Why didn't the Chinese ever colonize?

I mean they were the greatest civilization for most of the recorded history so why no colonies, exploration or proactiveness on their part?

Europeans from Greeks to Romans to Germanics to Vikings (that even discovered America in the 10th century AD) to Portugese to Spaniards to Russians to French, Dutch and English, Europeans, it seems were always interested in knowing what is behind the next hill and the next hill while the Chinese were just content to stay this side of the hill and farm.

It makes even less sense if you consider that most colonies happened because of overpopulation in the home country at least up until Spaniards started exploring to find different passage to, ironically, China. Chinese had ridiculous population and have always had ridiculous population they could have established massive colonies on Kamchatka, Alaska, Oregon, California, Indonesia, Philippines etc.

So what gives? Why were they so passive?

They're not as evil as the white man. The white man is the cancer of human history

Vikings discovered a small piece of North America, get your facts right.

u fokin wot m8
just because they did it to slanty-eyed bastards doesn't mean they never colonized anything

they didn't need to

They did. The "Han" people started out as one group among many on the Yellow River. It takes time for them to Sinicize all of what we think of as modern-day China.

When they had overpopulation issues, the usual result was to push south, not overseas.

>Korea
>Manchuria
>Vietnam
>Tarim Basin
>Tibet
>Dzungaria

WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?!

They believed they had already conquered everything relevant.

A small piece of america is still america faggot.

There was no reason to colonize overseas. They expanded inland, growing from the Yellow River valley to encompass almost all of mainland East Asia, including some of its best land like along the Yangtze and Sichuan. They also expanded at times into Vietnam, the Tarim Basin, Manchuria, Tibet, Mongolia, etc. If you look at the colonizing people's of the world, you'll notice they usually come from fairly small homelands with limited room to expand overland; the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the British, the Portuguese, etc. The likes of the Chinese, the Ottomans, the Mughals and so on had no need to build empires on the other side of the world when they were busy running massive land empires.

Add to that an ideology which saw the non-Chinese world as barbaric and barely worthy of study except for utilitarian reasons and which shunned foreign adventurism. It's worth mentioning that China's greatest expansions were made under Mongol and Manchu dynasties, largely because they didn't fully share that ideology and saw China as a multi-ethnic rather than purely Han state. Compare that with the likes of Greeks, Muslims and Westerners who were always fascinated by places like India and China.

I think the main reason for this is the fact that Chinese civilization emerged in relative isolation to the rest of the world, thus being essentially self-created and in the early part of their history (when Chinese philosophy emerged) interacting with no other civilized cultures. In contrast, the likes of Greece and Rome or Christendom and Islam knew fully that they were indebted to far older civilizations than their own and thus recognized that an interest in civilizations beyond their own would be to their advantage.

Probably the best reflection of this is in cartography; medieval European and Islamic maps attempt to show the whole world in as much detail as possible, while contemporary Chinese world maps show the non-Chinese world as a few blobs jutting out of China.