Yes. And looking in an area that could have been written off as Not Worth the Risks in a society more concerned about risks than rewards.
Looking for new fisheries wasn't particularly high-risk, and it had an obvious reward.
The geography certainly encourages it, but people rise to the occasion or fail to despite geography. If geography was destiny, England should never have amounted to much more than the Netherlands on the world stage.
Commercial interests far and wide but no great national power.
I think you're being a bit hard on the Netherlands, it definately had it's heyday as a great power. And I would argue that you could point to geography as a major causative factor as to why Britain became a great power and the Netherlands industrialized late.
There's the obvious one, the coal deposits of Britain, to start wirth
The problem is that its still stopping interest in what others have to offer besides specie around where the monsoons stop.
They didn't
have anything to offer. We know this, because Europeans tried for centuries to sell the Chinese almost anything to try to get the trade balance more favorable: from woolens to cuckoo clocks. Everything was either inferior in quality to local produce, or more expensive than other options, or far too esoteric. If 18th century Europeans couldn't find anything to sell the Chinese that the Chinese wanted to buy, you want to blame the 16th century Chinese for not bothering to sail all the friggin' way around Africa to get at...what?
And why are we assuming it will be again?
Because there was nothing to buy in Europe, and because the Europeans wouldn't have been able to pay more for Chinese goods than the Indians or Arabs. Then there's the logistical costs. There is no way that the Chinese would have had any commercial gains from trading around Africa or across the Pacific with Europe.
And China has the advantage of being a much stronger place than any European nation. It can find ways to go further than the coast hugging trade.
It didn't need to, and doing so wouldn't have made any profits.
Unfortunately for China, this would require either faster European development or more Chinese interest in affairs outside the monsoon region. And ideally both, but you can't have everything.
Well the first possibility is too general to draw conclusions from. The latter is possible, I suppose. One possibility would be if the Europeans played their hand too early, and attempted an invasion or dressing down of China in the 16th or 17th century. This would likely end badly, but it could lead to a punitive expedition against whoever tried it.
You just mentioned American goods China found interesting. How much grows in the New World that isn't native to China?
Lots of things, but the thing is that when the Chinese got their hands on them, they were able to grow them in China itself. China is big enough, and has varied enough terrain and climate that it could just grow it locally. Lot cheaper to grow chillis in Sichuan or corn in Inner Mongolia than to buy it from the Spanish.
One possibility that bears exploration is tobacco, I think. It was banned under the Ming and Qing, but if you can either stop the ban or get it established early enough that the ban is ineffective, then there will be a New World good the Chinese would want to buy. Then problem is, this probably wouldn't encourage much in the way of China going out to get it, because the Spanish would come and sell it, and then others would likely come in and undercut the Spanish prices, and then the Chinese would start growing it themselves.
The point is that an attitude where those opportunities are sought is one where they can be found and exploited, not the value of (for instance) sugar specifically. The world outside China and the monsoon region is pretty broad and we see Europe exploiting and trading everything from whale oil to indigo.
They did it because it was not available in their backyard, so it had to be sought. China didn't have that problem. There wasn't really a difference in attitude, Europeans bureaucrats were no less risk-averse than Chinese ones, and Chinese merchants no less adventurous and profit-driven than European ones.
Yeah, if your idea of "good' is "stable and boring" (boring used as the antithesis of what we translation as "interesting" in the famous saying), then yes, it does look dubious. This is not the attitude of a dynamic society eager for gaining spuds for the spud God.
Hey, we needed something to lighten things up, and potatoes are awesome.
Potatoes are awesome, but their adoption was actually pretty spotty in Europe. It took centuries for people to be convinced they weren't poisonous.
But more seriously, if the reaction if the Mandarins is "But the risks!" then that's going to have an effect harmful to the forces and energies that trigger the kind of explosive growth and leaps forward that took Europe from as industrially developed per capita as China in 1750 to almost twice as much by 1830 (with the UK being four times as much).
Which doesn't mean that it isn't worth it, especially as wealth from foreign trade also means more money spent inside China which means more economic development there.
Its not as if its (making up numbers) making 25,000 within China and making 1,500 outside China with a change to making 2,500 having no impact on anything inside China. European states benefited internally from the growth of trade as making the economy stronger above and beyond what money was specifically made selling, for instance, cod.
"And all of this gave the greatest stimulus to the European shipbuilding industry, attracting around the ports of London, Bristol, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and man others a vast array of craftsmen, suppliers, dealers, insurers." for starters.
And the Fujian coast was no different.
You seem to have made a connection between the Industrial Revolution and lots of overseas trade that seems too general. It was specifically the textile trade, and the need to outcompete Indian cotton, that drove much early industrialization.
Delay some technical innovations for long enough, and it's likely that the struggling British cotton industry might be entirely strangled by low-quality but cheap Indian cloth, and high-quality and pricey Chinese cloth before the technical innovations lead to the ridiculous increases of efficiency that OTL saw. That would put a serious spanner in the works.
See above comment on Mandarins preferring safety and boredom.
So did everyone. But people liked cash more.
Unlike Europe, China chose to regard the situation as the best of all possible worlds and preserving it was more important than improving it.
You act as if China wasn't improving, when in fact it was. However, while Europe developed labor-saving techniques, East Asia was much more advanced in land-saving techniques and fuel efficiency. The idea that China was static and undeveloping is untrue.
Up to 1750, China had an edge on Europe in a lot of fields. People's views are far too influenced by the effects of the industrial revolution, which was a phenomenon without precedence in human history.
In this scenario, Western Europeans would still have an interest in exploiting the world unless we think they develop an equally indifferent attitude towards the fruits of commerce to what OTL China had.
"All the world comes to Europe for the fungus." doesn't make it undesirable to find cod or whale oil etc.
They wouldn't need to exploit the world if the world was coming to it. That's the point. Cod and whale oil could be sourced locally. And, would they be interested in finding whale oil if there were Asians and Arabs rocking up with other, better oils and were willing to sell pots and pots of it for some of the fungus? Human nature tends towards the path of least resistance in this case.