And they typically correlate with high levels of efficiency and success against opponents that outnumber them in terms of population, GDP and industries...on top of having foreign support...right...
Which typically correlate with the ability to continue trading 1:1 in a fight, viz. ~60k Chinese casualties vs. ~60k Vietnamese casualties in 3 months, or the ability to survive trading lopsidedly in a fight.
Edit: as for all the stuff you added in the meantime, I wonder why you're leaning on the most incompetently-waged war in living memory, which had all the skill and planning of "we'll be back home in time for Christmas" in 1914, to make your case.
A guerilla movement over the size of Southern China would be something that's unprecedented. That is if you can deal with the conventional armies of the various Southern States and their foreign backers in the first place.
A guerilla movement over the size of Southern China would be a figment of your imagination, because it's simply never happened before.
Resistance of any meaningful scale is rare when the entire country is overrun, as the example of the French Resistance in WW2 shows.
In cases where there
is such resistance, like in WW2 Serbia, that resistance has not been pivotal to the course of the war.
Southern China would be where most of the industry isn if we are going by more people for industry=more industry.
Funny, I didn't know
this area had more people in it than
this area.
If
this map is any good, the ratio between these was around 8:5 in the 1930s, and 11:6 in the
1950s. So the north was actually almost twice as populous.
And if you're thinking "Aha, but the south has all the industry, so it will definitely win!", just wait until you get to the bottom.
It happened before under the Ming Dynasty. Imperialistic projects are typically very expensive. The main reason why it only happened once before had to do with the fact that the elites didn't want to be taxed to do it. Look at the various Southern Dynasties during the Northern-Southern Dynasty period and Yue Fei's Northern expedition, they had the momentum to reunify China, but the Southern elites typically left promising campaigns unsupported because they didn't really care about the North.The Southern elites were mainly interested in defending their provinces of origin instead of going on an offensive.
The south in that time had much lower population density than the north(*) and all their dynasties suffered from chronic political instability, coups and infighting among the aristocracy and usually within the royal families as well. That was the true reason why they continued to fail. In fact, the latter reasons are also why the northern dynasties constantly failed as well. Never-ending coups do not make for stable conquests.
What you are doing is beyond charitable, it is actively trying to distort early events to suit your narrative of later events.
(*): during the Sui era, the north-south ratio was 3:1, and would remain that way until the introduction of Champa rice in the Song era raised the local population density in the south versus the wheat-growing north.
You are somehow assuming that the various Chinese states will not band together nor would the foreign powers get involved. If either of them happens, it would be a really nasty fight.
Whereas you seem to assume that the south Chinese states are stronger than the north and that foreign powers are guaranteed to get involved.
If that is what's required for your scenario to occur, then I suppose your southern nations must also be suffering from political instability like the Southern dynasties were, in order for them to not just conquer the north.
A lot of British war material from both world wars originated from India......
Mostly food, then cotton/jute/etc, then simply raw manpower (with inferior weapons, ofc).
All the industrial materials coming to Britain came from America.
Much of the colonial empires' difficulties were around fighting uprisings in rural areas. In general, they had little difficulty controlling the urban areas.
This is incorrect. The vast majority of Africa was very easy to control, in part because it didn't
require anything more than light control.
For example, the British made a deal with the emirates of Northern Nigeria that they would not intrude on their internal affairs and keep missionaries out of their lands in exchange for their continued submission after the British defeat of the Sokoto Caliphate. They accepted, which meant that the British didn't have to keep a large military presence there.
In fact, in 1900, all of British West Africa combined required around 10k troops to police around 450k square miles and ~15 million people.
By contrast, the British Raj required around 260k troops to police around 1.8 million square miles and ~290 million people.
In other words, there were x26 troops in India for x4 land and x19 people. Reason: a more organized population, lesser tech disparity and a lot more cities.
Taxing locals for big profits is very much part of the plan. There is a good reason why India is the cash cow of the empire and everything else is built around it.
Might that have anything to do with
this idea?
1. Get the local economy to produce cheap raw products to send back home.
2. Motherland processes raw products into finished goods, its merchants sell back the finished goods to the locals at prices that drive local artisans out of business, thus hooking the colony on the motherland's goods. Deindustrialize the area to make sure local stuff can't compete in prices.
3. Keep the locals in an internal trading loop where they can't buy anything from your competitors, and anything they buy has to first go through your hands.
4. Profit for you, misery for the natives.
This economic model was what the Swadeshi movement was fighting against, and why the act of spinning one's own cloth was a major focus of the Indian independence movement.
Where in that process does the southern coast acquire any meaningful industry? That's the neat part:
it doesn't. The colonizer nation really doesn't want that, because it will mean the locals will have alternatives to just buying their overlord's goods at cost to their own economy. And this has long-term consequences for the economy even after the nation gets independence. That's why Nigeria and India, two of the wealthiest postcolonial nations, still base most of their economy on resource exports and textiles.