China Takes Over the World

ALL People's Republic of China.

"When China wakes up, the world will shake."

— Napoléon Bonaparte (in 1817)

Both the younger and older sister trope to Japan Takes Over the World, China Takes Over The World is when a future version of China, these days usually the People's Republic of China, becomes a major military and economic power rivaling, if not exceeding, the United States. It may also be one of the major powers backing or participating in a Third World War. Combining the Yellow Peril and the 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.

This trope has existed in one form or another since antiquity, and ironically originated to some degree with the Chinese, who still refer to "Zhongguo", the "Central State." From the Zhou Dynasty onwards the major Chinese governments claimed to possess the Mandate of Heaven, in essence claiming their government was divinely inspired to rule as a just sovereign over the world. Even outright revolution and the collapse of the last government would only disrupt this to some degree, since a government that could be overthrown obviously no longer held the Mandate of Heaven and that meant someone else could receive it. But in practice, much of this "rule" was indirect through this or that Voluntary Vassal or Puppet King, with the Chinese Empire alternatively acting as an aggressive conqueror, dutiful administrator, or "fatherly" patron for foreign rulers. And even then there were stark limits to even indirect rule, with China being unable to exert its influence over most of the planet (or even most of Eurasia) and semi-regularly being challenged by outsiders, most commonly steppe nomads who sometimes formed Chinese Dynasties of their own by conquering it but who more commonly struggled indecisively with the lowland Chinese to either avoid being subjugated, subjugate China, or hold on to what parts of China they had already conquered.

However, this trope's recognizable and adversarial take REALLY starts in the 19th century, when China's century-old dominance was upended by the emergence of European powers. The Europeans had spent the 15th to the 19th centuries conquering increasingly larger parts of the planet, but were still individually small compared to a China that they were heavily tied to economically and held in a mixture of condescension and fear. The feeling was mutual, with the Ming and Qing dynasties treating the Europeans as uppity barbarians with some clever and even formidable tools but who did not know their place within the celestial order. Add in some sparks and opium later, and you have those Europeans with powerful concessions but newfound fear of Chinese hostility, and a tottering Qing dynasty trying to simultaneously get revenge by modernizing while soothing itself with memories of the ancestral claim to heavenly rule while dealing with angry subjects. Fears over mass immigration of Asians led to racist and xenophobic political actions by governments in Europe, Oceania and North America. It actually predates not only the People's Republic of China (which won the Chinese Civil War in 1949) but also the fall of the Empire Of the Qing (in 1911). Chinese military power and global influence has risen and fallen for centuries, but it's always remained among the most populous countries on earth, with a long tradition of scholarship and invention, making it a very realistic candidate for superpower status. While the explicit dream of global rulership by virtue of the Mandate of Heaven collapsed with the growth of modern Chinese nationalism and the removal of the last Imperial Dynasty in 1911, it remains a cultural touchstone with great power.

The People's Republic of China began to focus on export-driven growth (and thus gained economic influence in the world) under the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping, but it wasn't until The '90s 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 a position of genuine global influence. China's economy has grown from a very weak position in the 1980's to being one of the world's biggest, and its military and diplomatic positions have grown at a similarly rapid clip.

These rapid political changes have made speculative plots about China as a global power (possibly a global villain) have become increasingly appealing, as the nation's power in Real Life has grown. Though The New Russia is still often used as a source of plots and characters (the connections between the two nations sometimes being mentioned). Interestingly, the opposite affect has also proven true, as studios have sometimes proven reluctant to cast China as the villain, because China is a growing market for movies, and they don't want to risk their box office returns.

Sub-Trope of Take Over the World. See also America Takes Over the World, Russia Takes Over the World and Japan Takes Over the World.

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Examples

Red and Nasty (1949-79 Red China) examples

Fan Works

• Rocketship Voyager is a Star Trek: Voyager fanfic written In the Style of a 1950's sci-fi magazine pulp. In a nod to Heinlein's fondness for this trope, a Red Shirt is listed as coming from the "Autonomous Region of Australia, People's Republic of Greater China."

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 eponymous 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). The original novel made this explicitly a Red Chinese plot, SPECTRE having not yet been created.
  • 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, allied with him in a plot to start World War III between Russia and America. The film is set in Japan but it is not them, as Japanese Secret Service helps Bond foil the plot. And since YOLT was filmed in the 1960s, before Banned in China was a factor, they are probably not North Koreans.
  • The Man with the Golden Gun is a minor example; the eponymous 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).
• In Sixth Column, also by Robert A. Heinlein, the PanAsians have conquered all of North America, leaving only one small secret military outpost to try and start a guerrilla counter-insurgency.
  • A theme of Heinlein's; the same idea appears in Tunnel in the Sky (Australia has been conquered, the local population deported to New Zealand so they can fill the country with their own population) and is mentioned in Starship Troopers.
• 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.

Live-Action TV

• Whodunnit? (UK): The episode "Future Imperfect" was set in the year 2076 and had China ruling the UK (and, by implication, the rest of the world).
• An episode of Star Trek: The Original Series "The Omega Glory," has Captain Kirk visiting a mirror image of earth where the Enterprise crew discover "savages" which are first thought to be Native Americans, but turn out to be the American people who lost the war to "The Kohms," their name for the victorious Chinese Communists.

Red and Rich (1979+ To Get Rich Is Glorious) 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!" The ad was brought back for the 2012 election.
• 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

• Possibly as a deliberate subversion of the early years of the Bond series, Tomorrow Never Dies has China almost enter a war with the United Kingdom... but only because of the actions of a rogue media mogul who knows that such a war would be good for ratings.
• Red Dawn (2012) was set to replace the original's Reds With Rockets with these guys, but Executive Meddling caused the villains to become North Koreans with Nodongs. The movie does mention that it was still a joint effort. North Korea attacks the northwest, while China took on California and Russia attacked the east coast.
• Star Trek: First Contact refers to the Eastern Coalition or ECON, one of the factions in the Third World War (and who Cochrane originally thinks the Borg's attack comes from) which is said to be a version of this in the Star Trek Expanded Universe, although it's not detailed in the film itself.
• The mockumentary Ha Ha Ha America predicts China superseding the United States.
• Ghosts With Shit Jobs is a mockumentary set in 2040 which predicts that the U.S. and Canada will become borderline Third World Countries which the wealthy Chinese outsource their menial occupations to.
• Dragon Day (2012). China recalls all its unpaid debt from the United States; when they refuse to pay, the Chinese launch a cyber attack on the United States.
• In Looper, China is presented as a prime destination for ex-pats. Meanwhile, the US is heavily implied to be suffering from rampant crime and poverty in 2044.

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 Evil Plans 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 plan 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 sites 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 William R. Forstchen's One Second After (about an EMP terror attack sending the United States into a New Dark Age) China is one of the few nations to survive the titular apocalypse unscathed (comparatively, Japan and Russia got hit almost as hard as the United States). The Chinese take over the Pacific Coast at the end of the novel, and are actually welcomed as heroes because they bring much needed food and medical supplies. Mexico is threatened by the Chinese military buildup in California, leading to rivalry.
• 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 rein 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.
• The Peripheral: Played with. In Flynne's time, there are a few hints that China is now the dominant world superpower, such as the prevalence of crappy Chinese cardboard cars, while in the 22nd century it's noted that China was well-prepared for the jackpot, and is now advanced almost to the level of a Higher-Tech Species — it's believed that Chinese technology is responsible for the series' Time Travel mechanics, and even Ainsley Lowbeer, who is capable of using London's Nanomachines to give herself what amounts to Reality Warper powers and borderline omniscience, admits that she is baffled by the country's tech.
• 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.
• Averted and examined in World War Z. The Chinese doctor's story in the beginning notes that, for all of China's pretensions of being the up-and-coming superpower before the Zombie War, there remained vast swaths of the country that were still essentially Third World, with people living as subsistence farmers with mostly 19th century technology. China winds up taking a brutal pasting as both the origin of the zombie outbreak and as one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, suffering a Humiliation Conga that culminates in a civil war. Even ten years after the war, only the coastal areas are recovering, with inland cities like Chongqing still mostly uninhabited and laying in ruins and Tibet having successfully broken away at some point during the chaos.

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 five 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.
• In the The Office episode "China", Michael gets paranoid and thinks China will take over America one day. Oscar calls him out on it, but unfortunately makes a goof that causes everybody to gang up on him.
• Joked about in 10 O'Clock Live where Henning Wehn kept insisting that Europe must unite (under German leadership) to fight against China.
• In Madam Secretary, Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Ming is a recurring antagonist and one of the few foreign diplomats who comes close to matching Liz McCord for guile. He once references this trope directly in season 2 when Liz asks him if he was responsible for the cyberattack against Air Force One. He replies with a completely straight face that China has no need to stoop to such measures because eventually they'll own enough of the US national debt to repossess America.

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").
• In Trinity, China becomes the leading economic and military superpower due to its vast industrial capacity and the goodwill generated when they drove off the increasingly ax-crazy Aberrants by threatening to nuke them out of existence. Even space travel is largely dependent on the Chinese with the majority of starships manufactured by them.
• In Infinity, China unifies most of the East Asian countries to become Yu Jing, one of the largest superpowers on future Earth.

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. On the other hand, it could also be subverted by the player depending on how the Strike Force missions play out among other things.
• 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.
• In ARMA III, the main antagonist is CSAT (Canton-Protocol Strategic Alliance Treaty), a military and economical alliance led by China and Iran, who have risen in power and prominance while NATO and the United States are on decline.
• People's General (1998), a game in the Panzer General series, is set in hypothetical 2000-2004, where China tries to establish control over the majority of Asia after successful invasion of Taiwan and provokes a war against Russia and the US.
• The Project I.G.I. sequel, Covert Strike, has it's Big Bad, General Wu Xing, a rogue Chinese official who's behind the theft of an EMP device and intending to take over the western world with it. Said game was literally Banned in China (albeit six months after it's release) after the revelation, despite the game stating that Wu Xing is a rogue official and the actual Chinese government isn't involved in the terrorist plot.
• 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. It then (per the Fallout Bible) annexes neighboring Asian states and the Russian Far East before launching an invasion of Alaska, setting the stage for an 11-year conventional war (which the Chinese lost) and eventually a climactic nuclear war between the Commie Reds in China and the Raygun Gothic USA.
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • Deus Ex features China as the only remaining autonomous nation in the world, having abandoned the UN at the time the latter 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.
  • Even by the time of the prequel 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.
• In Capcom's Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, China didn't so much take over the world, as it became the United Nations, such that the UN's blue logo is now red. All by sheer manpower, as China took advantage of the "Datacide" (silicon eating microbes eating digital electronics worldwide, basically setting back technology by a century) to claim rule. And then the UN invaded the United States, and all hell broke loose.
  • Subverted and then later inverted in the original Steel Battalion, where, while China stand-in Hai Shi Dao was an antagonist in the first game, Steel Battalion: Line of Contact recasts Hai Shi Dao fighters as patriots battling a hostile US-backed Pacific Rim Force.
• Waking Mars: The background of the game is that the US retreated from space due to expense and whatnot. This left China as the winner of the space race and the first country to put someone on Mars as well as discover extraterrestrial life.
• Wanted: Dead: The story takes place in an Alternate History where China was victorious in a war against America and NATO, and Chinese and Russian Mega-Corps promptly took over the world, turning Hong Kong into a Dystopia where Mega-Corps rule.

Web Original

• Parodied by The Onion in one article, where the publisher sells the bankrupt newspaper to a Chinese corporation.
  • And the aftermath.
• That is the premise of the future history timeline 当中国统治世界 (When China Rules The World). It can be read here and here.

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!"
• The South Park episode "Band in China" is one big Take That! towards companies such as Disney and the NBA for allowing the Chinese government to influence their business practices as well as ignoring the government's abuse of its citizens all in the name of entering the country's market for profit. Unsurprisingly, the episode got the show Banned in China.

Religion

• Some religious circles interpret Revelation 9:16 and 16:12^note "And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them." and "And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared.", respectively, in the King James Version as referring to China.

Real Life

• American Factory is a documentary that is essentially a real-life Gung Ho, but the factory is Chinese and there's no happy ending. A Chinese billionaire opens a factory in a Rust Belt town and brings much-needed jobs, and the film chronicles the disconnect between Chinese industry and American labor. Local workers are overwhelmed by the brutal working conditions, low pay and lack of benefits. The owner is disappointed by the perceived fragility and selfishness of the Americans, and we get many contrasts to the military precision of Chinese workers who toil under even worse conditions. The ultimate implication is that Americans will be unable to compete as manufacturing becomes increasingly sinicized, to the detriment of all.

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.
• The bizarre religious film The Mystical Laws features the "Republic of East Asia", whose government gets overthrown in a military coup by Hollywood Atheist Tathagata Killer, who promptly re-forges them into the thinly-veiled Godom Empire, crowns himself Emperor and leads them in a campaign to Take Over the World and purge all religion from society.

Comic Books

• The golden-age comic book Power Nelson was set in the then-future of 1982, a post-apocalyptic world dominated by China.

Film

• A Freeze-Frame Bonus in The Book of Eli provides a hint as to what caused the destruction of the US; one of the maps show North Korea encompassing a third of China. Which doesn't really make sense considering that North Korea is to China what a fox would be to a tiger considering the poor state of its military.

Literature

• H. G. Wells' 1907 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 guerrilla army using ornithopters.
• 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.
• Jack London's The Unparalleled Invasion has a slow (and very racist — it is a perfect example of the Yellow Peril concept, though not of the trope) version: a modernised Imperial China (it was written in 1910, literally a year before the Qing fell) expanding by having its growing population constantly move into bordering regions. Outnumber the natives, officially annex the place, start moving into the new bordering regions... ultimately, they're stopped by an international coalition using biological warfare to exterminate the Chinese population (the Unparalleled Invasion the title references). This is portrayed as a good thing.
• Another early example appeared in the 1928 novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan, which featured a certain Buck Rogers awaking in the 25th century in an America ruled by "Hans" and "Mongolians." The bad guys were the Han Airlords, 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 Buck Rogers comic strip begins the same way, and is just embarrassingly Yellow Peril themed for a long while. However, it eventually redeems itself (somewhat) by ending the war peacefully. Buck and Wilma infiltrate the enemy capital, where they meet the Mongol leader and are startled to discover he is a very nice guy, who had naively left the running of his empire to corrupt subordinates, while he puttered about with scientific studies. Upon learning how tyrannical their rule has been, he releases North America from the empire. He and the heroes part in friendship, Wilma even giving him a kiss on the cheek. From then on, the strip quickly gets away from the Yellow Peril theme entirely, and pits Buck and his allies against space aliens, Atlanteans, and stuff like that there (as well as perpetual no-goodnik Killer Kane, who is an American, just a rotten one).
• H. P. Lovecraft's stories:
  • "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.
  • "Nyarlathotep" shows a future resembling a Zombie Apocalypse with "yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments" instead of zombies.
  • In "He", a visitor is given a glimpse of a hellish future New York: " the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aërial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen." This would likely be considered very racist by even the most conservative people today.
• The Chung Kuo series of science fiction novels by David Wingrove are set in a world-spanning Chinese empire
• In The Rithmatist, Korea has taken over Europe for no other reason then the fact that Brandon Sanderson is a fan of Korean history and thought it would be cool. Unrealistic in real-life considering Korea has an economy of 1.2 trillion dollars and a military which while certainly mighty would be hardly sufficient to occupy anything larger than North Korea. Plus, Korea historically was never known for being that strong unless you count the 3 ancient kingdoms which were all dwarfed by China and quickly lost the ability to subjugate Japan as well.
• Attempted in The Turner Diaries. When the Organization launches its global race war, China invades and annexes all the Soviet Union's territory east of the Ural Mountains. When they try taking European Russia as well, the Organization launches a total carpet bombing of their territory with chemical, biological, and radiological weapons, turning Asia into a toxic wasteland full of dangerous Mutants.
• Digitesque: Apparently. The series takes place somewhere on the west coast of the United States, but everyone uses Asian utensils, and the writing (which no one can read) has both English and Chinese.
• In The Dinosaur Lords, among the Creators of Paradise few if any were Asian given the depictions of each individual Creator. However there's evidence that they were at least partially Chinese in culture: the "holy language" that the Creators used is Chinese as the China expy of Paradise is the nation famous for their everyday language being the same as the Creators, the Book of Law that all nations follow uses Celestial hierarchy and Taoist beliefs as the focus of morality rather than a Christian-based faith and when one character used their hand to draw the holy symbol in the air, the symbol depicted was the Yin-Yang. The Grey Angels, deadly entities created by the Creators even mention Taoism by name.
• Legend Series: China is mentioned to be one of the world's three superpowers, alongside Africa and Antarctica.

Podcast

• The Twilight Histories episode “The Voyage Home” takes place in a world where China rules half the world. Greece rules the other half, due to Alexander the Great not dying young. Though this is averted in the main timeline, where China has collapsed into civil war.

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.

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.
• Thousand-Week Reich is an Alternate-History Nazi Victory scenario with an emphasis on delivering realism for that idea. Among other things, this means that China in The '50s is still run by the Kuomintang, as the CCP lost access to outside support after the fall of the USSR and were subsequently defeated in the Chinese Civil War. While the Republic of China is still a corrupt, authoritarian state, it avoids the worst excesses of Mao Zedong's rule and, by the end of the '50s, has started to emerge as a great power. Given that, by that point, Germany is likely fading into irrelevance thanks to chronic mismanagement even in scenarios where it hasn't outright collapsed yet, most American foreign policy planners see China replacing Germany as America's chief geopolitical rival, to the point where they start talking about a Sino-American Cold War, especially in the wake of scandals involving Chinese espionage against the US.

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