China Takes Over the World

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Needless to say, this image was not made in China.

Both the younger and older sister trope to Japan Takes Over the World, China Takes Over the World is when the People's Republic of China, in the future of Speculative Fiction, becomes a major military and economic power rivalling, if not exceeding, the United States and becomes one of the major powers in any third world (or a backer in a Third World) conflict. Combining Yellow Peril and Red Scare, the PRC and its military assets provide a useful foil for the United States and the European Union, be it on the way international trade swings or on issues such as a certain island.

The People's Republic of China began to focus on export-driven growth (and thus gain economic influence in the world) under the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, but it wasn't until The Nineties that it began to assert itself as a world power. Since the mid-to-late 2000s, this trope has become firmly established as China in Real Life grew into its present position, though The New Russia is still often used a source of plots and characters (the connections between the two nations sometimes being mentioned).

While this trope is not quite discredited yet, it might have a short life expectancy. Nowadays, the Chinese are a fertile market for Western media. To get their goods to Chinese consumers, American media companies have to get approval from government gatekeepers, who have the power to censor works that they find inappropriate. As such, media companies must keep a friendly relationship with the Chinese government and avoid creating or distributing works that portray the Chinese negatively. This dynamic is exemplified in the production of the Red Dawn remake, which changed its villains from the Chinese military to the North Korean military to avoid offending the Chinese government.

Sub-Trope of Take Over the World. See also America Takes Over the World.

Examples of China Takes Over the World include:

Red and Nasty (1949-79 Red China) examples

Film

  • There was a So Bad It's Good movie in the 1960s called Battle Beneath The Earth with Red Chinese forces using a high-tech laser system to dig tunnels under the Pacific Ocean to sneak entire armies through and invade the United States from within.
  • In the early James Bond films, there were at least three implicit attempts by supervillains to wreak havoc that were being directed from China.
    • In Dr. No, the titular Big Bad is in the employ of SPECTRE to topple American rockets, but it is implied that they were hired by the Chinese (namely by the number of Chinese running around in his base - No is part Chinese, but there is no obvious reason why that should be relevant)
    • Goldfinger is more explicit as the Reds are in uniforms and Bond identifies a nuclear physicist as being from Red China (Oddjob is from Korea, if North then a Chinese ally)
    • In You Only Live Twice, Diabolical Mastermind Blofeld is seen speaking to two sinister Asian types representing an unidentified government, in a plot to start World War Three between Russia and America. The film is set in Japan but it is not them, as Japanese Secret Service helps Bond foil the plot.
    • The Man with the Golden Gun is a minor example; the titular assassin lives on a luxury island in Chinese waters "rent free" in return for "an occasional favour". His island has been turned into a power plant for a revolutionary solar energy device by a Malaysian conglomerate, but though it's in their territory, the Chinese don't seem to have much involvement in that.

Literature

  • In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress the Chinese have taken over huge tracts of the Pacific (including Australia, New Zealand and Japan), and large sections of what had been Russia. Interestingly, despite this move the Soviet Union is still presented as a major world power in the book.
  • The first chapter of C.M. Kornbluth's novel Not This August has the United States lose to an invading army of Soviet and Chinese forces, who proceed to split up and occupy the country. The rest of the book deals with the resistance movement against them.
  • There's a Kurt Vonnegut story that involves the Chinese people becoming microscopic and spreading across the world as a plague, killing half of the US population.
  • The Philip K. Dick short story "Faith Of Our Fathers" is a particularly bizarre and unsettling riff on this.

Red and Rich (1979+ Red China) examples

Advertising

  • A political ad by a corporate-funded right-wing lobby during the fall 2010 US electoral campaign depicts a history lecture in 2030 Beijing: the professor explains how Americans bankrupted themselves "and now they all work for us!"
  • A 2012 political ad for US Republican Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra has a broken-English-speaking Chinese girl thanking his political opponent for helping the Chinese economy. Its accompanying website —- since taken down due to bad publicity but conveniently archived -— was a chop suey of vaguely Chinese images and Foreign Looking Font use.

Anime and Manga

  • In Mobile Suit Gundam 00, the Human Reform League, one of the three major superpowers in an early-twenty-fourth century Earth, is made up of China, Russia, India, and the ASEAN nations. Although it is strictly a very tight-knit international alliance rather than a single nation, it is heavily implied that China holds the greatest political sway in the HRL.

Film

Literature

  • Black Star Rising by Frederik Pohl had China and India being the major powers after the US and the Soviets nuked each other to smithereens. Hilarity Ensues after aliens arrive, demanding to speak to the US president...and China has to come up with one, since they control North America.
  • Tom Clancy's novel The Bear and the Dragon has the People's Republic of China becoming a significant threat to world peace, building on Xanatos gambits from the previous two "mainstream" novels, Debt of Honor and Executive Orders. Though, part of their becoming a threat was due to drastically downsized armed forces of Russia and the United States.
  • The Seventh Carrier series of novels by Peter Albano has a Red Chinese missile-defense satellite system malfunction (or so they claim) and start laser-blasting anything with a heat signature hot enough to be a ballistic missile launch. Which means jet engines and missiles are useless—they get zapped the instant they get turned on. The characters strongly hint that they think this was some sort of Xanatos Gambit by the Chinese to neutralize everyone else's advanced aircraft and missile systems and level the playing field, but the only attempt to conquer the world that follows this is an alliance of Arab Muslim nations led by Libya declaring war on Japan for some crazy reason. China seems to sit the war out on the sidelines.
  • The basic premise of Maureen F. McHugh's Alternative History novel China Mountain Zhang.
  • Eric L. Harry's 2000 novel Invasion chronicles a, yes, invasion of the US by a rampant Chinese military. This is the final step after the Reds have invaded SE Asia and the Middle East, nuked Tel Aviv, wiped out a combined European fleet in the straits of Gibraltar and destroyed the bulk of the US Navy in a Curb Stomp Battle off Cuba.
  • The plot of Frank Schätzing's 2009 novel Limit takes place in 2025. China is much like today, only more Cyberpunk-ish and competing with the USA over helium-3 mining sides on the moon.
  • In Robert J. Sawyer's WWW Trilogy, the PRC raises the "Great Firewall of China" when it blocks the flow of information on their handling of a pandemic. Apparently dividing the internet into two disconnected halves gives birth to the first artificial intelligence.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's controversial Sixth Column has a "Pan-Asian Alliance", a combination of China and Japan (for some reason). They're stated to have conquered the Soviets and India before conquering the United States (they don't really mention what happened to Europe).
  • Heinlein also mentions in Starship Troopers that the "Terran Federation" arose after the Western nations had their asses handed to them by the "Chinese Hegemony" in a world war. Actually it was specifically stated to be an alliance of both the Western powers and Russia. Echoing mistreatment of POW's by the Japanese during World War II, but also an eerie foreshadowing of Vietnam, a key point of contention was the mishandling of the POW situation. While the Western powers freed Chinese POW's, the Chinese simply didn't bother to release the nearly 100,000 civilian and military prisoners they had taken. The humiliating defeat leads to near-anarchy in the West, which sparks the formation of the "Terran Federation" in which only soldiers have the right to vote, etc. The Feds spend the next full generation gradually recovering from the war and "trading butter for guns" to better prepare for the next one.
  • Chinese are sometimes the villains in Dale Brown books. Sometimes alongside Russians. Standout examples include Fatal Terrain where they nuke Guam and Executive Intent where they have the power-projection needed to amphibiously invade Somalia and Yemen.
  • Played with in the John Wells series by Alex Berenson. In the Ghost War, the renegade general intends to use an illusion of this to purge his enemies in the Standing Committee.
  • In Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card, several powerful nations make a grab for power, starting with Russia (AKA the Second Warsaw Pact). However, after it's revealed that the person running the show is a murdering teenage psychopath, he flees to India where he proceeds to convince them to take over Southeast Asia, while Pakistan handles the Middle East. As it turns out, though, his real plan is to get China to obliterate the overtaxed Indian army and have free reign over Southeast Asia. Russia throws its political support behind China and expands the Warsaw Pact by promising to be more benevolent than the Chinese. The US, no longer being a real superpower, can't do anything beyond... selling new world maps.
  • In Snow Crash, "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" is right up there as one of many national franchises working to get the major market share in the Divided States of America, and "Kongbucks" are still real money, while American dollars are hyper-inflated to the point where people use them for toilet paper.

Live-Action TV

  • In the Dollhouse episode "Epitaph One", set in 2019, China is mentioned as being responsible for at least one case of mass personality-wiping. Though they clearly aren't the only ones. It seems like a global bandwagon, as different groups and governments tried to wipe out each other before they could be wiped, resulting in The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Background material for the Firefly 'verse establishes that America and China took over Earth That Was together.
  • Discussed on Top Gear, when Jeremy and James examine China's growing automobile industry. The conclusion that they arrive at is that, in 5 years time, everyone will be driving a Chinese-made car. When we cut back to the studio for the closing credits, all three hosts have been replaced with Chinese ones, who, in subtitled Mandarin, announce that they will start their domination of the industry by taking over the show.

Tabletop Games

  • In the Transhuman Space RPG setting, China is one of the world superpowers (the leading military power; the EU is the leading technological power; the US comes second at both), and controls a significant chunk of Mars ("Rust China").

Video Games

  • Call of Duty: Black Ops II: The story takes place in 2025 where China and the US are involved in a new Cold War over rare earth minerals (see Real Life below)
  • The PLA is the most powerful out of the military, paramilitary and insurgent forces opposing the BLUFOR in Battlefield 2, and remains so in Project Reality.
  • The PLA is one of the three factions in Command & Conquer: Generals, alongside the USA and Global Liberation Army. (They are, of course, allied with the Americans.) They end up the winners in World War III.
  • The PRC and an "Asian Commonwealth" becomes a major rival power to the United States in the plot of the Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest campaigns.
  • People's General.
  • In Fallout, China ascends economically while the Soviet Union fades to become a second-rate, US-friendly state which presumably implodes with the rest of Europe during a prolonged war in the Middle East, setting the stage for a climactic nuclear war between the Commie Reds in China and the Raygun Gothic USA.
  • Deus Ex features China as the only remaining autonomous nation in the world, having abandoned the UN at the time it started wielding actual political and military power through UNATCO. The USA still claims to be a superpower, but this is pretty obviously not the case.
    • Also, at the time of Deus Ex Human Revolution, China is stated to be the global economic superpower. The largest human augmentation company in the world is based in the Chinese city of Hengsha, a two-tiered city.
  • The ending of Killer7 implies that by the 22nd century, China has succeeded the USA as the world's dominant superpower.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Played with in an episode of American Dad with Klaus telling Steve he needs to be attentive at school because "the Chinese boys pay attention, and they outnumber us 5 to 1. The Red Dragon awakens!"

Religion

Non-PRC or Yellow Peril Examples

Anime and Manga

  • In Code Geass, the Chinese Federation is one of the three major world powers, between the EU and the Holy Britannian Empire in strength. In R2 episode 16, they join up with the United Federation of Nations against Britannia.
    • Interestingly, a throwaway line of dialog in the first season implies that the nation is Communist, but R2 shows that this is primarily because the people in charge are greedy twits.

Literature

  • H.G. Wells' novel The War In The Air is among other things about a Chinese invasion of the United States using zeppelins in the early 1900s, eventually defeated by an American guerilla army using ornithopters.
  • The bad guys in the 1928 novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan (which inspired Buck Rogers) were the Han Airlords, These were Chinese who conquered America using airships in the late 20th century and ruled it for almost 400 years before American rebels defeated them with death rays and rocket guns.
  • The Chung Kuo series of science fiction novels by David Wingrove are set in a world-spanning Chinese empire
  • H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Shadow Out of Time" posits an Asian empire that takes the place of America as the world's one super-power some time in the future. A warning Time Travel tale titled "Him" ends with the protagonist witnessing an America primarily inhabited by Asiatics.
  • An early example comes from the 1907 dystopian novel The Lord of the World, in which the Chinese and Japanese monarchies have united into "The Empire" and conquered all of continental Asia and Australasia, and are poising to annex Europe to their empire. Ironically this is viewed as a good thing by the sympathetic characters of the story, the persecuted Catholic Church, as it will free them from domination by the socialist forces in control of Western civilization.

Video Games

  • Home Front - which posits a scenario where North Korea somehow conquers most of East Asia and invades the USA. The villain was originally to be China, but due to the possible backlash from China's Ministry of Culture and the economic interdependence between the USA and China that made the Chinese "not that scary", they cast the DPRK instead as the villain and an Expy for the PRC.
    • This is a common phenomenon in video games - the Chinese are unlikely to buy games where they're the villains, while the North Koreans are just plain unlikely to buy video games.
  • Background lore for Sword of the Stars mentions that SolForce traditions partially draw on Chinese ones, suggesting that China becomes pretty damn influential.
  • Rise of Nations: You can accomplish this by playing as China in the basic campaign mode.

Web Comics

  • Fansadox series The Great Invasion.
  • Earth is not ruled by the Chinese of Quantum Vibe, but they do rule Mars (or Huǒxīng as they call it).

Tabletop Games

  • The GURPS setting "Ming-3" is an alternate timeline in which the Ming Dynasty conquered most of the world in the 16th century.

Real Life

  • From the Chinese point of view, they did rule the world for much of their history. For centuries, imperial China considered the Emperor to be the de jure ruler of the entire world, with all other sovereigns considered either vassals or rebels. Not that they were really committed to enforcing this.
  • Mandarin-language instruction is becoming increasingly popular in elementary schools based on the assumption this will happen. A similar thing happened with Japanese in the 1980s.
  • China currently holds a near-monopoly on most and a complete monopoly on some valuable rare earth minerals required in advanced electronics manufacturing.[please verify] Rest of the world is basically China's bitch when it comes to building anything with integrated circuitry. For now, at least, this has also to do with simple cost reasons. Yes, there are rare earths in the USA, but if underpaid Chinese can gather them for much less money, why not? If prices increase, suddenly the old mines become profitable again... A lot of things China can do can also be done in other countries, but for a (slightly) higher price.
    • Rare earth may be China's trump card now, but like porcelain before, all it takes is for someone to invent a substitute and this mineral wealth advantage becomes meaningless.
      • Some preliminary experiments into Organic Technology seem to suggest it might very well be the workaround for the rare earths problem. Not to mention simple recycling measures go a long way.
    • Plus, environmentalist policies often forbid American companies from extracting raw minerals, but allow foreign companies to do so under less stringent regulation. Why? Because the EPA and the US Trade Department have two completely different agendas.
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