China was always a very powerful country until then

>tell you every man must wear a stupid fucking pigtail or be executed.
I'm surprised the peasant didn't rebel when the Qing implement that pigtail rule.

It was pretty much impossible unless the entire government committed itself to it out of sheer good will

I also never said they didn't understand diplomacy, but you have to understand. This isn't me downplaying the amount of states China dealt with, it is me acknowledging what an ABSOLUTE CLUSTERFUCK Europe was. The amount of states in the HRE alone that acted independently were more than the amount China dealt with at almost any given time period. Then there were other oddities like the status of the Greek Islands after Venice fucked the Byzantine Empire, but before the Ottomans. Ruled by various distant states with no real rhyme or reason.

Europeans at that point, had made diplomacy into an art form.

> Not only that but the huge chinese government with all its bureaucrats, magistrates, eunuchs etc. weren't very keen on modernization because they might lose their jobs, and many in it actively worked against it.
Not quite.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Strengthening_Movement
Why it failed was because the QIng's credibility as an imperial Chinese dynasty was shot to shit.

So all those scholars who studied abroad? Plotted the Qing's downfall.

All those modernized generals of the modernized units? Gathered power and political allies as they could sense the traditional all-out brawl for rule of China coming.

This was only after china got its teeth kicked in and when many in the populace itself were pushing for reform
Well this is the thing really, all those problems came together in a wrecking ball of hatred set on destroying the Qing, before everybody realized what was going on it was already too late for the Qing dynasty

Is it not the same thing that happened with India? The west exploits the divides within the country and play them off against each other. The Qing wer hardly this super organized state that could deploy massive armies, right?

They were actually

Wasn't China battered by constant natural disasters like floods in this period which significantly weakened them?

Both yes and no.

Yes in that like India, Euronigs utilized ethnic divisions as bases of dividing the country up (i.e. Russians supporting Turkics in Xinjiang, Brits "Liberating" Tibetans).

But China is quite the unified empire. China proper alone is. Furthermore the Late IMperialist Europeans played another game (i.e. not landgrabbing but market-grabbing) compared to India in the 1700's. The name of the game is "who can bully the Imperial Government better?" The game was who can make the Emperor a puppet for one's own purposes better than other European states.

Interestingly, the bullied Qing Government turned the tables vs. Europeans in rare occassions. Mind you: the concessions still needed the De Jure agreement of the QIng Government for it to be legal. When France was defeated by Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, all of East Asia was amazed of Germany and wanted military advisors from that country. This enabled the Qing government to literally throw the French under the bus and opt for Prussian advisors. France bitched and moaned about this but Qings now had the backing of the German Empire to cockblock France out of the China game.

France used to be large presence in China but by the late 1800's, Britain, Germany, Japan, and Russia were the only ones left as France was kicked out of the game.

China is always battered by constant natural disasters in almost every century. Big country with an interconnected infrastructure, specially in agricultural terms.

I'm pretty sure the Qing had to face several rebellions after establishing the dynasty. A rebellion existing doesn't mean it's succesful.

Almost every Chinese dynasty had to put out small fires after being established. With the stellar exception of the T'ang.

They did. How ignorant are you?

>such as isolating Timur's ass thanks to the Grand Voyages

Not him but care to elaborate on that? Sounds interesting.

Not him but IIRC Zheng He's Grand Voyages was less an exploration voyage but more of a grand tour to dazzle the Spice Route states.

The Yongle also had a secondary motive: to redirect all trade & alliances among states in the Spice route to China, isolating Tamerlane who's making moves towards invading China for his plans of Mongol Empire 2.0: The Islamening.

It worked. The Silk Route -source of Timur's wealth- lessened in importance as opposed to the Spice route. It doesnt help Timur that he and other Steppenegroes made the Silk Route a dangerous place.

Thr great powers at one point HAD the intention of literally carving up china, this was averted by the Open Door Policy largely pushed by the USA
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Door_Policy
just imagine the disaster that a partitioned china would have been

Still not like India which was actively divided.

It was more of "Once the Qing falls, we take pieces of it, ok?"

Good thing for China (well not really) it didn't happen because
1) The Warlords were fucking insane.
2) But they also were happy to accomodate Europeans like mini-Chinese governments.
3) WWI.

I must add though that this was only part of a larger whole of negotiations concerning china that determined the policy of the imperialist powers regarding the country and that in the end kept the country largely intact

Yes but the colonial powers would have actually pushed for the collapse of the Qing, which would have accelerated the Qing's decline

China was a complete mess by that time. Look up the Century of Humiliation. What did the most damage was probably the Taiping Rebellion. Keep in mind that Qing China was conquered and ruled by foreigners called Manchurians at that time. The Taiping Rebellion led to 50 million deaths in China. Then factor in things like the Opium Wars the Sino-Japanese War and it's easy to understand why China was in such a chaotic state.

Because Manchus were retarded backwards horsefuckers who stagnated the countries economy as the population continued to soar, impoverishing millions more people and turning China into an overpopulated shithole that relied on imported food to survive (something unheard of in previous dynasties).

Funny how the Manchu on the background is as much a claimant of China as the others

The late Qing dynasty was in a pretty bad state of affairs. Just look at these pictures.

china-underground.com/2016/05/15/75-amazing-old-restored-photos-china/

It was bad yeah, but things hadn't gone to shit that much yet. The cities still looked decent at least.

What is it with the Chinese and getting invaded and ruled by some foreign people that everyone ends up seeing as Chinese when the next foreign people come invading?

Happened constantly in history around the globe. Sedentary state structures get weak, nomads/hillmen/other savages invade because the state cannot stop them anymore and they become the state if they can because nobody wants to be a poor savage when he can be king.

I am a Manchu Qing of Tokarian descent living in the US. I have green eyes like my Qing father. My Qing grandfather had hazel eyes and brown reddish hair. Tokarians mixed with Proto-Turks migrated to Manchuria and further mixed with Tungusic tribes to create the Qing people. My ancestral clan is Proto-Turkic of the Tabgach Qing tribe and I am in no way Chinese racially, I am a Manchu Proto-Turk. Us Qing steppe peoples have always been different from the Chinese. I know clearly we Qings are not Asiatic Han Chinese and my Caucasoid Indo-European blood that flows through my veins is a testament to that.

WE WUZ QINGZ N SHIT

Small populations usually get absorbed into the main population and adopt into their melting pot culture through breeding with locals.

Please elaborate on T'ang.

TL;DR
>I'm Finnish

Even the Shang?

Europeans became rich after they made enough guns and started killing people who didn't have guns and took all their resources.

Then, using their wealth, pushed over regions that didn't have a ton of wealth created by genocide.