Latest point China can recover to become an Imperialist power akin to Meiji Japan

Vae Victus

So we all know about China's century of Humiliation and how it got beaten around like a feral dog for 19th and early/mid 20th centuries, by all its neighbors and some folks from halfway across the world.

What's the latest point, that China could turn it all around, and systematically reform itself to a point where it can become the pre-eminent Asian Imperialist power, knocking everyone around it down, and stealing lunches. Getting atom bombs dropped em on courtesy of the USA is optional!

My best bet is under Qianlong emperor who didnt focus so much on military conquests, but instead decided to use his early vigor and resources on domestic long term development, especially in sending swarms of Han settlers into the northern frontier to also one day contest it with Russians. Also staving off his decadent old age decline and trusting in corrupt officials who ran everything into the toilet, and having a more positive reception to the Macartney embassy and being more receptive to western ideas and especially industrial practices, which is then passed onto a more inquisitive successor. With Napoleon ramping on the continent, China might make a serious grab on everything East of the Urals under a colonizing expansive China.

I was thinking of maybe going for a post Opium War revival, but i dunno if it's enough time to reform and get their shit together in time to be a regional hegemon. Having a ship building and sailing tradition getting aid from the British by paying them to bootstrap it starting in the late 1790s, would be just too critical for a true powerhouse.
 

James Ricker

China was looking like it was about to do a Menji
The Dowager Empress was able to prevent it
If she can be stopped the 20th century would have seen a much stronger China.
 
Denliner

Denliner

100 Days Reform was probably the last chance that the Chinese were able to modernize and at least stand up to Japanese ambitions in the future after the humiliating Sino-Japanese War.
 

Vae Victus

I'm iffy on Taipings really able to turn things around. For them to well and fully take over, China would likely get depopulated and shattered into different cultural successor states. They were, to put simply, weird as fuck and totally not vibing with the ultra conservative Chinese state at the time.

100 Days/Ganking Cixi i feel is too late for the stipulation of China becoming a 800 pound gorilla fast enough to affect things in the timeframe im looking at.

It's one thing to stand off the Japanese and scare folks off enough to not invade. I'm more wondering what it'd take for China to turn into a true unstoppable Yellow Peril.
 
Denliner

Denliner

Vae Victus said:
It's one thing to stand off the Japanese and scare folks off enough to not invade. I'm more wondering what it'd take for China to turn into a true unstoppable Yellow Peril
Click to expand...
The Tongzhi Restoration then would probably the last POD where China could turn into a feasibly strong modern power where it can actually protect its sphere of influence and resist further Western imperialism. Becoming a bulwark against Japanese aggression is generally good enough for a modern China anyways, in my opinion.

I think there were some people that thought of killing Qianlong earlier in his reign as a POD to make way for a more modern thinking Emperor that cut down on corruption, but I think that's hard in an era where conservative elements in court were strong and there wasn't an Opium War to shatter Chinese supremacy to encourage reform.
 

drdwastaken

Maybe during the last rebellions in the name of the Ming? As long as the Qing rule china they never had a real chance, mainly due to divide between Han and Manchu.
 

Kerney

I think it's earlier than the times mentioned, can't really quite tell you when but it could be as early as Ming.

One underlying trait we see in China is huburis/pride in its self conception as the middle of the world. Maybe weaken China a bit in the 1500s and 1600s and force it to flex a bit more, the culture would be more dangerous earlier and reformers would not face as entrenched opposition in the 1800s.
 

raharris1973

Vae Victus said:
So we all know about China's century of Humiliation and how it got beaten around like a feral dog for 19th and early/mid 20th centuries, by all its neighbors and some folks from halfway across the world.

What's the latest point, that China could turn it all around, and systematically reform itself to a point where it can become the pre-eminent Asian Imperialist power, knocking everyone around it down, and stealing lunches. Getting atom bombs dropped em on courtesy of the USA is optional!

My best bet is under Qianlong emperor who didnt focus so much on military conquests, but instead decided to use his early vigor and resources on domestic long term development, especially in sending swarms of Han settlers into the northern frontier to also one day contest it with Russians. Also staving off his decadent old age decline and trusting in corrupt officials who ran everything into the toilet, and having a more positive reception to the Macartney embassy and being more receptive to western ideas and especially industrial practices, which is then passed onto a more inquisitive successor. With Napoleon ramping on the continent, China might make a serious grab on everything East of the Urals under a colonizing expansive China.

I was thinking of maybe going for a post Opium War revival, but i dunno if it's enough time to reform and get their shit together in time to be a regional hegemon. Having a ship building and sailing tradition getting aid from the British by paying them to bootstrap it starting in the late 1790s, would be just too critical for a true powerhouse.
Click to expand...

props for creativity and ambition- I'd read this!
 

Kaze

Banned
The problem with the Taipings is that they have more in common with ISIS than with reform. IF they won... it is likely nothing good would happen.

I would say 100 days was the last gasp of any sense of reform - if allowed to continue it is likely we get a Constitutional monarchy, but I do suspect that China would still be the sick-man of Asia for a while, until it caught up.

If I were to set a time for a POD, it would be the 8 Trigrams Rebellion - where there was an assault on the Forbidden City, Prince Mianning joined the battle and used his musket to wound one rebel and to kill another. After the rebellion, the Qing take one look at the musket that changed the tide... then says "we must learn or this thing will be the death of us."
 

Maperseguir

Oh boy, here we go again
First things firsts, you really need to dispose of that "century of humiliation" thing - it is KMT/PCC narrative that hides all the ups and downs of late Qing China under a single label of nationalist shame. For instance, the "national humiliation" of the Opium War was a blip on the radar for the Daoguang emperor; and China's military modernisation impressed western observers in 1900. There are differing historical views on the subject, but broadly scholarship is shifting from an "assassination" narrative - China beaten down by Imperialists - to an "old age/suicide" narrative - the Qing collapsing mainly for structural factors, even tho Europeans obviously gave it a hand. I'm personally enclined to blame first the limits of their statecraft for the Qing's failure, but you can find a broad range of proposed causes, from ecology to science, which anyway are not exclusive. The main point to answer your question is then: "when can the Qing solidify their regime enough to support a strong military infrastructure"? , to which there are I think two possible answers.

First, as mentioned by people there's the Tongzhi restauration and the self-reinforcement movement after the Taiping War. While it is necessary not to understate the extent of the work achieved by Tongzhi's reformers in the fields of importing european tech & building a strong army & navy for the empire, the era saw the underlying problems of financial crisis and territorial fragmentation get worse in the process (as modernisation was led more by provincial officials like Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang than by a weakened Peking).
Second, there's the window between the 1896 defeat against Japan and the Boxer rebellion. This is a much more narrower window, delimited by the electrochoc of defeat which gave reformers new impetus and the Boxer rebellion which saw the Qing lose their legitimacy and enter their terminal phase. The period's distinctiveness is that people were now willing to consider radical solutions - which gave them an impetus either to bring reform to new fields, or to bring down the dynasty altogether.

I have two assumptions now. First, that collapse of the Qing Dynasty after say the 1870s = warlord era, as power has become fragmented enough & local arsenals widespread enough to allow a protracted civil war. Obviously this is bad. Second, and this is more debatable, I personnally would tend to think that the chances of reform between 1896 and 1900 are very slim, as the dynasty is only hanging on by a thread: Qing powerbrokers like Cixi know that one false step means breakdown, and if they do decide to carry on reform it might as well happen. That would definitely do a great TL tho, if only for the spectacular aspect of the renewal.

But instead I'd rather go with a PoD somewhere in the 1870s, before territorial fragmentation has set in. If we can devise a way for Zeng Guofan to take power in 1865, we can end up with a strong & intelligent official in Peking instead of the partage of power between local officials and Cixi that was OTL adopted to sideline him. From there, we can hope the Self Strenghtening movement gradually gets better.
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

There's always

Superpower Empire: China 1912

(Link to the original thread) This is the story of a sleeping giant that shook itself awake. In 1911, China was called "the sick man of Asia". Its ruling dynasty was in a terminal state of deliquescence; its territory was being encroached on all sides by imperialist powers; it had lost...
www.alternatehistory.com
By @Hendryk
I couldn't get this to come up in the native site search, possibly because the author was banned, but the banning had nothing to do with that thread. And it's an excellent TL. One of the classics of AH.
 

EvilJam

Once the European powers have the ability to defeat China without unacceptable losses it is too late. They'd find a reason, it would likely be a bullshit one, to return China to the status quo, many Europeans were terrified of what the 'Chinaman hordes' would do if modernised and wouldn't have let them.
 
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