WI : No Qing Dynasty, The Great Ming Never Isolate Themselves

Yuelang

Banned
Hello

So, I always wondered about the issues behind Sun Yat Sen's Revolution, particularly because the common Chinese people deemed the Qing Dynasty as Manchu foreigners.

What if the Qing under Nurhaci never attacked the Ming? with the Ming never going into isolationism but maintain their policies at their peak strength?

What can we expect in this alternate China in 21th century?
 
Wait, so you're positing that the Ming survives centuries longer than any other Chinese dynasty?

The issue with this is that Ming China was a terrible place for people who were not the Emperor. There were widespread crop failures throughout the Little Ice Age, leading to famines ("the nine sloughs"). A lot of people could not afford children, leading to delayed marriage and (because of the shortage of women) things like two brothers marrying the same wife. Plus, you might be conscripted to rebuild the Great Wall and possibly die in the process.

It survived longer than the Yuan because it didn't stoke the extra "they're not even Chinese" resentment, but it was not going to survive in the same form for 600+ years.

If your POD is that the Ming is replaced by another Chinese dynasty rather than a foreign one, then probably nothing is going to change. 18-19c Qing isolationism was after the ruling Manchus had already Sinified, and was driven more by factors like the long 18c peace than by the fact that the Qing were Manchu.
 

RousseauX

Donor
In what sense was the Ming isolationist?

I mean sea voyages were banned for like all of 10-20 yeras of the ~250 years or so the dynasties lasted.
 
I mean what if Ming reformed themselves and enduring up to 21th century, like England

Well, England didn't really reform itself! It had a revolution, including the execution of the king. Then it had a dictator, whose attempt at a dynasty of his own failed. Then it restored the executed king's dynasty, only to decide against it. Then it brought a string of kings from outside, the only one of whom to establish a dynasty didn't speak the language and had to let Parliament run itself, and by the time he died, Parliament's authority was too strong to let any king usurp it.

The problem with copying this process into China is, first, China had no parliament. Non-absolutist rule in the Tang and Song eras did not consist of a formally empowered legislature, but of extraconstitutional controls on imperial power, by the nobility under the Tang and the merchants under the Song. So it wasn't as easy to depower a reigning absolutist dynasty without also leading to a civil war.

I'm sure it's possible to come up with a way China would revert to a stable anocracy (I'm slightly abusing the term, but it fits), on the model of the Song or the pre-Habsburg Low Countries, but it's not as easy as in England, which even at the peak of Tudor absolutism had a rubber-stamp body that could later evolve into a real legislature.
 

scholar

Banned
Wait, so you're positing that the Ming survives centuries longer than any other Chinese dynasty?
Technically, the Zhou would have lasted slightly longer. That said, they were a warlord ridden mess with direct control of only a small amount of land when they were finally conquered.
 
A more likely alternative leading to a similar result would be Ming being deposed by a local dynasty which decides the best way to improve the situation after their mismanagment would be to expand outwards, i.e. more Zheng Hes gathering tributes half a world away.
 

Yuelang

Banned
so basically Ming is unsalvageable? even when they end up as mere hereditary symbolic head of states?
 

RousseauX

Donor
so basically Ming is unsalvageable? even when they end up as mere hereditary symbolic head of states?

Only in the sense that if subsequent history goes differently an alt-Yuan Shi Kai might decide to find a "descendant" of some Ming emperor and make him a constitutional monarch of China as an alternative to the Manchus.
 

scholar

Banned
so basically Ming is unsalvageable? even when they end up as mere hereditary symbolic head of states?
Only if the Ming intellectual and scholarly elite manage to cajole and subdue the nobility into forming a German/British model of government to keep up with the rest of the world (or almost exactly what happened in Japan).

The Ming's not unsalvageable though, and the Ming government was seen as rather innovative for the time in that it had a bureaucracy that as a whole managed to provide a more open check to the Emperor's authority. Strong Emperors got around this, particularly toward the beginning, but as the Ming declined the Bureaucracy was able to effectively limit the power of the Emperor. In OTL this hastened their decline and the Qing made sure to kill that new institution deader than dead with an extra helping of dead.

Global Climate Change caused massive famines, political instability was common, and the Qing proved to be an existential threat to the dynasty, but with more competent leadership, Bureaucratic politics kept in check by capable Emperors or by even more capable members of the scholar-gentry, and the ability to prevent the Jianzhou Manchurians from getting in a position to effectively take on China, or defeating them early on and not having the main frontier general give away the keys to the kingdom because of frankly byzantine politics ruling in the capital. Maybe, when things are getting bad, a Zhu prince somewhere in the provinces who is an experienced general marches on the capital and installs himself as chief minister of the state and perhaps usurps the throne - which has a 50/50 chance of restoring or ruining the dynasty depending on the man, his kids, and how bad things are around him.

Depending on butterflies, you might actually get a non-western state developing something akin to constitutionalism independently of the West.

Another interesting note, the Qing's administration can be seen as a conservative reaction to recent innovation. In some ways later emperors tried to be more Chinese than the Chinese when it came to administration and airs of empire, and with the resurgence of conservativism most of China's relatively vast technological and astronomical know-how degraded and decayed to the point where Europeans had to teach Qing officials topics and studies that any Song or early Ming official would have needed no instruction in.
 
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