WI: Worse Plague in China

What if the Black Plague hit China like it hit Europe. Killing just as much or a little less amount of people but still a lot, what would happen to China? Would the Chinese depose the Emperor for his inability to explain the disease? How would it affect the social and economics of post-plague China?
 
What if the Black Plague hit China like it hit Europe. Killing just as much or a little less amount of people but still a lot, what would happen to China? Would the Chinese depose the Emperor for his inability to explain the disease? How would it affect the social and economics of post-plague China?

The Black Plague did go through China before it hit Europe.
 
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Unfortunately, the course of the pandemic in Asia is not as thoroughly documented as it is for Europe. However, the Black Death does appear in records from across Asia in the 1330s and 1340s. The disease spread terror and destruction wherever it arose.

Many scholars believe that the Black Death began in north-western China, while others cite south-western China or the steppes of Central Asia. We do know that in 1331, an outbreak erupted in the Yuan Empire; it may have hastened the end of Mongol rule over China. In 1334, this disease killed 5 million people in Hebei Province - about 90% of the population.

As of 1200, China had a total population of more than 120 million, but a 1393 census found only 65 million Chinese surviving. Some of that missing population was killed by famine and upheaval in the transition from Yuan to Ming rule, but many millions died of bubonic plague.

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The Yuan dynasty controlled China and Mongolia during the first half of the 14th century. This period coincided with a concerted withdrawal from the greater Mongolian world most of whom had by this time converted to Islam. It was a time of great turbulence: famines, epidemics, natural disasters, political unrest, as the last remnants of the Mongol empire in China devolved to regional warlords and the Ming Dynasty began to develop. Record keeping during this devolution is sporadic and uneven, but it does show three rounds of massive epidemic in 1330- 1350 each taking over 60% of at least regional populations. Unfortunately medical descriptions of the disease(s) have not survived. Sussman’s analysis of the overall Chinese population during the early to mid 14th century is that the losses are comparable to the 25-30% loss in Europe that is directly credited to the Black Death. Given the ancient foci of plague in northern China, this is where we should expect it to come from in the 14th century, and so it does appear to.
 
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