Symphony D.
Deity
You have heard of "carrot and stick" methodology? Replace "carrot" with "everlasting glory in the greatest nation on the face of the earth" and "stick" with "being carpet-bombed and nerve-gased out of existence" and you'll have my policy. 
Diametrically opposite responses tend to convey clearer messages than some mishy-mashy mediocre policy. It was simply the good fortune of the people that they didn't happen to be stupid enough to let themselves be swayed by some radical and instead realized they had far more to gain by simply shutting up and enjoying the new-found luxuries. To quote Al Capone: "You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."
A perfect example was Manchuria versus Korea, although Manchuria was rather more quiet and surgical than what would've happened against a full-blown rebellion somewhere. Besides, really, it was all too perfect. Marrying the population base, industriousness, and resources of China with the efficiency, resourcefulness, and craftiness of Japan, and then tossing in the variously skilled peoples and strategic resources of Eastern Siberia, Indochina, and Australia, setting the land borders on some of the most rugged terrain on Earth and forming a vast glacis of Pacific islands...
Besides, from such rapid defeat it was surely clear the Xin Han Emperor had lost the Mandate of Heaven anyway. Such rapid failure by two dynasties in a mere forty years... clearly an omen.
Diametrically opposite responses tend to convey clearer messages than some mishy-mashy mediocre policy. It was simply the good fortune of the people that they didn't happen to be stupid enough to let themselves be swayed by some radical and instead realized they had far more to gain by simply shutting up and enjoying the new-found luxuries. To quote Al Capone: "You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."A perfect example was Manchuria versus Korea, although Manchuria was rather more quiet and surgical than what would've happened against a full-blown rebellion somewhere. Besides, really, it was all too perfect. Marrying the population base, industriousness, and resources of China with the efficiency, resourcefulness, and craftiness of Japan, and then tossing in the variously skilled peoples and strategic resources of Eastern Siberia, Indochina, and Australia, setting the land borders on some of the most rugged terrain on Earth and forming a vast glacis of Pacific islands...
Besides, from such rapid defeat it was surely clear the Xin Han Emperor had lost the Mandate of Heaven anyway. Such rapid failure by two dynasties in a mere forty years... clearly an omen.
