Where things get interesting for the Mesoamericans isn’t just introducing horses, but other beasts of burden and agriculture. New crops, farming methods, and animals like chickens, pigs, and oxen could change native society substantially. All this assuming the Chinese are more interested in keeping the natives around as vassals and tributaries.
What would the Americas be like if the Chinese colonized it?
- Thread starter bk01997
- Start date
They might be only interested in that at first. But with the chaotic political situation among the Chinese dynasties, that could change and they would have to learn to be self-sufficient and independent from hostile new emperors. That could force them to expand and thus create conflicts over territories that lead to bloodshed
Indeed. It could be argued that the Chinese explorers/colonists in the Americas would fundamentally change Mesoamerican societies, but we should also expect plenty of violence between them. And yes on that point regarding the Rocky Mountains, as that would be a useful natural barrier against the European colonial expansion from the east coasts
Since we're already presupposing an exploratory, naval-oriented China arising from some whatever-POD, why, exactly? (Given that this China has the capability to cross the Pacific and discover the Americas?)
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Exactly. It might not be how we understand, but it could end up that way eventually
Sapa Inka Wiraqucha
Banned
For this to work out, you need a rethink of Confucian ideology because...
Confucian ideology holds several things to be true:
1. Merchants are the lowest of the low: they produce nothing and profit by moving someone else's products. The number one motivation for mainland empires to develop strong navies is to safeguard mercantile fleets and secure the local trading zone. This requires organized mercantile activity conducted with the participation of the state, like the VOC in Holland and the British East India Company in Great Britain; having the trade be conducted by foreign powers is not conducive to this because if they're making the effort to get here, they might as well protect their own damn ships, especially if they're not essential to China's economy and hence not something worth defending!
2. China is the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe. The default position for everything outside of China is that it's inhabited by barbarians who may or may not have interesting things, and the default position for those barbarians is on their knees, sucking China's dick and providing China tribute. China is automatically the best land in the world, so there's really not much point in straying very far outside its borders... unless you make some very significant changes to the state ideology. By the time that the rest of the world can really prove this attitude wrong, it's already way too late to make any colonies.
3. China's bureaucracy is a graft-ocracy from top to bottom, because the low-level bureaucrats don't get paid very well while also having boundless opportunities for corruption and bribe-taking. This was remarked upon with great scorn by many Western explorers and travelers to Qing China as universal.
4. Confucian bureaucracy is very reactionary by design, and they can often overpower the emperor's will despite him being an absolute monarch on paper.
The first problem here is that the Confucian bureaucracy also doubles as the official historian class of China, which means that they have the final say over whether emperors (and their ideas/policies) are judged as good or evil in the history books. Go against the bureaucracy and you'll get your wishes done for a time, but your successor will probably reverse your policies, for which he'll get to feature in the histories as the righteous restorer of order and tradition.
The second problem here is that the Confucian bureaucracy always wants to return to an older state of being; if new reforms are implemented, they'll only be maintained as long as there is official force backing them up and the situation requires them to be in effect.
Moreover, that older state of being can be quite problematic for imperial expansion.
1. Merchants are the lowest of the low: they produce nothing and profit by moving someone else's products. The number one motivation for mainland empires to develop strong navies is to safeguard mercantile fleets and secure the local trading zone. This requires organized mercantile activity conducted with the participation of the state, like the VOC in Holland and the British East India Company in Great Britain; having the trade be conducted by foreign powers is not conducive to this because if they're making the effort to get here, they might as well protect their own damn ships, especially if they're not essential to China's economy and hence not something worth defending!
There's also another problem: mercantile activity requires a degree of independence on the part of the company, which the Chinese bureaucracy will never allow. If it's not under the bureaucracy's thumb, the bureaucracy won't allow it.
2. China is the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe. The default position for everything outside of China is that it's inhabited by barbarians who may or may not have interesting things, and the default position for those barbarians is on their knees, sucking China's dick and providing China tribute. China is automatically the best land in the world, so there's really not much point in straying very far outside its borders... unless you make some very significant changes to the state ideology. By the time that the rest of the world can really prove this attitude wrong, it's already way too late to make any colonies.
3. China's bureaucracy is a graft-ocracy from top to bottom, because the low-level bureaucrats don't get paid very well while also having boundless opportunities for corruption and bribe-taking. This was remarked upon with great scorn by many Western explorers and travelers to Qing China as universal.
4. Confucian bureaucracy is very reactionary by design, and they can often overpower the emperor's will despite him being an absolute monarch on paper.
The first problem here is that the Confucian bureaucracy also doubles as the official historian class of China, which means that they have the final say over whether emperors (and their ideas/policies) are judged as good or evil in the history books. Go against the bureaucracy and you'll get your wishes done for a time, but your successor will probably reverse your policies, for which he'll get to feature in the histories as the righteous restorer of order and tradition.
For an example of this effect in action, look up "The Wanli Emperor's strike", where the Wanli Emperor, faced with a recalcitrant bureaucracy, did the only thing he could do: stop fulfilling his functions.
The second problem here is that the Confucian bureaucracy always wants to return to an older state of being; if new reforms are implemented, they'll only be maintained as long as there is official force backing them up and the situation requires them to be in effect.
For an example of this effect in action, look up what happened to the Yongle Emperor's ambitious naval programme after his death: cancelled.
Often enough, reforms would be sabotaged because the bureaucrats involved were too busy looting the budget:
1. Example: what happened with the Hundred Days' Reforms. That was stopped by Cixi in coordination with a cabal of officers and bureaucrats disaffected by the changes.
2. Whole segments of the fleet modernization budget were reappropriated by Cixi so she could build a palace for herself.
3. Example: the courtier Heshen, a favorite of the Qianlong Emperor, ended up embezzling almost the entire treasury (!!!) and could only be removed once the Qianlong Emperor died because the Emperor wouldn't hear a word said against him. Even after Qianlong abdicated, his son still couldn't do anything about him because he still had his father's ear. Fortunately, once his father died, the Jiaqing Emperor was able to get shit done.
Moreover, that older state of being can be quite problematic for imperial expansion.
For example, China proper has historically had very low tax rates. This was a state of affairs which the emperors were expressly forbidden from changing, which often forced them to look outward in order to supplement their taxes, forcing them to acquire and exploit their vassals. Notice that this reality goes hand-in-hand with the idea that the correct position for China's neighbors is as tributaries, not as equals. Same happens in every dynasty.
For example, the Kangxi Emperor was thus forced to subjugate the Dzungars and levy heavy tribute from them. This later caused them to rebel, for which the Qianlong Emperor "pacified" them, which in Chinese bureau-slang means "genocided".
This is but the latest in a long round of such genocides, going all the way back to the Tang Protectorate-General to Pacify the West and their genocide of the Gokturks; it was what originally started the Turkic migrations to the west, first after they destroyed the Eastern Khaganate in 630 and later when they destroyed the Western Khaganate and genocided its people in 657.
For this to work, you need...
1. Early Confucianism (or some later version of it) to not be quite so condemnatory of the merchant class,
2. For early Chinese conception of the world to not boil down to "There's our land, which is the bestest ever, and then there's everything else, which is inhabited by barbarians living in The Dung Ages",
If you want to guarantee that China expands oversees, make Confucianism have an ideological imperative to conquer the world and force the entire thing to bow rather than just anyone within reach.
3, For the bureaucracy to not be quite so corruption-prone or overbearing.4. And for Genghis Khan to not happen. Genghis Khan really set China back by strengthening the insular and unadventurous aspect of Chinese foreign politics, decimating the Chinese economy, and stopping any chance of Chinese foreign exploration for at least the length of the Yuan dynasty.
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Fair enough, I am actually drawn to the crazier threads on this forum and I like reading the ones that are the most alien to our world history.
What I was trying (poorly) to articulate is the discord between Chinese culture and the colonial enterprise. The trade networks that would be set up by Chinese adventurers in the Ming (or post-Ming) era would basically have to depend on private efforts as opposed to the state sponsorship of trade companies that came out of Europe. This is because of certain parts of Chinese culture and Confucian philosophy which other people in this thread have explained better than I could.
Obviously we could have a POD which changes these parts of Chinese culture, but you'd have to tear away foundational bedrocks of the Chinese worldview. The one thing that really tires me in the Alt History community is the tendency for people to just assume that Westernizing Non-Western cultures makes them somehow superior to their OTL counterparts. When talking about the making of the modern world people often assume that "If X had adopted Western models of education they would be better off", which is really icky for me to read.
So when I saw the title of the post, yeah I was inclined to push against the idea that the Chinese would be going out and colonizing places (keeping in mind that Colonialism is a specific kind of government sponsored conquest and administration aimed at resource extraction for the colonizers benefit) because I just don't think it's their style. It absolutely could be with the right POD, you're correct about that, I just wanted to share my two cents.
Sapa Inka Wiraqucha
Banned
Funnily enough, the areas of least mortality were in Mexico, the most developed part of the Americas. There it was down to somewhere between 25% and 50%.
I could easily see Mexico recovering and, in the event of a local dominating empire exploding, patch itself back together in short order, especially if whichever faction that did it had Chinese help in doing so. If so, it would become a distant vassal with prospects for expansion into northern Mexico and the Yucatan, and could quickly grow big enough to assert independence.
(1): That's never going to happen. Why? Because the Pacific is teh fuckhueg!! Manila Galleons is one thing; massive population transfers across a long stretch of ocean is another, especially when there are going to be lots and lots of other, more preferable, areas to settle. After all, if these guys have colonies all the way on the other side of the Pacific, you bet they'll definitely have colonies in Polynesia, Indonesia, possibly even Australia. All will be pisspoor for holding lots of people, but all will be closer. And it's due to this reason that in such an event, I don't think any such exodus will occur. In fact, I think that will be the last thing the Ming remnants will want because that's taxes and manpower that are leaving!
(2): Who says the Qing come? Who says the Ming even exist?
This scenario demands that Genghis Khan's destruction of China doesn't happen. Why? See my previous post.
This alone butterflies Ming away; you'll probably be dealing with Song instead of Ming. And the Song were not adventurous.
Curiosity will be stoked, but only because these are lands they've never visited, with strange people whom they've never seen, not because these are good lands for colonization. In fact, any relationship China has with these lands will be long-distance. Certainly the Chinese state won't want Chinese subjects leaving China to work somewhere else: that's valuable tax money and manpower you're throwing away.
Aye... and the Great Plains, and the Appalachians, and the tribes in all those areas... yeah, the Rockies end up last on that list.
In fact, they're more of a barrier to Chinese expansion since their rainshadow is what makes the Great Plains barren and uninhabitable as anything other than a nomad prior to the early 20th century.
If anything, they'll find more luck sharing the Confucian ideology with the locals, since it would provide a really good cudgel for the Huey Tlatoani to curtail his subject lords' power and create a true centralized state.
As I already said, no Ming loyalists, so no permanent settlements: it's just too far away for that.
At least. Probably more to the Tang/Sui era, which is when Neo-Confucianism first started up.
The Chinese don't have a pretty track record in dealing with neighbors. However, they probably won't get up to those shenanigans here for the simple reason that America is so far away that colonizing it is way too costly for too little / no gain. In fact, there's no intuitive reason to colonize beyond establishing little footholds like Portuguese Goa or British Bombay.
One more thing limiting Chinese overseas colonization: you are never, and I mean never, going to get the Chinese state to willingly part with subjects and let them live in an area where they can easily rebel and the state can't easily recover them. This is why they always colonized on land contiguous to China, like Xinjiang or Tibet or the Pearl River area.
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Sapa Inka Wiraqucha
Banned
Gold is plentiful in China and can just as easily be taken by trade. For that, all you need are a few tiny outposts with a garrison and a regular shipment of goods from China to trade for the gold.
Chinese penal codes rarely exiled people, and even then it was usually paired with putting them in that area's mines/fields/frontlines. Doing an Australia on them is just silly from their perspective because they're far away from government oversight and any gold-mine colony is going to have to have a large army on site to defend it against the locals, who won't take kindly to their lands being taken up. This alone makes the prospect too costly to be realistic, especially given how corrupt the Chinese bureaucracy is; any such funds will be looted and the colony will never see a single soldier to defend those miners.
They're actually too dirtpoor to make good tributaries, except maybe Mexico... except Mexico is inhabited by lots of independently-minded locals who really don't appreciate foreigners, even fancily-dressed ones.
One more thing: there isn't going to be a Chinese Cortez because the Chinese had one punishment for people who go outside the mandate of their position: death. Anything unexpected, especially something which requires that large budgets be forked over (like, say, for the defense of newly-acquired lands nobody asked for) will be met with death.
No shit. The Chinese only made the northern nomad tribes tributaries because a.) they had a habit of becoming big nuisances if they weren't kept in their proper place, and b.) they actually had some damn good horses and did have one or two useful things to take as tribute... not so with the steppe wanderers of the Great Plains (I say wanderers because they don't even have horses yet). To them, American natives north of Mexico are basically shit-eating pygmies with nothing worth stealing.
and that'll never happen
No, they won't change ever. America is just too far away to spare resources/manpower on, and the coast facing China is too poor to justify permanent stationing army detachments there. Even if California is taken, the Rockies are just one big wall separating the interior from any possible resupply/defense from the coast. Also, the entire thing is so far away that any army sent across the ocean is quite likely to die of disease before it gets to its destination. Certainly a large chunk of it will die en route, and the returns will be pitiful.
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Sapa Inka Wiraqucha
Banned
It won't even be interested in stealing anything from the natives. The Mexicans fight back (and sending army after army across the wide Pacific with no stopovers like Hispaniola was for Spain will be a bitch), so will the Inca, and nobody else has anything worth stealing.
Plus, I'm willing to bet that the Chinese didn't think that they'd go over and conquer Rome once they discovered where it was. Same here; too far away, and who gives a shit anyway?
No colonists --> no cultural erasure. The nomad natives are too poor to bother with, and the rest are too self-assured of their own millennia-old civilizations to give the foreigners from beyond the sea the time of day.
Not across the Pacific, for reasons detailed above. The area is too far away to bother with and the locals are too poor to bother bullying for their lunch money.
Europe will cross at some point: carracks can easily cross the Africa-Brazil gulf so, short of a harebrained Columbus-type scheme, they'll probably discover Brazil first. This'll happen sometime between 1400 and 1550. If it isn't Spain, it'll be England or any other power willing to spare a ship or two after reading Adam of Bremen's account of the Norse discoveries, or listening to Basque/Breton/Cornish whalers' tales of a distant island.
Nope. A lot of settled native cultures were permanently destabilized to the point of regressing back to nomadic lifestyles, and many were wiped out, but quite a few rebounded and became strong enough to be a real power, like the Comanche or Iroquois. Given more time, the population will bounce back to higher levels and more strong tribes/states will be restored/created.
True. Only thing I would dispute is if the costs vs. benefits analysis and the even longer distance wouldn't just make colonization beyond establishing a few trading stations too much of a hassle to bother with.
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Sapa Inka Wiraqucha
Banned
Not going to happen. A nomadic lifestyle on the steppe is a shitty existence compared to almost any other, especially when the Chinese likely just set up trading stations and nothing else. At that point, it's better to be a fisher who trades with the people providing wundertech than a hick savage kicking rocks.
Sorry for the multiposts, but I had to address all of this in a manner which wasn't an unbroken wall of text.
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Yeah, pretty much.
Confucianism is not inevitable, and neither is the possibility of it being replaced or reformed impossible.
Genghis Khan's birth can be easily prevented. I agree that a Later Ming or Qing colonial empire is probably unlikely, but the continuation of the early Ming's treasure fleet voyages/naval programme[1], while not prompting outright expansion, may produce incremental advancements that will give them the capabilities to cross the Pacific, and once some gold is found...
As for ideological motive, I can easily see a universalist form of the "Mandate of Heaven" being instead adopted. It's not so different from Europeans taking land in the name of God, but in this case religion is replaced by state/empire.
[1] Yes, I am aware the treasure fleets were not financially profitable. I am instead suggesting a continued naval presence in the Indian Ocean, which will keep the Chinese navally ahead and perhaps encourage them to establish colonies in the Americas at a later point.
But then again, the West did manage to rule much of the world, did they not? On top of the land of all the Native Americans they killed and the labor of African slaves, among others, they were the first to adopt industrialization, advanced medicine, mass literacy and education programs... it seems you conflated modernization with westernization here.
It's not that modernity was created by the West, rather it was modernity which created the modern West.
I don't know how I'd consider state sponsorship of trade companies culturally Western, in very the same way I wouldn't consider growing crops culturally Mesopotamian.
This is not to suggest that Western culture is somehow qualitatively to other cultures, indeed, it has often brought out some of the worst tendencies of humanity, nor that modernity is strictly a Western trend -- look at how they're declining relative to a rising Asia and soon Africa today -- but it was Western nations who were the first to industrialize and modernize, for reasons which remain in contentious academic debate; biological, racial (now considered rightfully racist), cultural, geographical... or what I'd personally chalk up to a lot of human decisions and some geography.
I think most would agree that Chinese colonialism would benefit China -- to the detriment of the colonized -- and that state sponsorship of trade companies should not be considered cultural Westernization in the same way we don't consider using guns cultural Sinicization.
And that's why we're on a thread contemplating the consequences of them possibly changing their style.
I was trying to say that there are possibly non-Western paths to modernity that look very little like the one that we are familiar with. When coming to this stage of World History, people's timelines tend to converge on a few philosophies and social structures (colonialism, Westphalianism etc.) that are often alien to the nations and polities that are being discussed.
But colonialism is a lot more than just state sponsorship of trade companies, it's a system that relies on a bunch of different cultural and social ideas that came out of Western Europe in OTL. Again, I'm not saying that system couldn't have developed anywhere else, just that you need to take the timeline a lot further back than proposed in the OP and make changes to Chinese culture.
Agreed.
And I'm enjoying that discussion heartily, I just haven't come up with anything interesting to add to it other than "this seems like it would be hard to do" lol.
There are two Pacific routes, one which leads past the east coast of Japan and around the Aleutians/Alaska and the other being the Manila Galleon route. I think for China the latter is more plausible since it presumes they started their overseas expansion with the Philippines. But the former is an easier route since you are never more than a few hundred kilometers from an island full of people to trade with to obtain furs and ivory (walrus tusks). I think you'd need to have China discover the first route before they do anything with the second, but it would be the colonisation of the Philippines that spurs them to keep crossing the ocean, since a Mexico-Manila-China route will obviously be more profitable than anything in Alaska or the PNW.
In this case, your Chinese settlements would be mostly mercentile and operating in Mesoamerica but you might have the government establish some trading posts and resupply stations from Cape Mendocino south to keep the money flowing north from Mesoamerica (and the Andes?).
Of course, a Chinese Philippines means China will be very active in Southeast Asia against Majapahit, etc. which is a whole different thing. To protect their investment, they'd need a bigger navy to deal with the Southeast Asian powers meaning more of a naval tradition develops and such. Polynesia too for that matter, so most of the islands north of the equator would have Chinese trading posts/resupply bases. It could be that they'd need to discover Hawaii to really get the trade going since Hawaii is a big, densely populated society with more to offer than smaller island groups.
And they'll get their guns at least. If we assume various small Chinese trading stations (which won't be so small given time, just look at Southeast Asia--even with less population density, the PNW and California has enough locals to support at least a few to attract adventurous merchants, smugglers, etc.) then eventually we'll end up with a lot of mixed-race traders who will obtain quite a bit of wealth as middlemen. They'll sell all the guns, tools, etc. they can which in turn will be traded through existing networks. Horses are more difficult since you don't have the same factors that led to horses spreading rapidly on the Plains, but once again I suspect the mixed-race trading class would bring in enough horses that it would start to spread into the Plains and beyond.
And when you have horses, you have plenty of reason for some Plateau group to make more frequent trips into the Plains to hunt bison and other game. Probably by this point you have Europeans present and their fur trade starting meaning yet more incentive to stay out there hunting and driving off competitors. At that point, you could have entire tribes move across the mountains to the Plains permanently simply because it offers more advantages than dealing with the groups who have better access to resources (and "resources" includes "access to Chinese goods", well guess what, they now have access to European goods which are considered about as good).
In this case, your Chinese settlements would be mostly mercentile and operating in Mesoamerica but you might have the government establish some trading posts and resupply stations from Cape Mendocino south to keep the money flowing north from Mesoamerica (and the Andes?).
Of course, a Chinese Philippines means China will be very active in Southeast Asia against Majapahit, etc. which is a whole different thing. To protect their investment, they'd need a bigger navy to deal with the Southeast Asian powers meaning more of a naval tradition develops and such. Polynesia too for that matter, so most of the islands north of the equator would have Chinese trading posts/resupply bases. It could be that they'd need to discover Hawaii to really get the trade going since Hawaii is a big, densely populated society with more to offer than smaller island groups.
They'd like the trade, firearms, and especially horses but overall the ones who'd really benefit are the coastal groups with inferior (for the Chinese) land. Basically whoever they'd just trade with for furs.
Not everyone had the same access to fishing sites and horse culture was profitable enough on the Plateau as it was when it first arrived. The only reason no one from the Plateau crossed into the Great Plains OTL (but the reverse happened, either peoples chased from the Plains by warfare or people from the Plains hunting and raiding across the mountains) is because the Plains Indians had greater access to firearms. OTL there were groups like some Salish tribes and the Kutenai who sat at the border but were eventually pushed west, so it's not hard to see it happening the other way around.
And they'll get their guns at least. If we assume various small Chinese trading stations (which won't be so small given time, just look at Southeast Asia--even with less population density, the PNW and California has enough locals to support at least a few to attract adventurous merchants, smugglers, etc.) then eventually we'll end up with a lot of mixed-race traders who will obtain quite a bit of wealth as middlemen. They'll sell all the guns, tools, etc. they can which in turn will be traded through existing networks. Horses are more difficult since you don't have the same factors that led to horses spreading rapidly on the Plains, but once again I suspect the mixed-race trading class would bring in enough horses that it would start to spread into the Plains and beyond.
And when you have horses, you have plenty of reason for some Plateau group to make more frequent trips into the Plains to hunt bison and other game. Probably by this point you have Europeans present and their fur trade starting meaning yet more incentive to stay out there hunting and driving off competitors. At that point, you could have entire tribes move across the mountains to the Plains permanently simply because it offers more advantages than dealing with the groups who have better access to resources (and "resources" includes "access to Chinese goods", well guess what, they now have access to European goods which are considered about as good).
One strategy might be to use the Pacific Gyre as a sort of Volta do Mar equivalent. Japanese ships sometimes caught it only to be pulled across the ocean like the case of Okiuchi and the Makah in 1820 or so. Have a Zhang He fleet equivalent or Qin Dynasty expedition or other fleet head north or around Japan, get caught, and land near British Columbia or the Willamette Valley or San Francisco Bay.
Sapa Inka Wiraqucha
Banned
This I like.
A Qin-era fleet would either land in the Kuroshio Current of the North Pacific Gyre or use the Equatorial Countercurrent.
If they use the ECC, they end up in Mexico. They also discover the as-yet uninhabited Hawaian Archipelago.
If they use the NGG, they end up either in northern or southern California. If they end up in the north, they go up the Canadian and Alaskan coastlines, eventually ending up back around Japan. If they end up in the south, they go down to Mexico before taking the North Equatorial Current back across the tropical Pacific, where they probably end up discovering Hawaii.
If North America is discovered at this time, it'll take considerably less change and finagling to get China to not turn its back on the discovery.
You could have the Qin survive, but you could also have the Later Han adopt Confucianism and maintain the early Han syncretic Legalist government.
If they do as @NinenineBFive suggests and adopt a universalist attitude ("expand the Dominion of Heaven unto all Four Corners and make all peoples bow", that sort of thing), then they probably will have more interest in a.) the coastal fisherman cultures of Washington and British Columbia, and b.) the successors of the Olmecs down in Mexico. Everyone else is, as I said, just too poor to be worth bullying for their lunch money.
Given that at this time the Han had more than enough land to colonize back home (and a desperate need to do so just to hold down the outlying provinces), they probably wouldn't population-colonize for a long time. They'll set up colonies in Hawaii and the Philippines, though; they're much closer, and would act as a stopover in a long ocean voyage from Canton to Xalisco. Trade will rapidly start developing as the map expands. In time, the South Pacific is mapped out as well; the first Chinese to discover Australia probably do so after after taking the South Equatorial Gyre while on their way from China to Mexico or from Peru to the Philippines. Chinese navigators might even find New Zealand before the Maori do!
Most trade on the Pacific will revolve around a northern triangle between China, Mexico and Vancouver, and a southern triangle between Mexico, Peru and Australia.
Chinese trade goods: Chinese jadework, bronze tools (and later iron), wheat/barley/rice, porcelain, silk, ivory, spices, horses
Mexican trade goods: Mexican jadework, exotic feathers, furs, maize/squash, textile, gold, cocoa, maguey
Vancouverian trade goods: whale products, fish, wood, furs
Peruvian trade goods: silver (worked and in bulk), bronze, textiles, llamas and llama wool
Slavery isn't on the menu because the Chinese already have plenty of their own in all the areas that matter to them and are within their reach.
Funnily enough, everyone on the Northern Triangle speaks some kind of tonal language.
Peru is unusual in that both tin and copper are found in abundance there, while iron isn't. As a result, bronzeworking was discovered early there, but wasn't popularized for a long time, remaining in isolated use by different cultures until the Inca united the region and spread it across the entire area. In this case, they rapidly become a center of bronze production. Whatever cultures live along the Andean coast are going to get very rich and are going to expand more or less in the Inca manner.
Funnily enough, everyone on the Northern Triangle speaks some kind of tonal language.
Peru is unusual in that both tin and copper are found in abundance there, while iron isn't. As a result, bronzeworking was discovered early there, but wasn't popularized for a long time, remaining in isolated use by different cultures until the Inca united the region and spread it across the entire area. In this case, they rapidly become a center of bronze production. Whatever cultures live along the Andean coast are going to get very rich and are going to expand more or less in the Inca manner.
Someone really needs to make a fic of this. I'll certainly try to make a map of this.
Effects on Mexico: Imagine this, but earlier.
Effects on Peru: Imagine this and this, but earlier.
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If it leads to China industrializing instead of Europe, you might actually have a world government (although it's unlikely). Britain managed to control a quarter of the world at its peak, a China with the same level of industrial development but dozens of times more people could possibly control all of it. In that scenario, pretty much all of the Americas and Australia would be populated by Chinese people. while most of Afro-Eurasia would be similar to European colonies in Africa.
Otto Kretschmer
Kicked
Colonial societies tend towards either more freedom or more slavery than the colonizing societies. Depending on what approach the Chinese take in America the colonies made industrialize first before China does
Sapa Inka Wiraqucha
Banned
Haha... no. It'll be subject to different internal and external stresses to be sure, but just because China has a big population doesn't mean it'll actually want to export that population, because remember: when you send peasants overseas, you're sending away valuable tax money and manpower.
Also, given the particular pressures China is under, I don't think they'll industrialize any quicker than Europe did, and maybe even slightly slower.
Industrialization happens in societies where the labor in a given field is pricey and time-consuming, and can be saved with some sort of invention, which leads to the inevitable spread of that invention across society and a process of transitioning from an artisanal economy to a mass-production economy.
Slave economies (or economies swimming in cheap labor) don't need this; this is why the Greeks and Romans, who knew about the uses of steam devices and could build mechanical computers, never followed up on them: there was simply no need because the immediate products of any innovation in those areas could simply be outstripped by the work of slaves.
Under this scenario, China has two economic zones: the rural interior and the mercantile coastal cities, both with high populations. It also deliberately limits social mobility with a local caste system and a system of internal passports, so overall it exerts a very strong control over its peasant manpower.
Thus, it has no incentive for early industrialization at all, especially when it has a glut of resources flowing in from all directions.
And it had serious rivals outside of the bounds of its empire. At any moment, the runner-up nations could decide to gang up on it and quickly cut it down to shape. Really a lot of its empire was based on pure luck (British India, for example) and was badly defended and completely undeveloped. Most of the British empire was composed of vassal states which had the label "colony" slapped onto them, like in Nigeria, Uganda, Cameroon, etc, etc. So their "control" really amounted to "stick a flag in it and give Frenchie the middle finger".
They only barely engaged in population-based colonialism, and even that was not based out of a desire to expand the king's imperium. It was based on a desire to remove rebellious elements (English Dissenters) and a lack of will to completely wipe them out as they should have.
Chinese emperors would never stand for letting rebels have their own way, especially if "letting them go their own way" meant allowing them to go somewhere where they can live unmolested, and the stranglehold of the bureaucracy on public life means they'll never be subverted to the point where their enemies can force them to obey a parliament.
Different cultures will conduct foreign politics differently: European-style colonialism isn't the only possible way, or even the only practiced way (it isn't even a single way). Also, on a broader note, colonialism does not automatically lead to successful industrialization (just look at Portugal+Brazil, Spain, France and the Dutch for examples). All it leads to is greater access to resources, which the nation may or may not take advantage of due to local cultural and political pressures. Also, for a variety of reasons, such as those I mentioned in my very first post on this, the Chinese ruling authority is not going to authorize colonization until they are technologically advanced enough to be able to immediately crush a rebellion which springs up in a colony. By that time, however, the natives will be too strong to just bend over and fuck like IOTL.
Chinese bureaucracy automatically tends toward state-control over economy, and I doubt they'll soften their stance to anything below what even the modern CCP allows (free-ish companies with a big government stake in them).
There will be no colonies before China itself has been colonized! Up until around 1000, much of what is today southern Han territory was only barely colonized by the Han and had to be held down with military force. So no, they won't start until their own backyard has been cleared out, and that's only if some other pressure like the steppe nomads doesn't delay any such plans yet further.
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Response
After reading all of the comments so far, I learned a lot.
I agree regarding the words about Confucianism in that it hindered China's development in many aspects, which is what I will consider.
I honest didn't know about the specific currents in the Pacific Ocean, so thank you.
Overall, this thread has provided me with a treasure trove of information and how things might have happened if the Chinese made colonies in the Americas. I was thinking about writing a book on this and I learned much more than I had anticipated. It is one of those areas of history where colonialism is only understood from a Western perspective and I wanted to know how that might have occurred with an Asian power. It has happened before, with the Japanese in Korea and Taiwan, and that was a completely different dynamic as opposed to white vs brown people
I agree regarding the words about Confucianism in that it hindered China's development in many aspects, which is what I will consider.
I honest didn't know about the specific currents in the Pacific Ocean, so thank you.
Overall, this thread has provided me with a treasure trove of information and how things might have happened if the Chinese made colonies in the Americas. I was thinking about writing a book on this and I learned much more than I had anticipated. It is one of those areas of history where colonialism is only understood from a Western perspective and I wanted to know how that might have occurred with an Asian power. It has happened before, with the Japanese in Korea and Taiwan, and that was a completely different dynamic as opposed to white vs brown people