The Qing should be an isolationist country, shunning foreigners.
If we follow history.
However, Qing modernization began in the 1870's. They tried to copy many elements of Japan's Meiji Restoration. The Qing's foreign affairs office was founded in 1863 historically. Also, the Qing, as I have been playing them, have been careful to avoid stepping on Confucian toes in most things. Perth posted summaries; I did some quiet but fairly significant things to ensure that China's Confucian elements would stay loyal. The Self-Strangthening Movement and other modernizing efforts were going on just a little bit after the current game-time.
Empress Dowager Cixi was a conservative with a strong Confucian power base. Meaning that
if she had opted for reform, she might have been able to push it through. Consider the Hundred Days' Reforms, for example. Again, if Cixi had been reform minded, as I am portraying her, China's fate might have been different. The most radical anti-foreign sentiment doesn't come until the later 1890's and the early 1900's, as even more Unequal Treaties are signed, and China suffers a string of military defeats.
China had large, powerful reform elements. The next emperor after Tiongzhi was a reformist (until exiled by Cixi). Without Cixi to coordinate conservative elements, it is hardly clear at all that China would have been so ripe for chaos during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The Qing Dynasty's fall in 1912 was hardly inevitable, and certainly not predestined by the characteristics of Chinese culture. China has had many periods of great openness and foreign involvement. You claim it's like China in 2000. I claim it's like China in 1680, or under the Song Dynasty. Isolationist periods came and went, and Chinese isolationism 1860-1912 was not a necessary feature of China's culture.
Regarding the modern trappings of the Swiss-Chinese treaty... not really. Exchange agreements were common in that period. China establishing an embassy abroad is highly unusual but, again, had Cixi been a different type of person, it might have happened.
But even if it would never have happened, that doesn't matter. The game is boring if all we do is play a marginally different history with all the same characters. The point is to swap out the cast and see what happens.
And regarding 200,000 soldiers going to the US... I agree. But I think there is a major difference between "physical impossibility" and "unlikely to occur due to personalities of a few powerful actors."
