In the early Fifteenth Century, Admiral Zheng He (a/k/a “The Eunuch Sanbao”) led several Chinese “Treasure Fleets” on voyages of exploration and trade around Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. He might even have discovered America, though that’s speculation. The only lasting legacy, however, was a few colonies of “Overseas Chinese” traders here and there. Zheng He’s last voyage was in 1433. The government ultimately cut the program and scrapped the ships – because of the high cost with no immediate return, but also because of a definite (and traditional) lack of interest in the world outside the Middle Kingdom. Thus, China gave up on its Age of Exploration just as the Europeans were beginning theirs; and by the 19th Century, China was a comparatively underdeveloped global backwater which the Europeans, and the Japanese, could carve up into spheres of influence as they pleased.
What if it had gone differently? Could China have become the first colonial-imperial power of the modern age? Would they have established the first Old World colonies in the Americas? And how would the Europeans have reacted to that? Would they have tried to learn things from the Chinese, so much more advanced at the time?
Would the inevitable engagement with the outside world that such a program would mean have stimulated China’s technological and scientific progress?
Would a colonial empire have preserved the Ming Dynasty from falling to the Manchurians in 1644?
The thing about the Zheng He expeditions is that, quite unlike the later European expeditions going the other way, economic purpose was rather lacking.
They somewhat akin to modern day manned moon exploration - incredibly cash intensive prestige projects, designed above all for internal political purpose: to display, to the Chinese themselves, the power (and legitimacy) of the dynasty, in particular by bringing back foreign curiousities and potentates to “make tribute” to the all-powerful Emperor. It is not a coincidence that they were launched under an Emperor who was, in matter of fact, a usurper.
They may have had “spin off” benefits (as indeed did moon exploration) but these were secondary. They never paid for themselves.
Thus, it was always highly unlikely that China would engage in European style colonial adventures - at least, under the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties.
I did some studying of the MIng. Their problem was not the lack of exploration or engagement, but the bureaucracy which made inevitable the lack of exploration or engagement. The real rulers were the bureaucrats - and they were as corrupt as they come and as short-sighted as you can believe, even sabotaging military campaigns in time of dire need just to kneecap a potential some-day might-be rival.
They unleashed early on a money economy which made life much better for ordinary Chinese. They then found it was much more profitable to steal from the public coffers than increase their pay to match inflation. In fact, they used the lack of the latter as an excuse for the former.
In any case, colonies were unlikely. They were too inward to recognize the value of trade, and without a huge sea-change (ba-dum-kssh!) in their attitudes they couldn’t really alter that. And they defined themselves so strictly (Chinas teh bestest and we don’t need or want anything from the “outside.”) that they couldn’t really change their opinions. That definition was the sole things which legitimized their power base; without it, they were just one of a number of power groups and influences.
However, the entire Manchurian thing would probably have happened anyway. Colonies are expensive and often unprofitable (Africa was not actually a major site of colonies for a good while, and most of those were slave-buying sites with cooperative locals). It took the Portuguese a while to really get going, and they had a lot more reason to found them, owing to longer distances and the spice trade.
Moreover, This wouldn’t have changed the underlying internal rot. Before the Manchurian dynasty was even a twinkle in Dorgon’s eye, Chinese rebels were taking down the Ming. In fact, Dorgon actualy tok over by allying with the rebels, then sort of declaring himself leader after they and the Ming bled themselves dry.
As a final note, the idea that the Chinese discovered America is pretty absurd. While it’s not impossible that they could have done so, so could the ancient Greeks. Or Egyptians in reed boats. Or the Irish in sealskin coracles (for which there is even some evidence). There was that one book a few years back (title?) but the author’s evidence was laughable, he had no idea of any archeaological techniques, and he implausibly suggested the ChInese somehow found their way to the EAST coast of the Americas.
What if they had made it to Mexico or Peru and met the Aztecs or Incas? You’d think they would recognize the value of all the gold they saw there, even if they weren’t interested in trade in general.
I think this is the key. In the 15th century the Portugeuse spent years systematically building up the navigational skill required for the Age of Discovery. They were willing to make that investment because there was a huge reward waiting for them if they were successful – a trade route to the spices of the orient that avoided the Turkish middlemen. Columbus’s voyages drew on the Portugeuse R & D and had the same motivation. The Spanish had the good luck to stumble on another honeypot – the gold of Central America. The profits from those two huges sources of income made it possible for the Europeans to justify spending a century improving their ship technology to the point where overseas colonies in other less-profitable locations were viable.
China was insular, but the Chinese were also perfectly capable of exploiting an economic opportunity if it presented itself. If Zheng He had discovered a cheap source for some high-demand item like gold or spice the Chinese would have followed the European path of aggressively advancing their naval technology.
And given that China already had an ample source of those things if it needed them via pre-existing trade (Arab and Indian sailors, mostly), building colonies didn’t make sense.
I got interested in the question, BTW, because I’m halfway through The Dragon’s Nine Sons, by Chris Roberson. And I’ve only ever encountered one other AH literary treatment of it, a short story by L. Sprague de Camp (forget the title) about a Chinese official who confronts a Spaniard somewhere in the 16th-Century American Southwest. (I’m discounting Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt because, although Zheng He figures in it, the actual point-of-divergence is a century earlier, when the Black Death destroys European Christendom as a civilization, leaving China and Islam a clear field to emerge as the world’s two superpowers.)
Fifteenth-century China was so different from western Europe that it’s impossible to change one factor and say things would have been different. Europe practiced a proselytizing religion which provided part of the motivation for colonialism; China didn’t. Europe was fractured into small states which couldn’t possibly be self-sufficient, and developed an inevitable appetite for foreign trade and foreign goods; China didn’t. Europe had an active mercantile class as early as the Middle Ages, which later provided the nucleus for the Industrial Revolution; China for the most part didn’t.
Western Europe faced its traditional enemy–Islam–across the Mediterranean, providing a spur to maritime and naval experimentation. China faced its traditional enemy–the northern nomads–on land, and naval expense was a distraction, first to be cut in times of crisis. If the Mings had continued sending out treasure fleets, they might have fallen to the Manchus or Mongols sooner–the fleets were breaking the budget!
The more serious Ming error was in banning private foreign trade and forbidding emigration (so much for colonialism!), which actions they undertook at about the same time as the treasure fleets ceased.
The interesting thing is that if you move the focus back a couple of centuries to the Sung dynasty (that is, prior to the Mongol invasions) a very different picture emerges: a China with a large merchantile class, internally divided like Europe, beginning to expand into overseas trade adventures and possibly on the bring of industrializing - and, like Europe, possibly facing the threat (at least in parts of SE Asia) of Islam moving the other way.
China still lacked a prostheletizing religion, but that hardly seems necessary - the Dutch were pretty aggressive colonizers in SE Asia without much religious impulse.
Well, for one, rule by the Mongols changed the way the place was organized and governed. The Yuan (and, later, Ming) were much more interested in centralized control, and were in a much better position to enforce centralized control. The power of the state in relation to private concerns increased.
Thus, it became possible for an Emperor to both organize large-scale expeditions such as the Zheng He - and to forbid them (or indeed any maritime pursuits).
Throughout the Sung, there was a clash if you will between those officials who believed in a more lassez-faire approach to gov’t and devolution of central control to local sources, and those who supported imposition of strict gov’t monopolies and central control. That debate was ended by the Mongols.
Thereafter, the trauma of Mongol conquest focused Chinese attentions on prevention of a repeat. Gone was the previous Sung interest in overseas trade and commerce. Of course, the Ming did eventually fall, to the Manchus.
Thus to my mind the really interesting “what if” is: what if the Sung had not fallen to the Mongols? IMO the world would look a lot more "Chinese’ today, as by any measure China under the Sung was more civilized and advanced than anywhere else. Examples abound - use of paper money, use of coal in blast furnaces to smelt iron on an industrial basis, large-scale overseas trade, etc.
In contrast, the stifling effect of gov’t control and myopic focus on the Mongol threat resulted in a crushing of this proto-industrial society. In Kennedy’s book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, he points out that the Chinese gov’t closed down the very last Chinese blast furnace almost the very same year as the first English blast furnace opened …
To which one might add the invention of gunpowder, military rockets, and the magnetic compass.
I think you make a good point–Ming and Qing China suffered from “too much unification” and too much centralization, dating from the Mongol conquests. The treasure fleets–an expensive, centrally directed prestige project subject to cancellation at the whim of an all-powerful emperor–were more a symptom of this illness than a possible cure.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that the Europeans were in better position to colonize the Americas due to the fact that the Atlantic Ocean is much smaller than the Pacific. The Chinese would have faced serious challenges colonizing the Americas because its unlikely doubt any ship in the 1400’s could handle the trans-Pacific voyage all that well.
Yes, but they had a rather obvious “hey, there’s land here” path north and around from Sibera to the Aleutians to Canada that would not have involved lengthy passages across deep water, although it would have involved cold and stormy seas.
He did, but how much of his expedition was intact when he returned? That’s my point; the distance would make it difficult for the routine, back and forth traffic that would be needed for colonization.
The Europeans had a clear interest in travelling across the Atlantic: namely, to reach China and the “spice islands”. The Americas were, at first, merely a roadblock in this pursuit.
The Chinese were not nearly as motivated to reach Europe. Nor would the Chinese have discovered much of immediate interest to them had they ventured in that direction - likely they would have followed the Northern route (rather than simply setting out across the Pacific), and so discovered Alaska - not much different from Siberia. They would have to go a long way south before finding Aztecs and Inca.
The problem with the “northern route” to discovery of the Americas is that the Chinese never really even bother to “discover” what is now the Russian Far East. Of course there were the Mongols in the way, but if the Chinese couldn’t even bother to explore Siberia, it seems pretty unlikely that they’d bother to go on to discover Alaska and Canada.
Likewise, it’s easy to imagine Chinese sailors discovering Australia, but it’s hard to imagine them deeming the discovery of Australia as important in any way.
Yeah, I agree. They had to make a really long voyage to get to the good stuff with nothing much enticing along the way. Then they would have to cross the Pacific at its widest to travel back and forth to where they would want to go.
