Why Did Nobody Try To Colonize China?

Russia was busy for the latter half of the 19th century doing it, but they were hampered by shitty logistics and an almost total lack of cash. It occupied the Ili Valley for the better part of a decade and was busy slowly annexing Manchuria until they got thumped by Japan. Then they were so shattered by the loss of the war they opted for an independent Mongolia instead of annexation .
 
Tibet would've been an independent nation. Unilateral annexation was, and is, a big no-no. That's why the Korean war happened.

As a rule, the US only cares about these things when its own commercial interests are involved. And the USSR isn't going to have a problem with Tibet coming under communist rule (this is before the split). Who exactly is going to fight China over this territory in the middle of nowhere, which used to belong to China anyway, only a few years after WWII?
 
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Tibet would've been an independent nation. Unilateral annexation was, and is, a big no-no. That's why the Korean war happened.

Right. And, despite much better US bases by comparison to a Tibet campaign, it was a draw. With any POD that wouldn't butterfly Mao there's no way the US spends the effort to prop up Tibet. If you want a non Chinese Tibet, your best bet is a heavily Soviet aligned India and a Soviet Sinkiang combined with a Nationalist China. KMT China will probably still try to take Tibet for geostrategic regions, but a Tibet bordered by a sympathetic CCCP and India can probably hold them off if the Union is willing to back them to the heel.
 
While India is huge and populous its history is one of fragmented states, which Europeans could digest piecemeal and unify later. In contrast China has tended towards being a unified central state, so its virtually impossible to carve off a piece and consolidate, making it too much for an expedition to conquer.

The Europeans did make a bunch of unequal treaties which served much the same purpose.
 
Qing Dynasty was arguably already a colony of Manchu ethnicity ruling over the Han.

European interactions were somewhere between what is now considered "neocolonialism", and the original 19th century colonialism. If it happened again today, then it would certainly be considered colonization.

While the Empire of Japan engaged in imperialism in China and turned Manchuria into a settler colony.

China was practically already as colonized as it could have been.
 
While India is huge and populous its history is one of fragmented states, which Europeans could digest piecemeal and unify later. In contrast China has tended towards being a unified central state, so its virtually impossible to carve off a piece and consolidate, making it too much for an expedition to conquer.
However, there's nothing in particular saying that Europe had to come across China in an imperial phase and not, say, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Granted, that was a thousand years or so before Europe really showed up, but it wasn't the only time of division in Chinese history. It's conceivable, at least, that China could have been in one of those states when Europe showed up, in which case the same kind of tactics used in India could have been applied.
 
However, there's nothing in particular saying that Europe had to come across China in an imperial phase and not, say, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Granted, that was a thousand years or so before Europe really showed up, but it wasn't the only time of division in Chinese history. It's conceivable, at least, that China could have been in one of those states when Europe showed up, in which case the same kind of tactics used in India could have been applied.

Sure, but if you were a betting man looking at the last 2000 years would you put your money on those odds?
 
Basically, China was big , it was a long way away, and crucially it stayed united. Had it fallen apart as India did after 1707, those other factors might not have saved it - but it didn't.
 
Because the European colonialists had the "misfortune" of having to deal with a united China and not deal with a China which was in one of its periods of disunity.
 
Because the European colonialists had the "misfortune" of having to deal with a united China and not deal with a China which was in one of its periods of disunity.

The Europeans were making an unbelievable amount of money off of China without having to occupy the place, why add an extra layer of government and bureaucracy? From the Second Opium War onward they proved that they could have conquered parts of it they wanted to, but opening it to trade was just easy and far less hassle.
 

Derek Pullem

Kicked
Donor
Well if you can impose a treaty on China after a war (First Opium) where you control their foreign trade and set the tariffs whats the point of spending all that money to take responsibility for their internal trade.
 
The simple answer is that they thought hard about it and kinda tried but it never really worked.

As early as 1517, some Portuguese were doing solid and detailed plans on how to conquer China (capture Canton and bet on an uprising against the mandarinal system by the general population) and famously, the Spanish also planned on an expedition.
Then you had all the Jesuits and other missionaries, not sure if it counts but it could have been a prelude to something else.
Truth is, after a while, once China was not the prime superpower it once was, it was easier to keep it in a subservient state, where it was effectively a protectorate of the Western Coalition. That way they could rule themselves, the West could still take what it wanted, minus the administrative costs
 
Sure, but if you were a betting man looking at the last 2000 years would you put your money on those odds?
If you were looking at the first one thousand years, maybe I wouldn't but I'd certainly have to pay attention to the possibility. The Three Kingdoms, Sixteen Dynasties, Northern and Southern Dynasties...there was a lot of division at different times. Second one thousand years, not so much. It's interesting to see a kind of phase transition in the stability of the Chinese imperial system from empire->division->empire to empire->empire transitions. Wonder why that happened.
 
If the Chinese tried to seize Tibet, they would be in violation of international law, and the world community would have an excuse to go to war over it. And you're overlooking one very important factor.
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Certainly the threat of nuclear annihilation would keep the Chinese out.
The threat of nuclear annihilation didn't keep the Chinese out of the Korean War. And the Chinese flooding into the Korean peninsula didn't see the US nuking China, despite MacArthur's plans (and MacArthur's plans weren't exactly palatable to DC either; aside from nuclear war, he wanted to lay down a strip of radioactive cobalt along the width of the Korea peninsula to guard South Korea). The US hasn't used nukes to safeguard any nation's sovereignty even to this day either, so who exactly in DC would be willing to risk WWIII or normalise nuclear warfare over a sparsely populated, landlocked Central Asian theocracy with barely any ties, economic, historic, or demographic to the US?
 

kernals12

Banned
The threat of nuclear annihilation didn't keep the Chinese out of the Korean War. And the Chinese flooding into the Korean peninsula didn't see the US nuking China, despite MacArthur's plans (and MacArthur's plans weren't exactly palatable to DC either; aside from nuclear war, he wanted to lay down a strip of radioactive cobalt along the width of the Korea peninsula to guard South Korea). The US hasn't used nukes to safeguard any nation's sovereignty even to this day either, so who exactly in DC would be willing to risk WWIII or normalise nuclear warfare over a sparsely populated, landlocked Central Asian theocracy with barely any ties, economic, historic, or demographic to the US?
We've certainly used the threat of nukes to do just that. That's the whole idea behind Mutually Assured Destruction.
 
Tibet would've been an independent nation. Unilateral annexation was, and is, a big no-no. That's why the Korean war happened.
Eh...that's not the real reason why the Korean War happened. The Korean War "happened" because the United States and NATO were attempting to block the expansion of the Soviet Union and its allies/satellite states. Note that the United States did not go in guns blazing when Idi Amin invaded Tanzania. Tibet, even if it were a pro-American independent state, would have been impossible to defend and probably would have been abandoned to its fate (albeit with a great deal of ideological grandstanding).
 
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