WI : Japan interfered with China like Britain interfered with Europe

  • Apologies 1 - I'm sure this has been covered before, a link to the best thread on subject would be a good answer
  • Apologies 2 - This isn't my era or region

Britain and Japan, both islands off the coast of large landmasses.

Britain endlessly interferes with European politics to ensure that no European force comes to dominate the continent and power is decentralised. Europe is constantly at war for 1000 years but becomes the scientific and technological leader of the planet.

Japan retreats into itself and allows a series Imperial dynasties to rule China as a whole. China is not endlessly peaceful but does have a large overall national identity.

I have an idea why this happened - the Mongols - could this have turned out differently?
Perhaps the Mongols go West, and their invasion of Japan in OTL becomes the invasion of Britian, with similar results. In the West an insular Britain off the coast of a backwards German (Mongol originated) Empire
and in the East a liberal, acquisitive forward looking Japanese state which interferes with the independent states of China, and begins to colonise the New World the way Britain did?

Could we reach the 20thC with a mirror image set of World Wars originated by the states in the East over their colonies in the West?
 
First issue is that until the late 19th century, Japan very much considered itself a junior country relative to China; while you had shades of independent thought developing by the early 19th century, as well as significant social change, overall, many of the critical components of such a rise, an industrial revolution (difficult due to Japan's paucity of natural resources), an assertions of independence, and the ability to project that same independence, are unlikely to occur at the same time, bar events such as OTL which cause Japan to modernize and surpass China.
 
Could we reach the 20thC with a mirror image set of World Wars originated by the states in the East over their colonies in the West?

No.

The situation that made Europe go as it did OTL, and China & Japan go as they did OTL, is not something that can be boiled down as "Mongols".

They were a factor in certain things in China and probably Japan, but they had already gone separate directions by the time Temujin was born.
 
You're also ignoring the fact that Europe was a collection of warring states ripe to be played off against each other with Britain as a part of this system of states.

China, while not always united, had a default state of (more or less) centralisation in place long before the Mongols
 
Last edited:
One major problem is that Japan had a much later start as a significant country, and even then was generally weaker than the Chinese states. Population and other differences mean that that will be hard to change before the modern era.

Another problem is that China has less in the way of natural divisions than Europe does (the main Chinese division is North/South, which did pop up several times). That makes it harder to generate the sort of numerous small states that Britain used for balance-of-power reasons. People do tend to overemphasize the Chinese tendency towards unification, but it's definitely easier for an unusually competent or powerful ruler to unite the country than it is for a would-be hegemon to unite Europe.

That said, post-Meiji Japan did interfere quite a bit in the internal workings of China (culminating in the Manchurian Incident and the full-blown Second Sino-Japanese War). That included messing around with various warlords to undermine the central government. Notable in that this period of interference tended to coincide with a point at which Japan is both much stronger compared with China, and China itself has very weak central control. It's just extremely hard to generate those conditions simultaneously (and the first one at all) before the modern era.
 
Last edited:
China has a long history of being unified, powerful, and looked up to by its neighbors as the gold standard of civilization. Even during its phases of disunity, there was still a feeling among the populace that it "ought" to be united under an Emperor, with the Mandate of Heaven. Whenever China fragmented, the question was never "How can we remain independent?" but rather, "Which of us will re-unite the Empire and found a new dynasty?" At least before the Meiji Era, having Japan off the coast of the Chinese Empire is not like having Britain off the coast of a Europe divided into constantly squabbling states of roughly equivalent size. It's more like having Britain off the coast of the Roman Empire at its height--or even like having it off the coast of the idealized and revered vision of the Roman Empire of popular modern imagination. There's just not much they could have done to interfere in anything.

To get Japan to maneuver its way into being a world power by interfering in China, you'll have to somehow prevent China from ever becoming "China" in the first place. Maybe with a POD as far back as preventing Qin Shihuang, the duchies of China could all have developed into their own nations, with competing interests that Japan could have played off of. But the butterflies from that will alter the course of the development of Japanese civilization itself, since OTL Japan relied on a heavy dosage of Chinese cultural imports to develop the way it did. Would the Japan in TTL even still be recognizably Japan as we know it?
 
Britain and Japan, both islands off the coast of large landmasses.

Britain endlessly interferes with European politics to ensure that no European force comes to dominate the continent and power is decentralised. Europe is constantly at war for 1000 years but becomes the scientific and technological leader of the planet.

Japan retreats into itself and allows a series Imperial dynasties to rule China as a whole. China is not endlessly peaceful but does have a large overall national identity.

I have an idea why this happened - the Mongols - could this have turned out differently?
Perhaps the Mongols go West, and their invasion of Japan in OTL becomes the invasion of Britian, with similar results. In the West an insular Britain off the coast of a backwards German (Mongol originated) Empire
and in the East a liberal, acquisitive forward looking Japanese state which interferes with the independent states of China, and begins to colonise the New World the way Britain did?

Could we reach the 20thC with a mirror image set of World Wars originated by the states in the East over their colonies in the West?

Generally speaking, China remained far more consolidated than Japan for more than 3000 years. There were times when the former was extremely fragmented, most notably during the Sixteen Kingdoms Period (304-439), along with the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589), but Japan remained relatively decentralized until the 6th century, so it wouldn't have even been able to contemplate an incursion into China. The last major period of division within China was during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-960), but Japan had its own set of political issues as the court began to gradually gain influence, so a planned invasion would have been out of the question.

The gradual transition of power from the monarchy to the shogunate in power, along with China's relative stability at the time, also meant that Japan was unable to consider any form of expansion from around 1000-1585, especially during the Sengoku Period (1467-1600). In fact, Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea (1592-8) was a complete disaster mostly due to complex logistical issues, along with China's willingness to aid its vassal, so even a tentative incursion into China at the time would lead to an even bigger catastrophe. The aborted invasion was also one of the reasons why Japan decided to implement Sakoku (1633-1868), which wouldn't exactly help your proposal.

To get Japan to maneuver its way into being a world power by interfering in China, you'll have to somehow prevent China from ever becoming "China" in the first place. Maybe with a POD as far back as preventing Qin Shihuang, the duchies of China could all have developed into their own nations, with competing interests that Japan could have played off of. But the butterflies from that will alter the course of the development of Japanese civilization itself, since OTL Japan relied on a heavy dosage of Chinese cultural imports to develop the way it did. Would the Japan in TTL even still be recognizably Japan as we know it?

This situation would lead to an immense amount of butterflies to the point where China, Korea, and/or Japan probably wouldn't even exist. For example, assuming that China somehow continues to remain divided, the lack of a Qin analogue ITTL could lead to a much more influential Gojoseon, which could lead it to eventually pressure the corresponding state(s) in the southern peninsula and seek to extend its influence among the various Japanese statelets, resulting in much more significant transmissions of Chinese and Korean culture to the archipelago centuries earlier. Considering that Gojoseon had already been relatively centralized around 700-300 BC, based on archeological evidence, it's theoretically possible that Korea could wield much more political influence over Japan than it did IOTL, which is the opposite of the OP's general intent.
 
Top