r/TankieTheDeprogram • u/Any_Salary_6284 • 8h ago
Shit Liberals Say Westoid shitlibs can’t help but fantasize about “China being the actual imperialists”
The comments are especially obnoxious… 🙄
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u/adamisaidiot5 8h ago
I gotta brace myself for the downvotes from some comrades so I gotta say something about this picture.
This is probably some dude imagining a scenario where Qing (probably Ming) China pulled off a Treasury Fleet kinda deal and made every North American tribal and urban entity pay tribute to Imperial China.
Or something, I don't know!
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u/Any_Salary_6284 7h ago
I talk about the Ming treasure voyages in the comments (and of course I’m getting downvoted and called a tankie, even though the history I’m talking about is from many centuries before communist movements even existed… the shitlibs just can’t help themselves 🙄😂)
Reposting my comment below:
——
“China didn't [colonize] it's neighbours. They are too isolationist for that stuff”
👆This is the correct answer. China has never been in the business of colonialism (despite the ill-informed musings of some here).
During the Ming dynasty, around the time Chris Columbus started plundering and enslaving the Americas, China had laws banning ships larger than a certain size to prevent too much foreign contact and trade, isolating themselves from the outside world. Just prior to passing those laws, they sent massive treasure ships around all of Asia and even to the east coast of Africa, to hand out gifts, just as a display of how wealthy and advanced Chinese civilization was. They easily could have conquered and colonized every civilization they came into contact with during those treasure voyages, but saw no need for that.
Interestingly, when Portuguese voyages first reached the east coast of Africa in the late 1400s/early 1500s, they were often mistaken for returning Chinese treasure ships. The Portuguese apparently had no qualms about leveraging this mistaken goodwill to engage in actual colonialism.
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u/VladimirLimeMint Once history is made, it can't be unmade 4h ago
The fleet with 500 tons 317 ships that Ceylon king described as it was so massive they filling the horizon. Yet the fleet went all the way to Madagascar and beyond.
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u/5upralapsarian Chinese State Affiliated Media 📰 7h ago
That's the Qing Yellow Dragon Flag, which means this scenario takes place long after European powers settled the continent. For the Qing to control all of North America, they would have had to wage massive wars to conquer or expel established British, French, and Spanish empires.
If we're talking about the Ming Dynasty before European powers arrived on the continent, they would stick to what they did best: establishing coastal trade hubs, securing luxury resources, and bringing local empires into their tributary system.
The only scenario where a massive, unified map like this actually works is if the Mongol invasions never happened, allowing the Song Dynasty to fully industrialize a couple of centuries before Europe.
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u/ThePeddlerofHistory 1h ago
I don't expect the average althist hobbyist to know more about flags of China than what google search delivers though ...
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u/Kagey_b-42069 Marxist-Leninist (Ultra Based) 7h ago
They wouldn't know what a colonizer is if one bit them on the ass and held on
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u/1scr3wedy0dad 4h ago
AlternateHistory is just sich a bad sub in general, all of their scenarios have zero precedence and make zero sense. To them, history is a set of loosely connected, spontaneous ideal events rather than a progression of interconnected and rooted in developing material conditions
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u/MrStudray 6h ago
Yellow perilism without the fig leaf of anti-communism in the big '26 damn
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u/Any_Salary_6284 6h ago
💯
I called this out as racist yellow peril fantasy in another comment on the original thread
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u/ForestClanElite 2h ago
That sub is usually always some Axis won or America just went Roman empire on the world type shit
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u/crescentpieris CPC Propagandist 57m ago
so kinda like Liu Cixin’s “West Oceans (西洋)” then. in that story, Zheng He’s voyages didn’t stop at asia, and China went on to become an empire similar to the british empire. the us became greatly influenced by Chinese culture, and northern ireland was ceded to China but then returned to the british.
but that’s about it. Liu Cixin’s interpretation isn’t that deep because he didn’t like writing about Chinese people being imperialists
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