Maybe once Red China falls, Tibet can reclaim independence and start hounding the PRC's successor for reparations later, yeah? Here in the West, we've got all sorts of minorities demanding reparations for shit that went down 100+ years ago, whereas the Tibetan population alive today (for reasons @AmosTrask named above) have all the reason in the world to demand way more than that.
For instance, if the country totally flatlines and we get Chinese Civil War II, then Tibet can probably break off and align with India while it's getting itself on its feet (similar to what you've said).
But even then, a "Neo-Han" regime would still have to be conscientious of neighboring India, in the event their ties are close enough for an attack on Tibet to also be seen as an attack on India (which would prompt them to retaliate accordingly). In short, even without PRC rule, I doubt China has its work cut out for it as much as you believe and is more likely to crumble under the pressure from all sides.
Because they've bribed almost everyone in a position to help them do so; even when it's at the cost of their own countries' wellbeing. The problem for the CCP now is that they're running out of things to bribe influential foreigners with.
For instance, if the country totally flatlines and we get Chinese Civil War II, then Tibet can probably break off and align with India while it's getting itself on its feet (similar to what you've said).
But even then, a "Neo-Han" regime would still have to be conscientious of neighboring India, in the event their ties are close enough for an attack on Tibet to also be seen as an attack on India (which would prompt them to retaliate accordingly). In short, even without PRC rule, I doubt China has its work cut out for it as much as you believe and is more likely to crumble under the pressure from all sides.
countries come back strong from civil wars all of the time.
After the french revolution you had napoleon for example. Civil wars are not the end of a country and in some cases once you have removed bad leadership by force you end up with a much more effective government. China has had a lot of civil wars I am in no way convinced that one more would end them as a great power.
Because they've bribed almost everyone in a position to help them do so; even when it's at the cost of their own countries' wellbeing. The problem for the CCP now is that they're running out of things to bribe influential foreigners with.
A few never will; the ones who bought into the propaganda and can't imagine such a powerful nation just collapsing practically overnight. They'll be caught completely by surprise, and most likely end up utterly ruined when all their investments in China (both financially and politically) suddenly become worthless; if not outright detrimental.
How far off do you lot think a Chinese economic implosion is? I have a feeling the state has just enough funny money and control to keep it from falling apart from the seams for a few more years, but beyond a decade is stretching it.
And when China goes belly up, that’s when the real hard times start.
Edit: Even better, before we have a Chinese Civil War, we will have a doomed invasion of Taiwan. Authoritarian regimes love a war to take peoples’ minds off the state’s failures.
How far off do you lot think a Chinese economic implosion is? I have a feeling the state has just enough funny money and control to keep it from falling apart from the seams for a few more years, but beyond a decade is stretching it.
And when China goes belly up, that’s when the real hard times start.
Edit: Even better, before we have a Chinese Civil War, we will have a doomed invasion of Taiwan. Authoritarian regimes love a war to take peoples’ minds off the state’s failures.
Hope it doesn’t take quite that long- Id sort of rather get all this done and over with. It if I get another year or so to prepare for the ripple and knock of effect this has on the rest of the world, I’ll be good.
Hope it doesn’t take quite that long- Id sort of rather get all this done and over with. It if I get another year or so to prepare for the ripple and knock of effect this has on the rest of the world, I’ll be good.
A few never will; the ones who bought into the propaganda and can't imagine such a powerful nation just collapsing practically overnight. They'll be caught completely by surprise, and most likely end up utterly ruined when all their investments in China (both financially and politically) suddenly become worthless; if not outright detrimental.
See, to a degree you are right. But when a lot of foreigners are not being allowed to take any money from China to help thier companies amd thier investments are basically now Chinas.
They lose interest fast.
Of course you have Apple who seems to love China
For instance, if the country totally flatlines and we get Chinese Civil War II, then Tibet can probably break off and align with India while it's getting itself on its feet (similar to what you've said).
But even then, a "Neo-Han" regime would still have to be conscientious of neighboring India, in the event their ties are close enough for an attack on Tibet to also be seen as an attack on India (which would prompt them to retaliate accordingly). In short, even without PRC rule, I doubt China has its work cut out for it as much as you believe and is more likely to crumble under the pressure from all sides.
China will 100% reform even if the current regime fully collapses. Just as it has for the preceding 4000 years the assumption that China won't be a thing is a delusion.
China will 100% reform even if the current regime fully collapses. Just as it has for the preceding 4000 years the assumption that China won't be a thing is a delusion.
countries come back strong from civil wars all of the time.
After the french revolution you had napoleon for example. Civil wars are not the end of a country and in some cases once you have removed bad leadership by force you end up with a much more effective government. China has had a lot of civil wars I am in no way convinced that one more would end them as a great power.
China will 100% reform even if the current regime fully collapses. Just as it has for the preceding 4000 years the assumption that China won't be a thing is a delusion.
I'll refer you to a series of arguments I made for China's collapse in the Cyclical History Thread.
Reposting it here, for your convenience:
All in all, I actually wonder if the "Century of Humiliation" (and its aftereffects) might count as a more "slow-rolling", but also more "gangrenous" example we can add to the list of macro-historical disruptions Skall wrote about here? While I know the West never ran roughshod over China the same way the Mongols did (Britain colonizing Hong Kong notwithstanding), it's nonetheless true that a certain Western ideology more lethal than Genghis Khan ever was made inroads and established a decades-long stranglehold that lasted longer than the USSR's has. More precisely: Communism.
Yes, it's true Deng Xiaoping passed limited market reforms and had a pragmatic spirit of "As long as it catches mice!", so apart from anything else, I think he deserves credit for making the People's Republic (74 years this October and counting) outlast the Soviet Union (just shy of 69 years to the day). Problem is, I actually think his liberalization was too "half-hearted" to shake off Communism's effects completely, and would actually call him (to use of Skallagrim's descriptors from earlier) too much of a "soft doctor" who balked at debriding his patient all the way through. As such, too much of the initial flesh-rot remains and continues to fester within a patient that now feels themselves dying, anyway. Because frankly, all the doctor's "soft cutting" did was buy the patient time — not save them from an early grave. If Communism could kill Russia when the Mongols couldn't, there's a good chance it'll kill China, too.
Heck, the ChiCom News Thread on this very site provides scads of examples showing how China's purported economic boom and military prowess is even more smoke-and-mirrors than the fake wealth of the modern West — much less its piss-poor harvests, various environmental disasters, all the second and third-world rural backlands outside the cities, and the looming demographic crisis it has ahead of it the CCP is covering up. Don't know about you, but to me, that sounds an awful lot like the USSR throughout the '80s — and we all know how that ended just a decade later. At the very least, it hints that China's in a far more precarious position than Western observers realize, so I'm giving them demerits already.
As a matter of fact, China's population isn't actually projected to grow much larger than it is now. Instead, I think it's projected to shrink after reaching its high-water mark in a few years (here), before eventually being surpassed by a still-growing India (here). No doubt leftover effects from the One-Child Policy play a key role here. I'm aware that China's had quite a few "eccentric" emperors and gone through some rough times that killed lots of people over the years, but to my knowledge, they never placed a hard cap on childbearing designed to actively prevent population growth or replace all the people who were killed. Deng, on the other hand, has — the long-term consequences of which lead to me believe that a hundred years from now, he may very well be more reviled than Mao. Skallagrim laments that Japan has an irreversible demographic decline and that its society has outlasted its culture; China has both that, and lasting structural rot from Communism and Deng's woefully insufficient reforms fucking its prospects over in the long run.
Moreover, while I could be me misreading things here, I don't read Xi Jinping serving a third term and cracking down on China's tech sector to be divesting China of its Communist ideological trappings. Seems the opposite to me, actually, and even presuming the Gulag-ing of Uyghur Muslims, welding citizens' doors shut to trap them in their homes, and countless urns and columns of suspicious cars when Covid first broke out here weren't Xi racking up a semi-secret mountain of corpses of his own, I still doubt he or his successors will keep the PRC from collapsing early by skillfully transitioning to the "Neo-Legalist" form of Skallagrim's outline.
Knowing the CCP, they'll cling to power and kill far more people to keep it than Mikhail Gorbachev ever could to preserve the USSR. Extrapolating from the demonstrations taking place in China now, my fear is that increasingly CCP retrenchment and crackdowns will only breed ever-greater resentment, desperation, and a sense of betrayal amongst the common people — who, even now, are protesting and feeling demoralized. So, in that sense, the discontent needed for another regime to rise up and take its place is already brewing. Unfortunately, the CCP will make them pay for it in blood, so any "Young Chinamen" coup I see happening is less a fairly swift coup… and more Chinese Civil War II, as the CCP unleashes Tiananmen Square and subsequent "Chinese Great Terror" to crush all dissent — and in so doing, catalyzes a second round of uprisings and warlordism around mid-century that the Neo-Legalist faction of Skall's outline would win by brutalizing everyone else into submission.
Certainly, I can see them beheading CCP officials in front of the Great Wall and declaring Mao persona non grata before demolishing his mausoleum, but even worse is how the Neo-Legalists of my imagining (who call themselves the "Heavenly Empire" or "Empire of Greater China" in my own outline) would also be rabidly anti-Western, rather than more or less putting them on ignore (as Skall has implied). The exact degree to which they actively fight Western forces depends on the details, I think, but between British imperialism and the opium trade in the 19th century, Soviet Communism and bullying of China in the 20th century, and American corporations and consumerism "debasing" the Chinese way of life in the 21st century, the self-styled "Heavenly Emperor" may very well concluding it was a cataclysmic mistake for the Middle Kingdom not to go out and "Crush the foreign barbarians before they could crush us!", which would serve as a damning pretext declares for the self-styled "Heavenly Emperor" to declare a scarily Hitlerian "Century of Vengeance" to avenge China's humiliation at the hands of Western imperialism and its "Legacy of ideological poison!" decades earlier.
Pair that with traditional Han xenophobia the Neo-Legalists would stoke, and I genuinely fear the Neo-Legalist regime will be less of a stone-cold "Chinese Eichmann", and more like a loony "Chinese Himmler"… alongside "Chinese Jim Jones", "Chinese Savonarola", and maybe even "Chinese Pol Pot" all serving in the same Young Chinamen cabal together and competing with the Western "Neo-Crusaders" (led by American "Caesar") to decide who can unleash the bigger Endlösung of the two.
But even then, I doubt China's reconquest of what it once held will go very swimmingly. For instance, my own take has Japan, Korea, most of Indochina, and maybe even the Philippines and Australia bond over centuries of bad blood with China as the US retreats from the Pacific. Eventually, they develop their own domestic arms industries and form a Pacific-wide military alliance specifically to contain China and stonewall whatever invasions it launches. In essence, a "Great Wall Around China" that begins to close in as soon as the Heavenly Empire commences its invasion of Taiwan in the 2060s, which the rest step in to defend. After all, Putin's currently having a hard enough time taking Ukraine and Hitler didn't succeed in accomplishing Operation Barbarossa, which is more or less what Neo-Legalist China would be doing by both wasting precious resources exterminating "undesirables" and fighting a multi-front war in a gambit to retake Taiwan, Japan and Korea, all of Indochina, and potentially even the Philippines and Australia in short succession while simultaneously launching forays into the warlord-dominated Russian Far East. At that point, I think China would be biting off way more than it can chew, and making much the same mistakes Hitler made that led to Germany overstretching — and eventually, losing.
There's also the "wildcard" option in which China lets loose yet another pandemic that makes Covid look like a total nothing-burger. Besides how we're long overdue for another catastrophic plague outbreak, anyway, China has also long been Pathogen Central (TM), as shown by its record of cooking up maladies that range from the Black Death then to Covid now. Hell, the current regime has had close calls with far worse strains (such as the 2014 Yumen plague incident here) — and those are only the cases we know about! Seen in that light, I think it's only a matter of time before a something else breaches containment and culminates in an oubreak of "Red Death" that wipes out anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions in just a few years. Pretty much how it happens in my own outline, anyway, save for the "Great Wall Around China" enacting blanket embargoes, harsh containment procedures, and sinking all Chinese vessels in sight, which more or less confines Red Death to the Chinese mainland and kills a couple hundred million Chinese citizens in the process — throwing its already-horrible demographic imbalance into disarray and prompting a national collapse that propels the Neo-Legalists to power. While there's little evidence to prove it, many suspect it was a CCP bioweapon released to cull "disloyal cohorts" of the population, on top of all the forced disappearances, networks of internment camps, and massacre-style crackdowns already taking place throughout the country by the time it leaks out.
In summary: I think the combined factors of the CCP having insurmountable structural rot, the "wildcard" option in which they cook up a "Red Death" super-bug, Neo-Legalist blowback running it into the ground even further, and China's neighbors having time to form a "Great Wall Around China" that stops the Chinese reconquest in its tracks will render it more a "Ptolemaic Egypt" that burns through its reserves and drops dead from exhaustion — which, if anything, is arguably more ignominious than how actual Ptolemaic Egypt went out.
Ultimately, I'd say a China hungering to reestablish its status as the Celestial Empire is in way over its head, at least for the next couple of centuries or two.
Between decades of CCP rot, fucked demographics, an utterly deranged successor state coming to power, and neighbors that hate China past, China present, and (more likely than not) China future fighting to the bitter end rather than submitting, I really do think even a post-CCP China that goes Operation Barbarossa 3.0 is more likely to get thrashed about from all sides before dropping dead from exhaustion.
Sure, it could be reborn in a few more centuries, but then again, China periodically fragmenting and reunifying on multi-century intervals is actually quite typical. If you ask me, we're in for a fragmentation pretty soon, which sucks for them way more than it may suck for us.
For my money, probably a rump state chaffing at various territorial concessions and loss of prized vassals (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and so on) to the West.
As I recall, you've already had the chance to read my thesis, but even before the CCP, there've been a handful of times China's endurance has "lapsed" in the face of mighty foreign powers. If the Mongols ran roughshod over China (establishing a whole new dynasty in the process), and the British nabbed Hong Kong from the Qing after running the world's biggest opium trade right on their doorstep, then why not an exhausted post-CCP China put in its place and deprived of its overseas possessions by the American Principate circa 2100?
Given how ineffective the attempts to contain Covid was, I’m not sure we’d be able to contain a major outbreak of something even worse.
On the one hand, I don’t doubt that elements of political elite knew how harmless Covid was and allowed it to spread as a way of consolidation of power, doing a soft run for authoritarianism and to help their buddies make money in the mega corporations as those got to run on even as everyone else got locked down.
On the other hand, we also know that there’s a push for neo-feudalism and population reduction under the guise of ‘saving the planet’. Plus, we’ve seen that the political elected aren’t quite as competent as they seem to think they are (but more competent then we are given they’ve gotten away with so much so far). So I wouldn’t put it past them to let such a disease spread, thinking they could use it for their purposes…only for thing so spring wildly out of their control as the disease does it’s own thing.
@Zyobot also, I have my reason to doubt hear their will be an American principality in 100 years. Honestly, I’m not so sure we’ll be able to reach the 2030’s before things go bad.
Given how ineffective the attempts to contain Covid was, I’m not sure we’d be able to contain a major outbreak of something even worse.
On the one hand, I don’t doubt that elements of political elite knew how harmless Covid was and allowed it to spread as a way of consolidation of power, doing a soft run for authoritarianism and to help their buddies make money in the mega corporations as those got to run on even as everyone else got locked down.
On the other hand, we also know that there’s a push for neo-feudalism and population reduction under the guise of ‘saving the planet’. Plus, we’ve seen that the political elected aren’t quite as competent as they seem to think they are (but more competent then we are given they’ve gotten away with so much so far). So I wouldn’t put it past them to let such a disease spread, thinking they could use it for their purposes…only for thing so spring wildly out of their control as the disease does it’s own thing.
Heck, even before Covid, China had a brief plague scare in Yumen that could've gone way worse (here) — much less all the other outbreaks they had to shut down that we simply don't know about.
And since China's economy and infrastructure are crumbling as we speak, I think it's safe to say its healthcare system is soon to follow. Honestly, the foundations for another Black Death (once again) originating in China seem like they're being laid as we speak; maybe that'll be what takes China down for the count, if Bubonic Plague pretty much Thanos-snapping Europe way back when is any indication.
@Zyobot also, I have my reason to doubt hear their will be an American principality in 100 years. Honestly, I’m not so sure we’ll be able to reach the 2030’s before things go bad.
For context, I'd refer you to the Cyclical History Thread, as well as extended remarks elsewhere had about America's place in the world here and here.
Even if the US continues to circle the drain (which it will), it's more likely than not that everyone else will follow suit, which kinda' "levels the playing field" when it comes time for a new hegemon to be decided. True, America in its current form may be a Republic... but then again, so was Rome back in the day — and we all know what it became after the Republic fell. Only this time, I don't expect there to be much of an Eastern rival to challenge it, should China self-destruct and India fall behind along with it.
I'll refer you to a series of arguments I made for China's collapse in the Cyclical History Thread.
Reposting it here, for your convenience:
All in all, I actually wonder if the "Century of Humiliation" (and its aftereffects) might count as a more "slow-rolling", but also more "gangrenous" example we can add to the list of macro-historical disruptions Skall wrote about here? While I know the West never ran roughshod over China the same way the Mongols did (Britain colonizing Hong Kong notwithstanding), it's nonetheless true that a certain Western ideology more lethal than Genghis Khan ever was made inroads and established a decades-long stranglehold that lasted longer than the USSR's has. More precisely: Communism.
Yes, it's true Deng Xiaoping passed limited market reforms and had a pragmatic spirit of "As long as it catches mice!", so apart from anything else, I think he deserves credit for making the People's Republic (74 years this October and counting) outlast the Soviet Union (just shy of 69 years to the day). Problem is, I actually think his liberalization was too "half-hearted" to shake off Communism's effects completely, and would actually call him (to use of Skallagrim's descriptors from earlier) too much of a "soft doctor" who balked at debriding his patient all the way through. As such, too much of the initial flesh-rot remains and continues to fester within a patient that now feels themselves dying, anyway. Because frankly, all the doctor's "soft cutting" did was buy the patient time — not save them from an early grave. If Communism could kill Russia when the Mongols couldn't, there's a good chance it'll kill China, too.
Heck, the ChiCom News Thread on this very site provides scads of examples showing how China's purported economic boom and military prowess is even more smoke-and-mirrors than the fake wealth of the modern West — much less its piss-poor harvests, various environmental disasters, all the second and third-world rural backlands outside the cities, and the looming demographic crisis it has ahead of it the CCP is covering up. Don't know about you, but to me, that sounds an awful lot like the USSR throughout the '80s — and we all know how that ended just a decade later. At the very least, it hints that China's in a far more precarious position than Western observers realize, so I'm giving them demerits already.
As a matter of fact, China's population isn't actually projected to grow much larger than it is now. Instead, I think it's projected to shrink after reaching its high-water mark in a few years (here), before eventually being surpassed by a still-growing India (here). No doubt leftover effects from the One-Child Policy play a key role here. I'm aware that China's had quite a few "eccentric" emperors and gone through some rough times that killed lots of people over the years, but to my knowledge, they never placed a hard cap on childbearing designed to actively prevent population growth or replace all the people who were killed. Deng, on the other hand, has — the long-term consequences of which lead to me believe that a hundred years from now, he may very well be more reviled than Mao. Skallagrim laments that Japan has an irreversible demographic decline and that its society has outlasted its culture; China has both that, and lasting structural rot from Communism and Deng's woefully insufficient reforms fucking its prospects over in the long run.
Moreover, while I could be me misreading things here, I don't read Xi Jinping serving a third term and cracking down on China's tech sector to be divesting China of its Communist ideological trappings. Seems the opposite to me, actually, and even presuming the Gulag-ing of Uyghur Muslims, welding citizens' doors shut to trap them in their homes, and countless urns and columns of suspicious cars when Covid first broke out here weren't Xi racking up a semi-secret mountain of corpses of his own, I still doubt he or his successors will keep the PRC from collapsing early by skillfully transitioning to the "Neo-Legalist" form of Skallagrim's outline.
Knowing the CCP, they'll cling to power and kill far more people to keep it than Mikhail Gorbachev ever could to preserve the USSR. Extrapolating from the demonstrations taking place in China now, my fear is that increasingly CCP retrenchment and crackdowns will only breed ever-greater resentment, desperation, and a sense of betrayal amongst the common people — who, even now, are protesting and feeling demoralized. So, in that sense, the discontent needed for another regime to rise up and take its place is already brewing. Unfortunately, the CCP will make them pay for it in blood, so any "Young Chinamen" coup I see happening is less a fairly swift coup… and more Chinese Civil War II, as the CCP unleashes Tiananmen Square and subsequent "Chinese Great Terror" to crush all dissent — and in so doing, catalyzes a second round of uprisings and warlordism around mid-century that the Neo-Legalist faction of Skall's outline would win by brutalizing everyone else into submission.
Certainly, I can see them beheading CCP officials in front of the Great Wall and declaring Mao persona non grata before demolishing his mausoleum, but even worse is how the Neo-Legalists of my imagining (who call themselves the "Heavenly Empire" or "Empire of Greater China" in my own outline) would also be rabidly anti-Western, rather than more or less putting them on ignore (as Skall has implied). The exact degree to which they actively fight Western forces depends on the details, I think, but between British imperialism and the opium trade in the 19th century, Soviet Communism and bullying of China in the 20th century, and American corporations and consumerism "debasing" the Chinese way of life in the 21st century, the self-styled "Heavenly Emperor" may very well concluding it was a cataclysmic mistake for the Middle Kingdom not to go out and "Crush the foreign barbarians before they could crush us!", which would serve as a damning pretext declares for the self-styled "Heavenly Emperor" to declare a scarily Hitlerian "Century of Vengeance" to avenge China's humiliation at the hands of Western imperialism and its "Legacy of ideological poison!" decades earlier.
Pair that with traditional Han xenophobia the Neo-Legalists would stoke, and I genuinely fear the Neo-Legalist regime will be less of a stone-cold "Chinese Eichmann", and more like a loony "Chinese Himmler"… alongside "Chinese Jim Jones", "Chinese Savonarola", and maybe even "Chinese Pol Pot" all serving in the same Young Chinamen cabal together and competing with the Western "Neo-Crusaders" (led by American "Caesar") to decide who can unleash the bigger Endlösung of the two.
But even then, I doubt China's reconquest of what it once held will go very swimmingly. For instance, my own take has Japan, Korea, most of Indochina, and maybe even the Philippines and Australia bond over centuries of bad blood with China as the US retreats from the Pacific. Eventually, they develop their own domestic arms industries and form a Pacific-wide military alliance specifically to contain China and stonewall whatever invasions it launches. In essence, a "Great Wall Around China" that begins to close in as soon as the Heavenly Empire commences its invasion of Taiwan in the 2060s, which the rest step in to defend. After all, Putin's currently having a hard enough time taking Ukraine and Hitler didn't succeed in accomplishing Operation Barbarossa, which is more or less what Neo-Legalist China would be doing by both wasting precious resources exterminating "undesirables" and fighting a multi-front war in a gambit to retake Taiwan, Japan and Korea, all of Indochina, and potentially even the Philippines and Australia in short succession while simultaneously launching forays into the warlord-dominated Russian Far East. At that point, I think China would be biting off way more than it can chew, and making much the same mistakes Hitler made that led to Germany overstretching — and eventually, losing.
There's also the "wildcard" option in which China lets loose yet another pandemic that makes Covid look like a total nothing-burger. Besides how we're long overdue for another catastrophic plague outbreak, anyway, China has also long been Pathogen Central (TM), as shown by its record of cooking up maladies that range from the Black Death then to Covid now. Hell, the current regime has had close calls with far worse strains (such as the 2014 Yumen plague incident here) — and those are only the cases we know about! Seen in that light, I think it's only a matter of time before a something else breaches containment and culminates in an oubreak of "Red Death" that wipes out anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions in just a few years. Pretty much how it happens in my own outline, anyway, save for the "Great Wall Around China" enacting blanket embargoes, harsh containment procedures, and sinking all Chinese vessels in sight, which more or less confines Red Death to the Chinese mainland and kills a couple hundred million Chinese citizens in the process — throwing its already-horrible demographic imbalance into disarray and prompting a national collapse that propels the Neo-Legalists to power. While there's little evidence to prove it, many suspect it was a CCP bioweapon released to cull "disloyal cohorts" of the population, on top of all the forced disappearances, networks of internment camps, and massacre-style crackdowns already taking place throughout the country by the time it leaks out.
In summary: I think the combined factors of the CCP having insurmountable structural rot, the "wildcard" option in which they cook up a "Red Death" super-bug, Neo-Legalist blowback running it into the ground even further, and China's neighbors having time to form a "Great Wall Around China" that stops the Chinese reconquest in its tracks will render it more a "Ptolemaic Egypt" that burns through its reserves and drops dead from exhaustion — which, if anything, is arguably more ignominious than how actual Ptolemaic Egypt went out.
Ultimately, I'd say a China hungering to reestablish its status as the Celestial Empire is in way over its head, at least for the next couple of centuries or two.
Between decades of CCP rot, fucked demographics, an utterly deranged successor state coming to power, and neighbors that hate China past, China present, and (more likely than not) China future fighting to the bitter end rather than submitting, I really do think even a post-CCP China that goes Operation Barbarossa 3.0 is more likely to get thrashed about from all sides before dropping dead from exhaustion.
Sure, it could be reborn in a few more centuries, but then again, China periodically fragmenting and reunifying on multi-century intervals is actually quite typical. If you ask me, we're in for a fragmentation pretty soon, which sucks for them way more than it may suck for us.
For my money, probably a rump state chaffing at various territorial concessions and loss of prized vassals (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and so on) to the West.
As I recall, you've already had the chance to read my thesis, but even before the CCP, there've been a handful of times China's endurance has "lapsed" in the face of mighty foreign powers. If the Mongols ran roughshod over China (establishing a whole new dynasty in the process), and the British nabbed Hong Kong from the Qing after running the world's biggest opium trade right on their doorstep, then why not an exhausted post-CCP China put in its place and deprived of its overseas possessions by the American Principate circa 2100?
That's certainly possible I'm just saying China will absolutely reform at some point after any theoretical collapse. The time frame for such to happen is up in the air but it will happen.
That's certainly possible I'm just saying China will absolutely reform at some point after any theoretical collapse. The time frame for such to happen is up in the air but it will happen.
Absolutely. Even if it doesn't ascend right away (which I'm betting it won't), it can always try again a few centuries down the line.
Mostly, I'm more insistent on a temporary fragmentation (and possible "Third Opium War" that ends much the same way as the first two, minus the opium) occurring, with reunification being brought back onto the table when its foreign oppressors who capitalize on the current regime's self-destruction are finally spent. That, I believe, will have to wait for the end of America's "Dominate" period.
