Why Did Nobody Try To Colonize China?

longsword14

Banned
If Ukraine had been a member of NATO and was filled with American Air Bases, I think the Russians would've hesitated.
Which alliance would hold Tibet, an obvious hotspot, against China ?
Britain never showed the kind of interest you imagine. It wasn't even Afghanistan which had British expeditions in the nineteenth century.
Younghusband went to Tibet only by the beginning of the 20th century, and even then Britain did not want to take all of Tibet away.
The only way you could keep China from TIbet is if a successor state of the Raj were interested and powerful enough.
 
Which alliance would hold Tibet, an obvious hotspot, against China ?
Britain never showed the kind of interest you imagine. It wasn't even Afghanistan which had British expeditions in the nineteenth century.
Younghusband went to Tibet only by the beginning of the 20th century, and even then Britain did not want to take all of Tibet away.
The only way you could keep China from TIbet is if a successor state of the Raj were interested and powerful enough.

I generally think you need Russia to do something that makes Britain overreact and move into Tibet in a misguided attempt to protect India.
 
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.

Yes, it’s worth remembering that many of the colonial expeditions in the 1870-1914 period were done very cheaply, with small numbers of troops. Conquering China would have required a much larger military commitment and the Europeans did not see the point, when they already managed to gain trade concessions.
 
Too far away from Europe and too organized a political entity to easily split apart as China as a concept of a unified polity is just too well established. Also no natural resources, well except tea and Europe quickly managed to grow tea in SE Asia. So not worth the effort of subduing endless peasant rebellions ect. Also Chinese nationalism developed pretty quickly in response to European imperialism compared to other places as Chinese people had long seen barbarians as inferior.
 
We've certainly used the threat of nukes to do just that. That's the whole idea behind Mutually Assured Destruction.
Though do that, the other guy has to believe that you're going to start WWIII over, in this case, Tibet.

Good luck trying to tell the American people that.
 
It seems like a rule of human civilization, at least until the last century when we decided that self-determination was good: if you don't colonize, you will be colonized. At one point, European powers controlled all of the Western Hemisphere and Africa (besides Ethiopia and Liberia, sort of). The Ottomans, ruling from Turkey, took control of all of the Middle East west of Iran, and then that was given to the French and British after the First World War. The British took all of South Asia (including India) besides Afghanistan. The Russians took Central Asia. The French got Southeast Asia, besides Siam (now Thailand). But there is one glaring exception: China. It is the world's largest nation and while it had some chunks taken by the Russians, Japanese and others, it always remained nominally independent. So why did nobody try to make it into a colony during the 19th century or earlier?
The Japanese sure tried. They ran into one major problem.

There are a metric crap-ton of Chinese people and they've got immunity to all the big diseases, they had a stable, organized society for a really long time, and they don't really like being told what to do by idiots on the other side of the planet.

Even with the Qing economy moribund, industrialization failing, society breaking down on a large scale, and naval tech severely delayed, the most the Europeans could claw out were some minor coastal concessions. Even then, there was no real success at altering the local society long-term.
 
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