>>17766424
>Did Toyotomi Hideyoshi really want to invade China
He was acting upon the info that Ming was in its death throes and it was ripe for taking.
Which was absolutely true. Ming was already dead by then.
Just to give you some perspective, Japanese withdrew from Korean peninsula in December 1598.
Manchus set up shop in northern China in 1616 and decisively conquered all of China outside of the Great Wall by 1642. Followed by conquering the capital in 1644 and doing a victory lap over the rest of defenseless China.
Oh, and they prodded Korean asses while doing all this, just to show who's in charge.

Hideyoshi had good intel, the problem was that while Japan had a much, much more potent force than anything Hong Taiji could ever dream of, its geographic position fucked them over.
Manchus didn't have to carry and supply their shit over the seas and fight a war in Korean landscape. So even if they were worse armed, supplied and less numerous than the Japanese by an order of magnitude, they got to poke the house of cards that was late Ming and got it to implode just like Hideyoshi's informants correctly assessed it would.

In light of looking at that sort of grander picture, it's extremely hard to even propose the plan as being some sort of 28 dimensional keikaku where he's out to butcher people making up his powerbase.