really construct a scenario, but I’d suggest Goguryeo conquering parts of northern China and essentially splitting China between a northern and a southern dynasty, where the northern one eventually wins the ensuing struggle. That would get you the Chinese imperial family as ethnic Koreans and their dynasty stemming from a Korean state. That said I think sinnicization of said imperial family is inevitable.
The Jurchens and Manchus were often mistaken to be nomadic, but this was not the case. The Manchu were a sedentary, agricultural people, with farms, livestock raising, and settled villages.The 'foreign' dynasty rulers who succeeded in ruling China tends to be of steppe nomadic origins. For famous example, take the Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing. Steppe nomads tends to have better chances at conquering China than sedentary nations before the time of early modern age.
Nothing stops an ethnic group from conquering China gradually even from not the North, maybe by the time they took over everything they would be mostly Sinitic but it's not like the Manchus or Mongols managed to avoid that either.
What makes you say that? I don't see any reason why this scenario would be likely to create a fundamentally divided China. I think it's vital to think of it not as a Korean state ruling north China, but as a Chinese state that includes Korea and is dominated by an ethnically, and initially linguistically, Korean elite. I don't see it as being all that different from the various dynasties that were founded by various nomadic peoples conquering northern China. While there would likely be an element of hostility or discontent to the fact that the imperial family and elite are ethnically Korean, I think that it would rhetoric that's adopted by opponents of the regime to dress up a different source of hostility, rather than something that would actually make people revolt or unite. Again, that's analogous to the general response to the various Turkic dynasties as I understand it.As much as I love the idea, I think more realistically is that a strong Korea, even to the point of being the majority around the North China Sea, would be the cause of a fundamentally divided China. Otherwise China would be able to unite against them.
Hmm. It would seem that northern states historically had an advantage over southern ones in terms of their capacity to conquer China at large. I don't see anything in this scenario that would modify the historical trend for China to be reunited after periods of disunity.However, that could mean a China torn between a Korean North, Alt-Chinese Middle, and Vietnamese/Alt-Cantonese south.
What? First off the Indo-Aryans, I never have heard of the term "Aryo-Indians", migrated into India and didn't invade. So the people groups never really were displaced. Which brings me to my second point. Even if some Dravidians wanted to move to the Yangzte Valley they would have to either cross the Himalayas; move through Central Asia then the Western Chinese Desert into Eastern China; or move across India to Bengal then through South East Asia up Southern China to the Yangzte. And these people didn't have horses, and were sedentary agriculturalists, long abandoning their nomadic lifestyle. The effort undertaken to create a Dravidian China would require everything short of an ASB. Highly improbable.Dravidians. As the Aryo-Indians invaded the North, Dravidian peoples could move into the Yangtze valley and displace the locals, creating a radically different Dravidian China.