oops, bye bye Prussia
but Russia is so big it will take time to get them to concede anything...
but Russia is so big it will take time to get them to concede anything...
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Quing to save the day! Are you going for a White Peace, a victory or a crushing defeat for the Prussians? That is, how much effort are you willing to put into this war?
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Part 27: The Franco-Prussian War: A Bismarckian Nightmare, Conclusion
Even as the war raged on at China's borders, China's interior remained almost entirely unaffected, other than a few refugees pouring in fleeing the Russian invasion. The Emperor did not concern himself with the day to day running of the war, leaving this to his generals. Instead, he focused on executing various reform proposals to improve the education system, a cause that had grown increasingly popular among scholars in recent years as new theories of positivism and functionalism emerged, and general scientific knowledge expanded.
The Chinese Renaissance had cast light on a severe failing of the traditional Chinese examination system - it lacked flexibility. Traditionally, the system worked as thus: Anyone wishing to obtain offices within the Qing government, or gain recognition as a scholar, had to pass one of three exams, divided by difficulty and prestige. Those who passed the most difficult exam, the jinshi, could gain positions in the prestigious ranks of Chinese government and elite society. Those who passed the lesser two exams could gain lesser positions. The precise content of these exams had been drastically altered in the Daoguang and Xianfeng eras, but the basic structure remained unchanged - and a problem began to emerge.
As more and more scientific knowledge was discovered and philosophy and engineering advanced in China, the scope of the exams grew steadily broader. Especially in the highest tier, exam takers were expected to have a deep knowledge of Confucianism, chemistry, biology, medicine, history, engineering, good governance, physics, economics, etc. even as the knowledge in these fields grew complex it was virtually impossible to master all of them. This was fast creating an impossible conundrum - either water the exams down so people could pass, or make them so impossibly hard that the expansion of Chinese scholarship ground to a halt.
The solution was frequently proposed and soon became widely agreed upon - specialize the exams. Under the Emperor's new reforms of the examination system, while all exam takers would still be required to have a basic knowledge of all the important subjects, there would be different exams for those scholars specialized in different fields.
Meanwhile, the war dragged on, as the Empire was caught by surprise - a Russian army had landed in California. The Qing naval command was shocked - the entire Russian Far East was under total blockade. But they had foolishly failed to pay any attention to Russian Alaska, and thus the Russian Alaskan Army had been able to sneak into California. The local Qing forces moved to surround the Russians, but decided not to risk an engagement for now, as the Russians had dug into the California mountains.
Meanwhile in Xinjiang, the conflict continued as tens of thousands of French conscripts were force marched hundreds of miles through occupied Prussia and the unforgiving Russian winter to reinforce the collapsing Russian lines. But despite the endless onslaught of reinforcements, the French armies were crushed again and again.
Spurred on by the horrific numbers of wounded the conflict created, Chinese medical technology continued a steady advance.
And yet another French conscript army was beaten back.
Meanwhile, the Russians had rallied by bringing reinforcements, freed up as the Prussian army ceased to be a threat. They caught General Deng Xiangying in the mountains with only 3000 soldiers, while the rest of the Qing forces were busy fighting the French. But to the shock again of the Russians, the conscript armies of Russia proved incapable of breaking through the defenses of the more experienced Qing forces, especially dug into the mountains as the Chinese were, and the Russian general reluctantly called a retreat as Qing reinforcements threatened to strike them in the rear.
(note the warscore. This is despite almost all of Prussia being occupied, and the Prussian armies annihalated. I've only lost a single battle in this entire war. XD)
The war had ground in to a stalemate. Prussia was almost entirely occupied, though the capital was still holding against a Franco-Russian siege. But China had inflicted an endless series of decisive defeats against both France and Russia, and the Prussians refused any independent surrender. The French and Russians concluded they would have to negotiate a compromise peace with China.
However, the Franco-Russian alliance came to the negotiating table claiming victory, attempting to force a humiliating peace on Prussia. They demanded the Prussian king abdicate leadership of the North German Federation, and that Prussia would lose all lands except a small strip of northeastern Prussia to the North German Federation. The Qing and the besieged Prussian government refused this demand, and resolved to fight on.
And fight the Qing forces did, continuing their endless chain of victories. But the Qing generals were unsure how to force the Russians and French to a more favorable peace - the French and Russians seemed quite unconcerned about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their soldiers, and were very unwilling to accept a white peace when they had almost all of Prussia under occupation. That left the Qing forces two options for forcing them to terms:
1. Invade Russia by land.
2. Find a way to launch a naval offensive.
Neither option was considered very practical - successfully bringing Russia to bear would likely require the Qing to bring their full forces to bear. And the Qing navies lacked any naval bases capable of supplying a fleet's voyage all the way to France, even if they relatively backwards Qing navies could somehow defeat the French fleet. It was a rather humiliating failure to admit, but China had a severe lack of long-distance power projection capabilities.
The Emperor decided to hope that the threat of option #1 would suffice, and announced a new reform - henceforth all fighting-age Chinese adults would be requried to register with the government on a draft list, in case the Qing had to institute mass conscription. However, the Emperor had no interest in actually carrying out such a mass mobilization - the Chinese Empire did not have enough interest in winning the war for such an expensive act as a mass mobilization to be necessary. But hopefully, the threat of it would be enough to make the French more reasonable in negotations.
Meanwhile, China convinced the new Ottoman bourgeoisie dictatorship to accept Chinese protection; the Ottoman elite were impressed by China's military success against Russia, and hoped that by joining the Chinese tributary system they could secure their borders. In exchange, the Ottomans made vague promises of eventually joining the current war effort against Russia, but these promises were never carried out.
Instead, the Turks attempted to use their new status as a Chinese tributary to bully Greece into ceding land, and when things escalated to war and Greece called in Britain, the Turks sent a "tribute" mission to request Chinese intervention, seemingly hoping to repeat Prussia's diplomatic success.
The Emperor instead expelled the Turkish embassy from Beijing, again, infuriated by their arrogance. Though the Ottomans remained a Chinese tributary, and would in the future reopen their embassy.
The Qing won yet another decisive victory, but yet the Franco-Russian alliance still continued their intransigent insistence on total Prussian humiliation. Still, the Emperor had decided it was not worth continuing the war, and the endless chain of Chinese victories would assure that in terms of international prestige, China would not lose much from agreeing to the Franco-Russian demands; Prussia would take the blame for the defeat. Thus, reluctantly, the Qing Emperor signed the treaty, and the Prussian king, besieged in his capital, was forced to follow suit, abdicating rule of the North German Federation.
On the one hand, China had been forced to admit defeat in a war. On the other hand, Chinese armies had performed infinitely better than the humiliatingly defeated Prussians. The international and domestic fallout was significant.
At home, the Emperor became all the more focused on the plan to send Treasure Fleet expeditions to Africa, convinced now that China needed to gain naval bases closer to Europe so that future humilations like this would not occur. He also worked to solidify Qing diplomatic control over Columbia and Egypt, with Qing engineers already proposing the possibility of using canals to project Qing power against the European barbarians. It also helped permanently end any talk that the Qing were Western puppets, what with the fact that the Qing had just led the way to an endless series of military victories over the Western powers of Russia and France. The Emperor also announced plans for a further expansion of the Qing military, to better counter the vast European conscript armies.
The first action of the new Qing treasure fleets was to establish a military outpost on the island of Shumshu, a sparsely inhabited island near Japan.
Abroad, in Europe, the barbarians gained renewed respect for China, and Prussia and the North German Federation's stock fell in the eyes of the international community.
China was now widely seen as the greatest of the Great Powers, and the North German Federation as the weakest of them.
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Looks like Germany won't be forming anytime soon, although the NGF is so naturally strong they should be able to bounce back from that. Releasing Prussia from the NGF is really weird.
Your China, on the other hand, will be extremely hard to beat. What was your military tech at compared to Russia and France in that war?
Your China, on the other hand, will be extremely hard to beat. What was your military tech at compared to Russia and France in that war?
Yep. The Papal States added on that wargoal, for whatever reason. And France wouldn't accept a peace deal without it. It took me a few days to think of a roleplaying justification for that. XD
Hm, with only Ostpreussen being torn away from the NGF I doubt that they will remain indepentent for too long.
Especially since NGF still has cores on it, I don't know why the Papal States AI even bothered.
I already own Vladivostok, which doesn't have that name, because the Peking Convention never fired. Russia only gets to steal Outer Manchuria for free if they sphere Manchuria. The US sphered Manchuria instead in this game.
And as for Alaska, because I lost the war. =P I couldn't even get a white peace, let alone demanding terms. Turning that around would have required a full scale invasion of Russia, at the very least.
Ah well, at least now in the wake of a major war with a unsatisfying conclusion China's colonizing Africa feels more like a reasoned response to world events and less like an ahistorical gaming of the system.
On the plus side, now you can start focusing more on military techs now that you can colonize Africa. Then you can REALLY mop the floor with the Russians. Hmm, perhaps once you've sent out treasure ships, you can pay the Tsar a visit? Oh, he doesn't have to get up, you can send your army to him. Discuss the future of Alaska and maybe convince him to lay off those poor defenseless Central Asian states/future tributaries.
I can't colonize anything in Africa yet, where I am in the game. =P Machine guns don't become available until 1870.
The one island Shumshu had a higher life rating, and thus I could colonize it earlier.
Part 28: The Second Great Chinese Treasure Fleet
Admiral Zhao Linge had been put in charge of the Qing treasure fleet project, with the entire Qing transport flotilla having been re-purposed for the project. Zhao sought out all available knowledge on Africa, especially taking advantage of trade ties with Egypt and the Ottomans to seek Islamic literature on the subject. There was also a good deal of Western literature on the subject, but considering that the racist West reportedly viewed the varied peoples of sub-Saharan Africa as either demons or animals depending on the source, Zhao Linge was disinclined to trust any Western sources. He knew little about Africa, but he was fairly confident its inhabitants weren't supernatural creatures from the depths of a Christian cultist's vision of hell. He thus relied almost entirely on Islamic accounts. He also studied the legendary exploits of Zheng He in great detail, drawing on them for inspiration; they were some of the only detailed Chinese writings that covered Africa.
What the research made clear was that Africa was a continent of many nations and countless cultures, which would require a great deal of finesse and a great number of translators to properly bring into the tianxia. Many Africans had learned European tongues over the last few hundred years, but Zhao Linge had no intention of introducing China to the Africans in such a barbaric tongue. Zhao Linge did his best to get ahold of translators and guides who could help interact with the natives; Egypt was of great help in this endeavor, as they were next-door neighbors with several subsaharan African nations, and ruled over Sudan. However, Zhao knew it would not be enough, and he would have to hire African guides upon arrival.
Importantly for the Qing, Africa promised great untapped wealth, untouched by either the barbarian Europeans or the natives. The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa were too technologically behind China to have fully exploited the continent's rich farmlands and minerals, and the Europeans had largely cared only for the slave trade. Large parts of the continent's economy was indeed in a state of total collapse in many ways - cheap European manufactured goods had driven African artisans out of business en masse, and centuries of European exploitation of Africa for slaves had left the African nations too heavily dependent on slave exports; thus causing massive economic hardship once the Europeans finally outlawed the barbaric practice. By inducing the nations of Africa to join the tianxia and sharing modern Chinese technology with them, China could obtain vast amounts of resources from them in trade - which would help fuel the slow, fitful Chinese Industrial Revolution.
The strategic implications were also significant - by establishing a strong Chinese presence in Africa, China could undermine the European dominance of global trade networks, and obtain naval bases within striking distance of the European mainland. And by sharing Chinese weapons technology with new African tributaries, the Qing would gain vast new armies which might help tip the scales in Qing efforts to undermine the global hegemony of the foreign devils.
And of course, China would introduce the glories of Chinese culture to Africa, though that was a relatively minor concern for Zhao Linge or the rest of the Qing military elite.
Columbia, meanwhile, sent tribute to the Qing court at last, offering to join the Chinese tributary network. It was the first truly Western nation to join, a great diplomatic victory for Qing.
And in Europe, the Turks fought a losing battle against a British-led coalition in their reckless attempt to reclaim Greece.
Zhao Linge, meanwhile, had decided that the ideal target for a Qing show of force would be against the Islamic Caliphate of Sokoto. The Qing would journey to Africa, march across the continent to show off the splendor of Qing, and demand Sokoto become a tributary. If they refused, the Qing would capture a military base from them, as preparation for future expansion. As Sokoto was one of the strongest and largest sub-Saharan powers, defeating them would encourage other African nations to join the tianxia without resistance, or so Zhao hoped. And so, as the Emperor moved to prepare propaganda to justify the action, Admiral Zhao Linge departed. The Ottoman embassy in Beijing was allowed to reopen, and several editorials were published in China's state presses, which declared that the Sokoto Caliphate was run by dangerous cultists who laughed at the religious leadership of the Ottoman Caliph, who was a righteous tributary of China. (the Caliphate had become politically powerless after the anarcho-liberal coup in Istanbul, but he at least in theory was still the religious leader of the entire Islamic world, and the Chinese were more than happy to exploit this)
The international community soon put two and two together and realized what the Chinese press propaganda portended, but it was successful in smearing Sokoto so other nations were less likely to protest.
Meanwhile, construction of a Qing administration on Shumshu was completed.
Meanwhile, Admiral Zhao's glorious treasure fleet finally arrived off the shores of Africa, and Mingzhu Xingde took charge of a landing party. It was the beginning of what Chinese historians would refer to as the great Long March, a nearly four thousand mile march whose heroic and seemingly impossible exploits would go on to become Chinese legend.
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