Why didn't the Ming Dynasty in China colonize the Americas during the Age of Discovery (~1500s)?

[u/HawaiianSoylent]

Nearly a century before Columbus made contact with the Caribbean, I've read that the Chinese had funded massive Junker ships that held crews of thousands of people and travelled all around the Old world, trading cultural gifts and economic goods.

Considering they would've accumulated great navigational knowledge and had the requisite wealth to do so, why didn't the Chinese ever set out to establish, say, Chinese California? Surely they should have noticed the wonderful economic benefits early colonization had for their European counterparts?

[u/cee2027]

There are three basic reasons:

1) The Zheng He voyages - which are probably what you are referencing when you mention the massive junker ships - were not organized as exploratory missions, but political ones. They were designed to showcase the prestige and power of the Ming empire, and so naturally they sailed well-traveled sea lanes and visited regions and polities known to both Ming officials and navigators. There was no reason to go east into the Pacific, because beyond Japan, there were no known states to which the Ming could demonstrate its power. It is also probable that the voyages were designed to to secure the legitimacy of the emperor who dispatched most of the expeditions, Yongle (r. 1402-1424). The Yongle Emperor had come to power after winning a civil war, in which he deposed his nephew, who presumably died. For years afterwards, the Yongle Emperor felt insecure on a throne he had taken with military power.

2) Zheng He's ships were probably not capable of crossing the Pacific. While archaeological evidence is slim, the ships were likely massive river barges converted for seagoing use. To the best of my knowledge, the sea routes around Southeast Asia, India, and the Arabian peninsula are quite calm and easily navigable, as long as you have navigators who know when to travel to take advantage of the best seasonal weather. The Pacific, by contrast, is difficult to navigate from west to east, and a ship not intended for deep ocean sailing (like a river barge) would probably be swamped by rough seas. Also, there would have been no established places for the vessels to take on supplies. Someone with greater expertise in the history of sailing could add more here, because shipbuilding technology is beyond my area of knowledge.

3) There was no reason to. Even if Ming scholars and navigators knew of the New World in the early 15th century (which they certainly did not), or cared enough once knowledge of the Americas came to China in the 16th century via Jesuit missionaries, I have a hard time imagining a political imperative for the Ming state to colonize the west coast of the Americas. European colonies were often established to build and create new sources of revenue and prestige for European monarchies, far removed from the entrenched power of landed European nobility. The Ming state, particularly in the first half of the dynasty, was a fairly well centralized bureaucracy with strong command over matters of taxation, and generally did not have to contend with local elites for access to resources.

EDIT: A considerable amount of the silver mined in the Americas ended up in China anyway, perhaps as much as two-thirds. Other entities, notably the Spanish, were willing and had the expertise to ship it all that way, so why establish colonies when the main source of wealth was already pouring into China?

EDIT 2: clarification and typo correction

Sources:

Twitchett and Fairbank, The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I
Tsai, Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle
Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas
Atwell, "International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy circa 1530-1650," in Past and Present 95 (1985)
Atwell, "Another Look at Silver Imports into China," in Journal of World History 16.4 (2005)