One of my colleagues believes that in order for Asian countries to be able to colonialism, it is necessary that the Chinese Empire of Qin Shi Huang does not exist - and as a result, more ethnic groups live in the Han territory.
Kyushu was never independent after the Yamato conquest, unless you're counting Ryukyu as well.
I mean Chinese groups already did plenty colonization, modern southern China is far from the heartland of Zhou, Qin, and Han, Chinese merchant diasporas spread across Indonesia and Southeast Asia, Chinese cultural exports were feed directly into the veins of states in modern day Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, etc...
Well, by the way, another colleague points out that Irredentian China is too focused on expansion into the interior of the continent, while the abbreviated version will be more focused on the sea.
As for Siberia .... no - at that time Muscovy was the only one who needed Siberia. China has no need to go there, because their northern territories are not very densely populated anyway. And of course it makes no sense for Japan to go to Kamchatka.
Only Bengal really. As Monter notes, Kyushu stayed Japanese once it had become Japanese, and as for Guangdong, already the Han dynasty advanced that much south. And while there were periods of Chinese fragmentation, I think that has been greatly overestimated in the popular mind. And especially the South often was an area to withdraw to for Chinese dynasties when the North fragmented or was overrun. It was just that until the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (when exactly that happened and masses of people fled south), or even until the Tang Dynasty, the South was not well populated, well developed, or even well under control, with Chinese rules often only extending only to the few cities and the roads between them, and the various hill tribes being independent.
Much of Russia itself is on the Eurasian steppe, or is only marginally more productive than it while using European cultivation systems and food packages. The same is not true of China; the centers of agriculture in China were far from the steppe, and the hugely productive rice cultivation system in particular was difficult to transplant.
Every single one in which everything is different except fucking South America, but not like in an understandable way in a well France is the world hegemon but everything is the same" and also in every single one in which the US somehow manages to annex Mexico and make it into states two years after it being invaded.
I mean, I'm pretty sure they'd have to. Leather and fur are key materials for a steppe herder, and they (and their decendents) have controlled China before.
War focus as a whole bore me. I prefer to see the social and cultural and economic effects of alternate history. I think that dystopian or overly chaotic and violent worlds are also boring as a result, unless they balance the destruction with a lot of development somewhere else.
There is a Timeline "Reign to Glory" (on the Russian wiki). The author, of course, justified everything well, but the only remarkable detail is the Italian Confederation, led by the Pope. Everything else is the banality of constitutional monarchies.
If one thinks of what the Russians did in Inner Asia was colonization it is hard to describe the Qing/Manchu efforts as something different.
Economically, Central Asia was knee-capped by oceanic trade routes opening up (think of withering inland towns bypassed by interstates, then scale it up a lot).
Flint holds to the 'No Way To Contain The Anglo Settlement' school of thought. He simply disrupts what that means politically (Cherokees and demi-Cherokees running a fair sized independent polity rather than getting shoved off further into the margins).
