Was China colonised? They lost some territory and had serious humiliating treaties forced upon them after losing some wars but I'm not entirely sure "colonised" can be used for this. Korea was certainly colonised by Japan but the entire Korean state was erased and absorbed. China was never truly erased.So which is it?
>>18756204the MO in china is to conquer the north and push the changs down south, no need for colonies
>>18756204Chinese soil is being colonized by the Viet, the Russians, the Koreans and the Mongols to this day. Plus there's the bandit government on Taiwan.
>>18756204They lost a war and signed an unfavorable treaty. It's like saying France was colonized post Napoleon. Either one.
>>18756204>Korea was certainly colonised by Japan but the entire Korean state was erased and absorbed.Good, modern Korea is massive shithole.
>>18756204China doesn't lend itself to being colonized by a tiny minority, except if that minority completely subsumes itself into Chinese culture and governance. Traditional modes of British style colonialism wouldn't really work in China, since there aren't any local governance structures independent from the Chinese state at large that could be co-opted to serve as a colonial ruling class. In India on the other hand, there were tons of independent power structures and feuding castes, religions and ethnic groups to use against each other
>>18756492>Traditional modes of British style colonialism wouldn't really work in China,The Raj system would work pretty well, actually. To the point where the traditional scholars would have to step up their game and stop being a drag.The Australian style of flooding the region with convicts less so, as there's already gangs around for those criminals to cozy up with.The system of setting up negro-powered plantation colonies, with a side of elevating colonists to citizen status through land ownership would mostly clash with the fact that structures of governance and land ownership already exist.
>>18756204China was colonized during this time period, but it was by the Manchurians. They're the ones who imposed strict cultural laws on the chinese, and took over the bureaucracy and the theocracy and the monarchy. The European states that came to take advantage of China's weakness were more like referees in the petty power games played by Asian states. >this province wants to rule this region >ok because we say so >no because we say soPeople's were pitted against one another for the political advantage of the Europeans who wanted to economically benefit. The Chinese and their Manchu conquerors were just piece on the Asian game-board.
>>18756204>Was China colonised?Yes, but not by Europeans in any meaningful way. The British got Hong Kong, but other European interests in China were too shallow to last as long as Hong Kong did, and even then Hong Kong was decidedly more Chinese than it was British. The most successful colonization efforts of China were by invading tribes from the north, but even these groups naturalized over time, whatever immediate impact they had on Chinese culture.
>>18756509>The Raj system would work pretty well, actuallyThis ignores the fact that the British were only able to implement the Raj system after a long period of coopting local powers and playing them against one another, as that anon stated. The British colonization of India was a gradual process that went from control of disparate private interests to co-opting regional authority, to leveraging this to intervene in larger conflicts and eventually establishing hegemony. The Raj system didn't materialize out of the ether, it was a way to consolidate the gains made by the British.
>>18756844that and the East India company who originally ran India as a kind of selection of puppet states of a mercenary junta, just didn't work at all. They were really ineffective at getting anything accomplished and often resorted to just killing the Indians who opposed them, which left them with not much of an economic base to generate wealth with. It was only after the British created an administrative bureaucracy in India that they truly saw any kind of real wealth. You need to have the layers of administration, civil infrastructure, courts, postal services, police, banks, public services, urban planning, transportation planning to truly colonize a place and make it yours. The Europeans never placed all that in China, and instead just played the power games of pitting one faction against another by spending money here, restricting trade there etc. You could argue that with all the time and effort the British sank into India they didn't keep it for that long. One of the largest benefit was taxing their indian subjects, but the vast majority of that tax revenue went back into India itself. Mostly on the military but a lot on civil administration and public welfare. That's the true cost of colonizing a country. You end spending most of the money you extract from the colony just administrating and defending the colony. It's why the model was abandoned for the third world sweatshop globalisation system we have now.
>>18756204The economic situation within China with foreign state monopolies and fines for messing with the foreign institutions, like paying 20 million taels if someone assaulted a missionary, is a bit more colonized than some countries that get painted as a colony on maps. A lot of colonies in the period weren't anything more than an economic arrangement with local authorities and laws left alone and no real settler population. Map painting really obscures the nuances of it, but if Egypt is painted British red then parts of China could be too, along with French blue and German gray.
>>18756877The EAC was mainly interested in the transfer of wealth, which is something looting achieves splendidly.>You need to have the layers of administration, civil infrastructure, courts, postal services, police, banks, public services, urban planning, transportation planning to truly colonize a place and make it yours.>The Europeans never placed all that in ChinaMeet the friendly Shanghai Police. You might've heard of them or of the Hongkong police.
Load my P1851/1853 Enfield and fire at every bugs on sight.
China is a manchu colony
>>18757097I don't consider Hong Kong to be a part of Chinese society in this era. The same way the Chinese didn't. Hong Kong was home to an exiled group of boat people who were barred from joining or participating in Chinese society. They were forbidden from owning property in China, barred from marrying someone who owned property, couldn't wear certain clothing material etc. The chinese referred to them as Jianmin which literally means outcast people. They were also hereditary beggars, so they could never escape the generational punishment of being confined to the outskirts of both Chinese society and the Chinese empire in these kind of colonies. I guess similar to Siberian gulags, except worse because it's a fate that your descendants can never escape either. It's not like the British took over a bustling but primitive port city called Hong Kong and installed a bunch of administrators and transformed it into an imperial colony. There was no Chinese rule to overthrow because the island wasn't run by China at all. It was just a place to put it's undesirables. No governance needed. The guy who picked Hong Kong as a place for the a British base on the outskirts of China actually got fired for it. Lord Palmerston was so upset and called it a 'Barren Rock' in a letter to him. Shanghai was a different story, being firmly part of the Qing dynasty, but the city was also run by a Qing governor and his administrators. The British were allowed to run special zones in the city the way they wanted, which is why they imported a bunch of policemen, but ultimately Shanghai was a Qing ruled city.
China lost some lands such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, but besides that they were forced to pay indemnities and agree to unequal trade treaties where they couldnt tax goods sold by foreign companies
