What happens if China keeps Nanyue (northern Vietnam)?

It's kinda interesting how they just accepted (northern) Korea as a separate tributary state, but hey, buffer states are always good, and sometimes expansion just doesn't happen because of quirks of history.
 
It's kinda interesting how they just accepted (northern) Korea as a separate tributary state, but hey, buffer states are always good, and sometimes expansion just doesn't happen because of quirks of history.

Wellll.... In Korea's case I think it's more an issue of geographic determinism.

The arc from central Manchuria to Gansu was the perennial security issue of Chinese dynasties, without anything approaching a sustainable solution until the Qing dynasty. If you can't reliably control the eastern edge of Mongolia or modern Jilin province, the land route to Liaodong will always be one large raid away from being cut.

When it's just Liaodong at the end of that route, you fortify the place and rely on its geography and Han population to secure it. It can be lost, but it would tend to be recaptured, if only a dynasty later. When it's northern Korea you're getting cut off from, that's a whole different thing. It's a large, densely populated, and non-Han region, with an established identity distinct from being a Chinese minority.

Allowing Korea, or half of it, to spend most of its history as a Chinese province requires a lot of unlikely (but not impossible) preconditions. Annexation would have to happen as early as possible (Warring States, Qin, Han at the latest) and be stable for the first centuries of Chinese unification (Han, in OTL). That removes the issue of the Koreans realizing that Koreans aren't a Chinese people, but as others have mentioned you then run into the northern frontier problem. China would have to turn earlier and for more extended periods to cooperative dynasties like the Tang and Qing - co-ventures between Han administrators and non-Han militaries. If that were the norm, the center of power in China would stay to the north, and Korea could be sustainably managed. In essence, you'd have to rewrite Chinese history completely.
 
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