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velvetvexations · 6 months ago

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If you're not big into martial arts, you might not have heard of sanda, originally created as CQC for Chinese soldiers. It's often decried by just about everyone as being, essentially...just MMA rather than having roots in traditional Chinese kung fu.

That's only half-accurate. I'll explain why, but I need to catch you up the nearly one hundred years before it's creation for context.

(CW for war crimes, brief mention of sexual assault, mention of Native American oppression, and political cartoons with a racist depictions of Asians - and as always, if someone knows better, please correct me)

The first thing you need to understand is the Century of Humiliation, a concept in Chinese historiography. The premise is that China was regularly fucked over from the 1840s to the 1940s when the communists took full control of the mainland. While this is a narrative heavily pushed by Chinese nationalism, it's not exactly wrong - they had it pretty bad, and thought not exclusively the fault of foreigners, a lot of it was, including the two Opium Wars where England and France wrecked China's shit for the right to keep the drug trade going. The Second Opium War is where the UK first got Kowloon, which would be followed later by the rest of what would become Hong Kong.

English Commerce

I tell you to immediately buy the gift here. We want you to poison yourself completely, because we need a lot of tea in order to digest our beefsteaks.

The Taiping Rebellion, from 1850 to 1864, is estimated to have cost up to about 30 million lives, compared to the American Civil War's 700 thousand. And let me tell you, it's crazy we don't talk more about the Taiping Rebellion, not only because of the devastation but because the rebels were a very strange branch of Chinese Christian that believed their leader to be the brother of Jesus Christ. Which...well, I guess that's also technically the West's fault, although Western Christians were heavily divided on how they felt about the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and ultimately after some indecision and putting feelers out to the rebels, the West chose to back the Qing.

For the people who love the DDR because their enforcement of laws were not always necessarily the worst in the entire world for queer folk: the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was spectacularly feminist for it's time, way more than East Germany was pro-queer! Maybe consider switching over to Chinese Christofascism?

(I'm sorry, I'm going to be angry about that literally forever)

China would go on to badly lose the Sino-French War and Japanese-Sino War, the two together resulting in China losing suzerainty (essentially control of foreign affairs) over Vietnam and Korea, and a lot of their influence outside their own borders.

At this point, you can start to see how China was being treated by the West...and Imperial Japan, who, as we've discussed, were great big westaboos. Everyone wanted a piece, and it was a race to get the biggest. They didn't think in terms of what China wanted, they hardly considered themselves in opposition with China, but rather each other.

Putting His Foot Down Uncle Sam: Gentlemen, you may cut up this map as much as you like, but remember that I'm here to stay, and you can't cut me up into spheres of influence!

Needless to say, the Chinese were...not pleased with how things were going.

The traditional narrative is that the Qing's modernization efforts were, at best, a very mixed-success. There's been more questioning of that, though, since "modernization" is inherently kinna a Eurocentric term with arbitrary values. Just before the Japanese-Sino War, everyone was pretty certain "modernization" had gone great and they were going to crush Japan like ants. The Qing did face issues with corruption and firing shells that had their high-explosives siphoned to be sold off, but considering Russia has had to deal with essentially the same problem in Ukraine finding their reserve tanks to be hollow tin cans, I'd say that's fairly modern.

Social instability would continue to rapidly worsen after losing the First Sino-Japanese War, during which Japanese acts of brutality were enough, as I mentioned in my previous historical post, to elicit at least temporary scandal among the Western Powers Imperial Japan hoped so desperately to impress. Tensions were especially high with Christian missions, culminating in an incident in which two German missionaries were killed in an attempt to kill a third accused of rape. That led to Germany invading and taking away yet another piece of China's sovereign territory. Not helping things was that, because of special protections for the practice of Christianity forced on China by treaties from those prior conflicts, many bandits were "converting" or claiming to have done so in order to escape the law. And all of this is in the midst of serious natural disasters ruining lives and leaving people with nothing.

So that brings us to 1899, the main point of this post, and something you may have only heard of before in a throwaway line on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm talking about the Boxer Rebellion.

It was then that an escalating series of murders against Christians (missionaries and converts) and attacks on telegraph wires and railroads blossomed into something like but not quite a revolution, the most notable event being the Siege of Peking (Beijing), where over two thousand Christians and foreign civilians took refuge until the formation of the Eight-Nation Army, an alliance of Italy, Russia, the United States, the UK, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Japan, Germany, and France, invaded to rescue them.

You might assume that "Boxer" came from someone's name, or a major location, or something like that, right? The name actually conceals the reason I find the Boxer Rebellion so interesting, and why we're talking about it today. See, back then, kung fu was referred to as "Chinese boxing" in the West.

The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists were just one extralegal organization that flourished in late 1800s thanks to the Qing slowly losing their grip on governing even within some parts of their own territory. They weren't just anti-foreigners, they started out pissed at the Qing for the ongoing troubles, and fighting government control is where they got their start. Yet, they famously used the battle cry "support the Qing, destroy foreigners" - hey, wasn't this supposed to be a rebellion by an extralegal organization?

Ha - well - while she initially condemned them, Empress Dowager Cixi would later throw in with the Fists, at least partly because the prince stanned them so hard he met with her wearing one of their uniforms. This, it seemed, was a legitimate path to expelling all foreigners.

So, right now you're probably thinking back to where this post started. The natural conclusion at this point is that the Fists surely lost, but their martial arts were impressive, right? And then that became sanda?

Well.

No.

The movie Boxer Rebellion (1975) depicts martial artists jumping into crowds of armed soldiers and devastating them with the awesome power of kung fu. You might expect this to exaggeration typical of action movies, and it is, kinna. It's also only half of what the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists thought they were capable of.

The Fists believed their kung fu made them invulnerable to blades and bullets, including cannonballs. They thought they could fly. They thought ghost warriors would descend from the sky to help drive out foreign armies. Though they had some firearms, they were mostly armed with blades if anything at all. The Empress ordered the Qing military to assist them, but generals wisely chose to do the bare minimum or outright ignore the command entirely.

Even stranger was the legends that grew around the Red Lanterns. You can think of the Lanterns as a kinna women's auxiliary to the Fists, who spurned women lest they "pollute" their masculine magic kung fu and cause it to fail. The Lanterns were divided by age between Black Lanterns (older women), Blue Lanterns (middle-aged women), and most famously, the Red Lanterns, who were eleven to seventeen.

Like the Fists, Red Lanterns possessed magical powers. They could fly, but also, unlike the Fists, walk on water and stop guns, among other things. When Catholic women were accused of making that masculine kung fu magic fail by exposing themselves, the Fists resolved to wait for the Red Lanterns to arrive, since their magic would be immune to corrupting femininity.

I want to take a moment to say I know how all this sounds, and I've tried to keep my language serious at least in this section because I don't mean to paint the Fists as "stupid" for the things they believed. It's important to keep in mind the Fists were largely peasants driven by nationalistic fervor and desperation from how bad things had gotten thanks to foreigners, natural disasters, and the Qing's own corruption and internal failures. It's depressingly reminiscent of ghost shirts, which just ten years prior had failed to stop bullets during Wounded Knee. The population was despondent and angry, with little still left to lose. That led them to kill innocent people prior to dying themselves to an enemy they never had a chance against. People like Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, and others outright took the Fists' side at least in terms of "who started it".

More often than not, history is sad.

So the Boxers lost, badly. Empress Dowager Cixi was given a pass for siding with them because she was more useful on the throne than off it, but the Qing would fall about a decade later in the middle of trying once again to further "modernize". China fell a free-for-all between warlords, ultimately coming down to the Kuomintang's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. The two would (barely) work together to resist Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which quickly became part of World War II. Soon after they fell back into conflict, with the Kuomintang forced to retreat to Taiwan and still claims independence that the PRC still denies.

In Taiwan is the Republic of China Military Academy, which was known as the Whampoa Military Academy when it developed sanda in the mid-20s. It is, basically, MMA. Traditional martial artists certainly played a part in it's early history, but they were doing what Bruce Lee would fiercely advocate for decades later - "absorb what is useful, discard what is not". Foreign combat sports, like Muay Thai and (actual, Western) boxing were worked in as well. Like in MMA, a background in traditional martial arts can be helpful going in, but you're going to have to learn a lot more and probably unlearn several things as well. The biggest influence was actually the lei tai, raised platforms where Chinese brawlers engaged brutal and often fatal matches, sometimes with weapons even. Like, people had organs come out on the lei tai, it was nuts.

The reason MMA and sanda look so similar is that that's just what comprehensive and effective fighting looks like. It's the same reason England doesn't use gyroget ammo for their guns while Germany equips their soldiers with fully automatic crossbows. In video games, which I love with all my heart, fighting styles as diverse as sumo and capoeira are presented as more or less equally balanced, with different advantages and disadvantages. That's not how it works. We solved the optimal way to hold your arms and it's not like this.

You may have heard of Xu Xiaodong, a Chinese man trained in sanda who has a history of fighting and handedly winning against supposed masters of kung fu. The PRC hates him for that because, like with pseudoscientific traditional Chinese medicine, kung fu is a useful promoter of nationalism, and it's better at that if it keeps it's mystique as impenetrable as possible.

I would probably like a lot of modern Chinese martial arts movies if not knowing that they were bankrolled to be propaganda for the PRC, like the first Ip Man, which exists to further the myth of wing chun and remind everyone that Japan sucks for what happened during WWII. I don't think they're making many movies about the Boxer Rebellion.

#boxer rebellion #china #taiping rebellion #taiping heavenly kingdom #opium wars #martial arts #sanda

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hera-the-shoggoth · 2 years ago

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Dà Yīn: China's Last Imperial Dynasty

Decline of Qing During the XVIII century, the Great Qīng Empire began to decay from within. Vital infrastructure was neglected as corrupt officials diverted state funds to their estates, while the army withered as its last experienced officers died and their sons became landed gentry no longer training in warfare.

While the Eight Banners had used the latest technology to defeat the well-organized gunpowder armies of the Southern Míng diehards, innovation had slowed to a halt by the Jiāqìng era. From a height of tactical and technological prowess during the times Shùnzhì and Kāngxī, the army and especially the navy became more atrophied and antiquated with each passing decade.

Despite the dynasty's pride in the Ten Great Campaigns of the Qiánlóng Emperor (r. 1735–1796), the Qīng armies became largely ineffective by the end of the 18th century. It took almost ten years and huge financial waste to defeat the badly equipped White Lotus Rebellion (1795–1804), partly by legitimizing militias led by local Hàn Chinese elites. XIX Century Civil Wars The Tàipíng Rebellion (1850–1864), a large-scale uprising that started in southern China, marched within miles of the capital in 1853. The court was forced to let its Hàn governors-general, first led by Zēng Guófān, raise regional armies. This new type of army and leadership defeated the rebels but signaled the end of Manchu dominance of the military establishment.

During the 1840s, the country had been decisively defeated by the British in the First Opium War. Intellectuals suggested more brazenly that the Qīng had lost the favor of heaven. Floods and famine during the early XIX century resulting from poor infrastructure and corruption further reinforced this perception.

As the massive Tàipíng and Niǎnrebellions spread across the south, the banner armies struggled in vain to contain them, and in 1851, the Xiánfēng Emperor finally authorized reformist officials to raise from the provinces affected by rebellion new, experimental groups making use of western techniques and modern technology.

The Yǒng Braves Zēng Guófān's strategy was to rely on local gentries to raise a new type of military organization from those provinces that the Tàipíng rebels directly threatened. This new force became known as the Xiāng Army, named after the Húnán region where it was raised. The Xiāng Army was a hybrid of local militia and a standing army.

The Tuánliàn system is the Chinese term for localised village militias created in the Zhōu period. In May 1645, Míng rebel leader Lǐ Zìchéng was killed by a tuánliàn of local landowners in Húběi province.

During the Jiāqìng reign, with the corrupt and ineffective official military establishment of the Eight Banners and Green Standard Army incapable of curbing the White Lotus Rebellion, the Qīng court began to order local gentry and landowners in all ten provinces to organise tuánliàn for self-defense, with both funding and control in the hands of local gentry and landowners.

It was given professional training, but was paid for out of regional coffers and funds its commanders — mostly members of the Chinese gentry — could muster. The Xiāng Army and its successor, the Huái Army created by Zēng Guófān's colleague and student Lǐ Hóngzhāng, were collectively called the "yǒngyíng" (Brave Camp).

Other yǒngyíng included the Chǔ Army of Zuǒ Zōngtáng, and the Yīn Army of Níng Wěizhé raised from the norther counties of Hénán affected particularly by the Niǎn rebellion. Many of the yǒngyíng commanders gradually became disaffected with the weakness of the Qīng regime and as the wars wore on they found themselves increasingly in control of all local affairs on behalf of the central government.

Aftermath of the Second Opium War During the Second Opium War of the late 1850s, the Eight Banners performed even worse, and it became immediately apparent that only the new armies were having any noticeable effect on the Franco-British advance.

The Tiānjīn Peace gave Europeans unrestricted access to all Chinese ports, preventing the central government from collecting taxes there and unseating its control over the coasts, while Europeans walked Chinese streets unafraid of Chinese law in the foreign quarters. By the end of the war, the yǒngyíng were the only Qīng armies still able to control much of "China proper" as the Manchu and Mongol banner forces had retreated to the north or been destroyed.

Though the rule of the Qīng had effectively been broken by the 1860s (and there were many powerful people in China during the mid XIX century who were dissatisfied with the Qīng's embarrassing ineffectiveness and foreign origin) the Heavenly Kingdom was greatly feared by the gentry, by religious traditionalists, and by capitalists for its abolition of land ownership, alliances with organized crime, ruthlessly enforced moral policies as well as its extraordinarily strange para-Christian religion.

Most people with anything to lose saw rule by the Tàipíng as far, far worse than the Qīng. This was also true of the Niǎn Rebellion that had appeared in the north. While it adopted some White Lotus trappings, it remained largely a loose movement of starving young men forming bandit groups occasionally organized by petty warlords. This gave them their name, which refers to such gangs of brigands.

General of the Yīn Army Níng Wěizhé, in particular, became famous for fighting both the Tàipíng and Niǎn. He had been taken and sold into slavery as a child by criminals who burned his family's estate in 1810, remaining a slave until 1824, when his family regained their estate and managed to find him and buy him back. He fought with great vigor at the head of his new army, eventually becoming commander of the Army Group Jiāngnánand developing an intense rivalry with Zēng Guófān.

As the war wound down in the south he established a base of political and military power in Nánjīng. He gave the city its old name back and pardoned many people who had been imprisoned or exiled by the Tàipíng as well as a network of revolutionary intellectuals that he kept safe from government reprisals. There he concluded that much of the grievance with the Qīng government that had led to the rebellions was justified, and became determined to use the force at his command to rectify the issues of the southern people.

He created a new government in the military district of Army Group Jiāngnán based from Nánjīng. It included a cabinet of reformist scholars and officials who had been demoted or exiled by the Qīng, as well as victims of the Tàipíng, who would form the basis for the early-Yīn Grand Secretariat.

His motto became Chóngjiàn Shùndiān which had two meanings. One to "re-build a levelled imperial domain" which appeased the Qīng he nominally still served, and another to "re-establish the domain of Shùn" referring to his admiration for Lǐ Zìchéng and the ideals of the Shùn Dynasty.

The latter was a message with revolutionary connotations, as Lǐ was officially regarded as a usurper. His opposition to both the abuses of the reactionary and moribund Míng state and the Manchu domination at the same time made him a powerful symbol for Níng's government and for a strengthened, Hàn-ruled China.

From there, he launched expeditions against the Niǎn rebels of the north, and established control over most of the Yellow River basin. He returned many estates to their old owners, while also distributing grain to starving peasants and raiding western-financed banks to start infrastructure works in his domain. He began to redistribute the property of corrupt Manchu absentee landlords, while enforcing a policy of racial integration that was partially successful in reducing spontaneous public massacres of Manchu families.

Open Rebellion In December, 1865, with his army in control of much of the country and the Green Standard forces loyal to him and his coalition, he had his soldiers cut off their queues to show insubordination to the Qīng rulers that had failed them. With this test, numerous Qīng armies and citizens that remained on the fence about the transition of power did the same and joined the cause of the Nánjīng Government.

In April, 1866, with provincial governors now pledging to his side, Níng along with a coalition of other officers broke from the Qīng government, now helpless to stop them. Some of the other generals, armies, and people opposed this and remained loyal to the Qīng.

A major anti-Níng offensive was organized by Sengge Rinchen and Zēng Guófān, but the yǒngyíng commanders loyal to Níng were able to halt it in western Hénán, pushing the Qīng armies north into Mongolia. Many loyalist Green Standard and Banner units regrouped around Běijīng under Zēng's command, managing to hold the region around the city in a stalemate that would last until the 1871 Peace of Cāngzhōu.

With the defeat of the "Bǐngyín Offensive" against him in late 1866 (the year of the fire-tiger) Qīng commanders still resisting in the south widely surrendered and defected to the new government. By this time most of the Hàn gentry and scholar-officials supported the Yīn Army's takeover, which changed little of the real of state of affairs while also establishing Hàn rule over China proper without the upheaval of a working-class revolution.

In that year Níng began to refer to himself by a popular nickname that his associates had given him; the Prince of Yīn. This came from the name of his army, which had developed a firm loyalty to the general. Its soldiers mostly came from Níng's own home country of northern Hénán, where the ancient capital of the Shāng Dynasty was located. Homage to Shāng

An educated man, Níng Wěizhé was an admirer of King Pán Gēng and Tāng the Martial, comparing his efforts to those of the Shāng monarchs as recounted in the Bamboo Annals and the Records of the Grand Historian.

King Tāng was the ruler of a small Xià vassal state called Yīn, and led a rebellion to rectify the people's hardship during the reign of the tyrannical Jié of Xià. This was used to galvanize resistance and encourage a rebellion. Tāng's speech to the nobles from the Records of the Grand Historian made on the eve of his uprising was widely published by the regime, and the Qīng reprisals against civilians were compared with the punitive expedition of King Jié against the state which would become Yīn.

King Pán Gēng's legacy was used to illustrate the virtue of the southern government. The traditional accounts of his life mention his determination in moving the capital from the northern city of Yǎn (near modern Qūfù) to the old city of Bó on the south bank of the Yellow River. This had been the capital of the old vassal state, and he renamed the city Yīn after this state in order to honor his acestors' rebellion against the Xià.

Pán Gēng's purpose in this was to reinstate the old governance of King Tāng and bring new prosperity by moving to the legendary older capital (Bó) from which Tāng ruled, after which the dynasty itself is usually known as the Yīn to historians. This was compared to the Nánjīng Government's use of the southern city as the new capital in opposition to Běijīng.

In panic, defiance, and paranoia, remaining Qīng loyalists sometimes ordered the mass execution of civilians without queues, and some areas experienced depopulation, which inflamed existing ethnic tensions. For the most part, the commanders of the yǒngyíng supported the coup as well, which changed little of the real state of affairs while also establishing Hàn rule over China proper without the upheaval of a working-class revolution.

Jiàntóng Reform

Níng Wěizhé underwent the rites of enthronement as Emperor and Son of Heaven, beginning the era of Jiàntóng ("establishing a system") on the lunar new year of 1867. His new empire was named the Great Yīn, after the name of his army, which was named for the late-period Shāng capital on the south bank of the Yellow River. The army was raised in that country and it was the general's homeland.

Its use signified the throne's intention to initiate a renaissance of pre-Mongol Chinese culture and religion, while also using new techniques of industry and war to restore the power of the empire. It references the feudal ages to help reinforce a Chinese national concept centered on the Yellow River and the south.

His first series of imperial edicts for the time of Jiàntóng are known as the Jǐsì Laws after the sexagenary date of their passage (1869, year of the earth-snake). They introduced widely welcomed as well as controversial reforms. Slavery was abolished alongside familial punishment, the imperial naming taboo was abolished, the civil service examinations were rewritten to incorporate an understanding of modern sciences and techniques of government, land ownership was reformed, and religious freedom was introduced, while banking was centralized.

The Jiàntóng Emperor reorganized the numerous small and irregular armies of his allies into the Huángjūn, or "Yellow Army". After this new unified national military took Tàiyuán in 1870, the government seized many of the Piàohào draft banks to help begin the construction of highways and railroads, and to buy artillery and rifles from the United States and Russia.

Third Opium War and the Jiàntóng Restoration

The same year as the Fall of Tàiyuán, the Huángjūn occupied of the ports of Zhèjiāng, Fújiàn, and Guǎngdōng. The emperor ordered the seizure of the qiánzhuāng banks of the south as well, which were closely connected with the European factories along the coast. Also in this year the imperial government signed a new treaty with the Russian Empire agreeing to hand over claims to central Manchuria and Mongolia.

The new state's confiscation of wealth, its alliance with Russia, and its opium eradication policy was met with hostility by western European powers. This prompted a coalition of Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Japan to declare war on the Great Yīn in support of the Great Qīng, although the French could not participate due to their recent defeat against Prussia.

However, the country was not without foreign support this time. While Britain sent the Royal Navy and marines to Běijīng to protect their unlikely Aisin Gioro allies and hold the southern border in Shāndōng and Shānxī, the Russian Empire brought together forces from Anadyr, Chukotka, Khabarovsk, and Vladivostok to execute an invasion of Manchuria if the British attacked the Yīn.

In 1871, as the Anglo-Spanish forces launched their invasion of Guǎngdōng and Zhèjiāng from the sea and their land campaign across the Tàiháng Mountains, small groups of Russian Army forces fought their way into central Manchuria. While the offensive was very limited due to the distance that had to be traveled, the Qīng/Mongol armies were dedicated wholly to containing the Yīn counterattacks in the south while the Russians were faced with nothing but militias.

By the spring of 1872, the Russians had reached Harbin, while thousands of British casualties were sustained in the Battle of Chángchūn (which was widely photographed at the dawn of modern war journalism) with little gained. Even more deaths occurred in the struggles for Shànghǎi and the Pearl River against the well-trained and enthusiastic volunteer army of the Yīn. The international public began to scrutinize and question the war.

Peace of Cāngzhōu and Normalization

The newly unified German Empire and Kingdom of Italy also sided with Russia and China against Britain and Spain, while the US largely sympathized with the Yīn and did not help the coalition in any substantive way. A truce was declared at the city of Cāngzhōu, and a new treaty was signed with the representatives of the British crown in the foreign legations of Běijīng.

The British agreed to limit the number of troops it stationed to defend the Qīng, while the Russians withdrew from central Manchuria. Both the Huángjūn and the Cossack irregulars met with disaster attacking in the wide Mongolian steppe, and in the east the allied trenches in Bǎodìng county proved impenetrable. As a result of this stalemate, the Yīn Empire agreed to accept Northern Qīng independence.

While neither the Russians nor the Great Yīn could take Běijīng, and the British successfully kept the Russians from controlling Mongolia and central Manchuria, the western powers were forced to recognize the new government of China-proper as an independent nation, while the Yīn and Qīng agreed to recognize one another's sovereignty as the Sòng and Liáo had done in the middle ages.

The defeated powers recognized the right of the Yīn state to regulate and tax the ports, and relinquished claims of sovereignty over them, with the exception of Hong Kong and Macau. These would remain British and Portuguese respectively until they were retroceded to the Federal Republic of China in 1997.

Níng Wěizhé had allied himself from the early days with the religious minorities of the country which were persecuted by the Qīng. He saw parallels with the suppression of Buddhism during the early Middle Ages and with the Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars from the Qín Dynasty.

He tolerated the existence of churches and masjids and the right to worship freely, which earned him the sympathy of international Christian and Muslim communities, many of whom sent money to the Yīn imperial government, and Pope Pius IX condemned the British Empire's war against a free people. The Good Emperor Gientun became a title of endearment for the monarch, and his funeral procession in 1881 was observed by many international dignitaries.

With this treaty, the rule of China's last imperial dynasty was solidified, and it would last until 1945, when the Zhēnshèng Emperor was deposed along with the Grand Secretariat by the US-Japanese occupation forces after the end of the Second World War. The US military intervened in the resulting civil war, yielding the modern republic ruling in the east and south, while the Northern Qīng which had been occupied by the Yīn in 1933 would be incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Manchu-Mongol SFSR in 1947.

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"High Yīn" Epoch of Lóngsháo and Hóngyuán

In 1878, the US president arbitrated in favor of China in its dispute with Japan over the Liúqiú Archipelago and the Yellow Army was able to establish authority on the islands by 1880. The following year, the Great Yīn went to war against the Píngnán Republic, using muslim commanders like Mǎ Rúlóng to gain the loyalty of the people and reincorporate Yúnnán Province. The Jiàntóng Emperor died in 1881, leaving the state to his eldest son Níng Jūyì, who took the throne with the era of Lóngsháo (thriving harmony), but died a few years later in 1884 without leaving an heir.

The Lóngsháo Emperor left the throne to one of his nephews, Shūlún, who became the Hóngyuán Emperor (vast universality). Known in death as Emperor Huīzōng of Yīn, the young man took power under the influence of the Jiàntóng Emperor's widow, the Grand Empress Dowager Jìngcí. She is alleged to have had her son the Lóngsháo Emperor pressured by threats to make her grandson the crown prince so that she could control him when he reigned. There are even rumors to this day that she had the emperor poisoned for his modernist stance.

However, the Grand Empress Dowager died soon after the young Hóngyuán Emperor reached majority in 1893. He hated Jìngcí, and began to sideline her conservative Confucian Party while pursuing ambitious projects of industrialization and liberalization in collaboration with the Modernist Party. Allying with the growing bourgeoisie, he launched more reforms to the bureaucracy at the urging of a new generation of officials educated in western ideas, while also engaging in expansionist foreign policy aimed at strengthening the empire's position.

In 1891, the Chinese Navy briefly took control of Táiwān and dismantled the Formosa Republic, but in 1895, during the early Hóngyuán Era, the Yīn Empire went to war with Japan over control of Korea. The First Sino-Japanese War ended in defeat. Japan occupied Korea but was met with too strong a resistance in Liáodōng to advance any further, while the Chinese Navy was defeated in the Yellow Sea. Japan gained suzerainty over Korea and Táiwān after this.

Following the loss of Korea, the navy launched a coup and the Yīn government underwent a brief civil war that brought the Hóngyuán Constitution in 1898, ending the absolute monarchy and reorganizing the Grand Secretariat into a two-house parliament in a similar combination of the German and British models as had proven successful in Japan following the Meiji reforms.

Greater East Asia War

In 1905, the Yīn, Qīng, and Japanese as a coalition fought a successful war against Russia after the empire invaded Manchuria and Korea in order to construct a railroad. Russia was defeated on land and at sea, and Northern Qīng control in Manchuria and Mongolia was solidified. This resulted in an Anglo-Yīn rapprochement and paved the way for the construction of a modern Chinese navy, the Yellow Fleet.

In 1914, the European powers went to war due to the activation of interconnected alliances, and China fought on the side of the entente along with Qīng and Japan. After the war, Japan was given control of numerous islands in the Pacific, while the Northern Qīng helped to preserve the White Movement in eastern Russia until 1925.

Zhēnshèng Era and Expansionism

In the 1930s, militarists gained control of the newly enthroned Zhēnshèng Emperor with great popular support, sweeping out moderate and socialist parties in the Grand Council and establishing the Jiùguó Zhèngfǔ or "National Salvation Government", ending the alliance with Japan and Britain and withdrawing the country from the League of Nations.

From 1933 to 1936, Great Yīn conquered and occupied the Northern Qīng, splitting off Mongolia and putting it under the Buddhist theocracy of the Bogd Khanate. The Yīn Empire also annexed Běijīng, reverting the city's name to Běipíng as capital of Héběi Province while vassalizing the Aisin Gioro family under Yīn occupation as the sovereigns of a puppet Grand Duchy of Mǎnzhōuguó.

In 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out with the Huángjūn's invasion of Korea. At first, this was met with widespread popular support, but the Chinese occupation quickly alienated the people with the annexation of the peninsula and creation of the Āndōng Province. Koreans were forced to learn Chinese along with other sinification projects, and Korea would prove to be a prototype for other such efforts in China's colonial empire. The Japanese Army was pushed back to a perimeter around Busan. Japanese naval efforts to bypass the Sino-Korean army with a landing at Inchon was thwarted by a Chinese naval victory at the Battle of Huksan and the war at sea swung in China's favor. In 1939, China joined the Axis Powers while the US worked to supply the remnants of the Japanese Navy with ships and oil.

In 1940, following the start of the Second World War, China occupied French Indochina with the approval of the Vichy Government. In 1943, China would annex Việt Nam and Cochinchina, re-creating the "Jiāozhǐ Province". There, the imperial government launched a sinification campaign in education and business similar to that attempted in Korea, placing northern people in positions of power.

The imperial guards of Việt Nam fled to the forested hills where they would engage in a guerrilla war. They were soon joined by thousands of partisan fighters who resisted the Chinese occupation of Southeast Asia. This would be followed by a series of invasions in Singapore and the Dutch East Indies throughout 1940.

That same year, the country invaded Tibet and forced the 13th Dalai Lama to accept Chinese suzerainty under the Bureau of Buddhist and Tibetan Affairs. This was used by the government to justify a religious cause to the war through the defense of Vajrayana Buddhism. Second Sino-Japanese War At the end of 1940, the Japanese Navy mutinied against the government in the name of the emperor, while the rival national army loyal to the central government marched against them and fighting broke out at the ports. People began to riot, and when Communists launched a Soviet-backed uprising, a full civil war was on. Far-right and left groups fought both one another and the National Diet.

With the Japanese navy defeated and its army expeditionary forces in Korea crushed in Busan by aerial bombing, the Chinese army and navy cooperated and launched a massive invasion of the Japanese Home Islands via Korea that occupied most of the Yīn imperial government's attention for the rest of the Second World War.

The islands were gradually absorbed by the combined Sino-Korean army, and the overwhelming force of the unexpected invasion left only pockets of resistance in the mountains. The Japanese government-in-exile continued to control the IJN and cooperated with the Allies in fighting the Chinese Yellow Navy in the Coral Sea as Sino-American relations strained to the breaking point. The Jiùguó Zhèngfǔ militarist government declared its mission of establishing Chinese dominance over a circle of East Asian nations as had been the case during the Míng period. In early 1941, as war loomed with the US, a system of state-sponsored Chinese folk religion was made the official state religion alongside Buddhism and Daoism. Hinduism, Christianity, Shinto, and Islam were suppressed and targeted as foreign elements, repudiating the tolerant legacy of the Jiàntóng Era. Just before the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, occupied Japan was annexed into China as Rìběn Province. End of the Empire In December, 1941, China launched successful attacks against the US Philippines and the naval base of Pearl Harbor, opening up a massive naval front in the Pacific, contesting the US and Japanese navies with a formidable fleet centered around a corps of aircraft carriers called the Tiānhǎi Zhàntuán (Sky-Sea Battle Group). The US Navy recovered, however, and the country began a gradual push into the West Pacific. The Yellow Army retreated from the Japanese countryside in late 1943, holding only the major cities and transportation routes, while Emperor Showa and the imperial family joined the resistance in 1944, fleeing south by plane to US-occupied Okinawa to lead the government-in-exile. In early 1944, a Chinese invasion of British India would end in defeat and the UK would invade the country via Tibet. That same year, the allied US, Australian, and Japanese fleets had destroyed most of the Yellow Navy and launched a campaign to retake the Japanese Home Islands. There they would find total chaos. Rival warlords were fighting one another in the unoccupied countryside and the civil war continued into the late 40s, but by 1949, the US and Soviet armies had successfully occupied the country and divided it at the 37th parallel. In 1945, the Soviet Union invaded Qīng Manchuria, while all the allied countries engaged in heavy aerial bombing. Vast devastation was incurred when the Royal Air Force bombed Chinese levees and dams on the Yellow River and the Yángzǐ, and famine ensued with the flooding of farmland. The Great Yīn surrendered after the cities of Shàntóu, Xiàmén, and Wēnzhōu were destroyed with nuclear fission bombs by the US Air Force.

#alternate history #taiping rebellion #imperial china #qing dynasty

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