Starting from a 1000BC POD, how likely is East Asian hegemony?

Probability of East Asian-centric world starting from 1000BC?


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OTL, East Asia was often dominated by China, and during the Song Dynasty they were the closest to starting a medieval industrial revolution before the Mongols came and pillaged them (just an example), obviously Europe then overtook the rest of the world and that led to our world being pretty Eurocentric in some parts.

So if out of a million timelines of Earth diverging from 1000BC, how likely is East Asia going to become the “centre of the world”/dominant like Europe was as opposed to other regions? (Namely Europe)

By East Asia, of course we mean China, Korea and Japan. But for the sake of this discussion I will add Indochina as well.
 
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I put 10-20% just because hegemony is a pretty big hurdle which is not necessarily going to be a thing in every ATL.
 
Well, with an enddate of when? Because, at the rate we're going, it'll end up being an East Asian (well, mainly Chinese) hegemony over the rest of Asia and Africa sooner or later. Hell, Zimbabwe accepts Chinese RMBs. Chinese projects are going up across the Old World and the Chinese taking concessions from places like Sri Lanka, right under India's nose.

Purely European world domination lasted a couple centuries out of thousands of years of human history and Europe's increasingly lost influence over the rest of the world, so just saying 'how likely is ____ hegemony' without specifying a deadline is a bit nearsighted. By 1900 is far different from 'any point in history, past, present, or future'.
 
Well, with an enddate of when? Because, at the rate we're going, it'll end up being an East Asian (well, mainly Chinese) hegemony over the rest of Asia and Africa sooner or later. Hell, Zimbabwe accepts Chinese RMBs. Chinese projects are going up across the Old World and the Chinese taking concessions from places like Sri Lanka, right under India's nose.

Purely European world domination lasted a couple centuries out of thousands of years of human history and Europe's increasingly lost influence over the rest of the world, so just saying 'how likely is ____ hegemony' without specifying a deadline is a bit nearsighted. By 1900 is far different from 'any point in history, past, present, or future'.
Can you have global hegemony without at least oceanic travel? I feel like that would delineate a specific level of technology or global integration necessary to have that type of hegemony.
 

Kaze

Banned
Sounds like another Wank the Song - how about this try it with Thailand or Myanmar instead. The temples and palaces of their former royal families were massive and beautiful to behold. In a different timeline, you could have them dominate the whole of South East Asia.
 
Well, with an enddate of when? Because, at the rate we're going, it'll end up being an East Asian (well, mainly Chinese) hegemony over the rest of Asia and Africa sooner or later. Hell, Zimbabwe accepts Chinese RMBs. Chinese projects are going up across the Old World and the Chinese taking concessions from places like Sri Lanka, right under India's nose.

Purely European world domination lasted a couple centuries out of thousands of years of human history and Europe's increasingly lost influence over the rest of the world, so just saying 'how likely is ____ hegemony' without specifying a deadline is a bit nearsighted. By 1900 is far different from 'any point in history, past, present, or future'.

Atleast 300 years of being the centre of the world, startdate / enddate can be anytime but cannot start past 2000AD.

I’m envisioning the hegemony type like what Europe exercised over Asia and Africa during the Age of New Imperialism, mainly being ruthless colonizers and exploiters.

For this to work the Industrial revolution must start and be contained in Asia (and maybe a ATL Meiji for one power) for more than a couple of decades

Yeah, Europe did dominate the world mainly from 1700-1950.
 
Can you have global hegemony without at least oceanic travel? I feel like that would delineate a specific level of technology or global integration necessary to have that type of hegemony.

Because of that, I pictured Indonesia rather than China as the center of East Asian civilization being key to this scenario.
 
What exactly are you hoping to discover from these, "How likely is 'x'," threads? Not trying to be hostile, that's a genuine question. They generally devolve into an argument about the fundamental premise anyways, so what are you gleaning from these discussions exactly? Because we're all amateur historians and fiction writers, rather than actual experts, there's literally no way anyone here could adequately answer this question without a lifetime of study. Why Nations Fail is a good example of what the end goal of such questions might be, but there are so many factors to take into account when predicting something as abstract as this over such a huge length of time, that I have my doubts as to whether an actual answer is even possible to ascertain
 
What exactly are you hoping to discover from these, "How likely is 'x'," threads? Not trying to be hostile, that's a genuine question. They generally devolve into an argument about the fundamental premise anyways, so what are you gleaning from these discussions exactly?

What's weird is that they're not even by the same user. There must be some kind of appeal to "give an exact number figure for potential social advancement" (italics for vagueness upon vagueness), but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is.

I get what, broadly speaking, these questions are trying to go for - a perfect 19th century analogue, with industrialism, the colonisation of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (save the one being "advanced" in the first place), pseudo-Enlightenment rationalism, the Maxim gun and so on. But good alternate history doesn't work like a game of EU4 or Civ; it's not interesting, at least to me, to read a timeline that's obviously squeezed into a simplistic macrohistorical narrative without any regard for the real causes and effects that would exist in such a world. It's lazy.

But threads like these don't even do that, they ask how plausible such a cookie-cutter TL might be! It's boring as anything, but it also leaves us to just... guess at what the author's pet macrohistory might be, or advance ours on just as little evidence and serious social theory. What will we achieve here, but a million petty arguments about our most basic assumptions?
 
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