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I read Diamond a long time ago but what he was contrasting was that the Chinese Empire was centralised and so when they decided not to expand, that applied to the whole empire, while the Europeans were fragmented so even if Germany and France and England didn't want to send any ships, Portugal and Spain could be convinced to take a risk.

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Columbus' 3 small ships were also vastly cheaper than Zheng He's large fleet that had some really large ships in it (even if we dismiss the reported sizes as utterly unrealistic).

There's also the fact that the European ships at the time were more robust than the Chinese ships -- because robust ships had been really useful for sailing along the Atlantic coast for trade/fishing.

I also wonder which two islands are considered large out of GB, Ireland, Iceland, Corsica, Sicily... I feel like there's a couple of big islands around China too... Taiwan, some in Japan, Borneo, Philippines for instance. Indigenous Taiwanese settled the whole south Pacific.

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