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You can say this about any POD further back than a few decades that alters the fortunes of any country that has even a moderate influence on international events. Granted, anything altering China's fortunes will produce much larger butterflies than average.
Absolutely. My paternal grandparents met because of the precise way WWII shaped up, as did many other people's immediate ancestors.
Yes, although it's not just big things like that - even assuming your grandparents still managed to meet and get married, a few seconds difference in the time of conception of their offspring is going to lead to quite genetically different individuals.
So in this example, simple things like relative abundance or scarcity of silk sheets/pyjamas, romantic dinners at Chinese restaurants, etc., etc., would also have big big effects.
That is an egregious example of the continuing irrelevance of the old media.
http://www.theonion.com/article/chinese-journalists-bemoan-decline-of-traditional--36725
all 4 of my grandparents met after the war, but their lives were shaped by the war.
Actually my folks kinda touched the entire war between them
Paternal grandfather: Technician on a destroyer or destroyer escort in the Pacific theater
Paternal grandmother: uniformed Navy mechanic repairing aircraft engines in the states (she had some interesting stories about the way those early servicewomen lived, and there was a running joke that at the end of the war she outranked my grandfather).
Maternal grandfather: engineer with the 9th Army
Maternal grandmother: civilian nurse in Boston
you know, I wonder if their journals are anywhere I could get my hands on them. Between the 4, they were in the vicinity of a lot of history during that time.
Yeah, but if you go that far down the rabbit hole you can't talk about anything hypothetical, and the realisation of that would be too traumatic for the history forum. We can at least keep it to whether the same pool of genetic material is being drawn from, and treat it as if the little differences even out, because the alternative is confronting the pointlessness of all we debate.
I'm unsure - I think it's an important point to bear in mind when thinking about any alternate history, as it emphasizes that any change is going to lead to a world which is very unfamiliar, in terms of both the big and the little things.
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yes, but any significant event is going to make EVERYTHING unfamiliar.
Qing survival means no Martin Luther King. It means no FDR. It means no Soviet Union. It means no atomic bomb, or ipod, or the internationalization of tabasco sauce. It means no me and you and it means no collapsible umbrellas. It could result in alien invasions, the resurrection of punk rock as a serious genre, and the continued dominance of analog phone systems.
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No... The birth the same people doesn't happen because every person is a statistical miracle, one possible genetic combination out of tens of millions of possibilities. However things like collapsible umbrellas aren't statistical miracles. They aren't invented by the same person in the same time and place but they are probably still invented.
Riddikkulous.
History is not shaped by whether you or me existed. Or even MLK. The forces that shape history come from the social structure and the material basis of a society and are channeled by the cultural superstructure that the society uses to interprete and negotiate class differences.
(Okay this is perhaps a tad too Marxist.
But Marxists are right about quite a few things in history.)Of course on the end individuals make decisions and they sometimes decide this way, sometimes that way. Yet for the overall course of events individual decisions, and the individuals making them, are only pebbles in a riverbed. The river will flow downhill regardless of how they are arranged. Maybe one or two individuals in a generation are not pebbles but boulders and the riverbed actually takes a certain path because of them. But even they can't make the river flow uphill.
Besides. Alternate history speculation is pointless if you assume history is just a chaotic mess without overarching laws or structures. Why bother in the first place if you think it is.
Just leave individuals born after a "point of divergence" out of your scenario. Or invent new individuals if that's necessary. Base them on known characters if the story really needs the individual touch.
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What for? To prove that something that didn't happen is what would have happened?
Agree mostly. Would only hazard the statement that the Taiping rebellion in this timeline may not even have taken place, at the least not in the explicitly anti-Manchu way that it did - the social dislocations of the First Opium War and the ensuing opium epidemics especially in the south-east are missing, which - assuming no coincidentally similar breakdown of administration - already drastically reduces the relative appeal of the various bandit groups to the local populace vis-a-vis the state authority. Crucially matters though what exactly changes: Is the examination system adapted to allow for the growing class of would-be elites to join officialdom, or are they still frustrated by the notoriously hard exams? Would a strong Qing state allow for the proselytising of British and other missionaries inside its borders? What about the extraterritoriality of the Treaty of Nanjing and what that implies for the power of the Qing state versus the foreigners to protect the locals - since, in our timeline, Christian converts were increasingly protected by their churches and even ambassadors to the point where the local Qing officials learned not to try and bother about their transgressions? Would western modes of thought and ideology still hold the same power that they did IRL if the traditional Qing court cosmology, rhetorical though as it may have been meant to be, did not appear to break down as the foreigners began to dominate the Qing, again especially in the southeast - the later heartland of the Taiping, if the apparent link between the Confucianism of the emperor and the natural harmony of the Chinese state did not break? Would late-Qing Han racial nationalism still emerge among the student and intellectual classes if the relative power of the Manchu-ruled Qing state was maintained - indeed, why should it if the western belief systems were shown to be inferior to the culturalism of the Qing intellectuals by virtue of the successful defense of the Qing state against the foreigners (again, emphasising the maintenance of traditional cosmology)? What happens to Japan as one of the key tributary states - if the traditional order is not inverted through successful Meiji and unsuccessful Tongzhi/etc. reforms, what happens instead? Going beyond the 60s - what happens to the historical attempts to reform - Tongzhi, Guofan, Hongzhang, Youwei, Qichao, Guangxu? What has so drastically shifted the balance of power at the court in favour of the reformers long before any apparent need for change was there? What form does the impetus to reform takes is imho also crucially important - does it come from the west or is it somehow internally generated? Even ignoring the impact of the west for a moment, though, which imho to some degree merely revealed how kaputt the state really was - what happens to the disconnection between local and central government, to the inefficient and outdated taxation system that far too heavily relied on overtaxed peasantry and unregulated and unpaid tax agents? What happens to the military structure of the state - does the decentralisation and personalisation of army generalship resulting from the Taiping, Nian, Dungan, and Panthay rebellions, as well as from the various Opium Wars, still take place - presumably not, but if not, what else leads to military reform?
As plenty of others have said - far too many butterflies.
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It's fascinating stuff. If you can stand the cruelty and (during 19th century) general depravity of everything that's not part of intellectual life under the Qing.