Can easily see a Hau Pei-Tsun presidency happening, the man came dangerously close to seizing power In OTL, late 80s/early 90s in Taiwan is an interesting period that often get overlooked, to say at least.
Can easily see a Hau Pei-Tsun presidency happening, the man came dangerously close to seizing power In OTL, late 80s/early 90s in Taiwan is an interesting period that often get overlooked, to say at least.I’m with you on that. I very strongly doubt that a Palace Faction that has just realized their wildest dreams is letting him anywhere near the reigns of power when they’re trying to reconsolidate a reunified China. They probably wouldn’t even let an anodyne moderate like Lien Chan near the big seat. A Lee Huan/Hau Pei-tsun style old-timer, on the other hand…
Fair enough!
Potentially. While Hua Guofeng was more open to reform than he gets credit for, he wasn’t Deng, not by a country mileDid the PRC’s swerving around Reform and Opening-up doom it to failure
Super interesting period. Lee was super lucky he didn’t get coup’d, honestly.Can easily see a Hau Pei-Tsun presidency happening, the man came dangerously close to seizing power In OTL, late 80s/early 90s in Taiwan is an interesting period that often get overlooked, to say at least.
Lee was super lucky he didn’t get coup’d, honestly.
I’ve planned on using Hau Pei-tsun in CdM but he’s kinda hard to ignore in a TL covering 1980s Taiwan
What about Yu Huo-kwa? He was Ching-kuo’s right hand for much of the 80s, after allLee Teng hui was very wily, successfully neutralising and carefully removing the KMT's Palace Faction gradually when he became president. Notably Chiang Kai shek's wife attempted to assert her influence to block Lee but failed, returning back to the US. Which is why he didn't get couped.
The most notable example of his wiliness took place when his term was ending. He anointed Lien Chan as his successor knowing that he wasn't popular with the Taiwanese voters and allowing Chen Shui-bian of the DPP to win in 2000. Which is why till this day KMT members consider Lee a traitor to their party and that he was a closet Taiwan independence supporter which was subsequently proven right. But that's another story...
Nevertheless to have Hau Pei tsun as president instead of Lee would take the ROC on a very different path of history.
Maybe there is a happy ending for China in the horizon...With Deng's death, Hua's rise and the advanced age of many of the Elders, however, finding a suitable power base opposed to Hua was difficult and had to come from outside of the circle around Yang and Peng. The famine, ironically enough, provided just such a figure - from Sichuan province, where most people would have asked "what famine?" thanks to the efforts of the experimental agricultural management practices of local functionary Zhao Ziyang
Maybe indeed, though that depends on your definition of "happy"Maybe there is a happy ending for China in the horizon...
So, what happened with Deng again? Please remind me.A Tale of Two Chinas - Part I
The early 1980s is often marked as a point at which the Republic of China, bunkered away on the island of Taiwan, and the People's Republic of China in the Mainland, started to see broader and broader divergences. Buffeted by a series of labor reforms in the mid-1970s, Taiwan's economic growth began to seriously outpace that of the PRC, helped in large part not only by cheap consumer goods and electronics manufacturing but by increasingly sophisticated logistics and microchip operations, and the authoritarian shell both had sat under since 1949 began to crack east of the Taiwan Straits while in Beijing things were as top-down as ever.
Indeed, in the views of many senior Chinese officials, they probably had to be. The autumn of 1981 brought with it two major challenges that badly strained the Hua Guofeng regime's authority both with the CCP luminaries who surrounded him (known collectively as the "Seven Elders," many of whom were not particularly strong supporters of his) and the Chinese street. The first was the much-awaited trial of the Gang of Four, the group of ultra-Maoist ideologues who had steered much of public discourse during the late Cultural Revolution and sought to run China upon Mao's death, including the late Chairman's wife, Jiang Qing and a genuinely dangerous and ambitious young demagogue in Wang Hongwen. Part of the reason the Gang of Four had fallen from power and grace in 1976 was that, to put it simply, most people with power within the CCP genuinely despised them, as did the military, which by the late 1970s had formed something of its own power base. Hua, who had very powerful allies within the intelligence services on whom he relied to prop up his power within China, had been the leading figure in their arrest and charges of treason.
The actual trial of the Gang of Four, however, split opinion on Hua within the party. Elders such as Yang Shangkun and Peng Yen, who had been allies of the late Deng Xiaopeng and thus had never warmed to Hua to begin with, took the stance that Hua's chosen prosecutors were incompetent, and assumed that it was Hua who had deliberately done so. Setting aside for a fact that in a system such as the PRC's the guilt of the Gang of Four was fairly plainly pre-determined, the trial of the Gang of Four - how it was reported on, what prosecutors discussed before the judge, how party members reacted - became part of a power struggle within the Politburo between Hua's enemies, the military, and the intelligence services. In the end, of course, the Gang of Four were all sentenced; Jiang, the infamous and colorful "Madame Mao" regarded as the most rabid enthusiast of the Cultural Revolution's excesses, defended herself and stood defiant, while Wang and Yao Wenyuan expressed repentance for not only their crimes but, perhaps more gravely in Red China, their "political errors." On December 1st, 1981, they were given sentences of twenty years apiece, which Hua's detractors took as evidence of his being too light. [1] Hua, who had always been careful not to fully repudiate and reject the Cultural Revolution even as it was clearly time for China to move on, made an address flanked by his chief allies Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Ji Dengkui and Chen Xilian - now derisively called the "Little Gang of Four" - to declare "justice has been served against the political errancy of these four traitors to China and the memory of Chairman Mao" and suggested, "It is the hour to turn a new leaf." The "New Leaf Policy" became understood to not just mean China moving on from the Four with their sentences but the Cultural Revolution generally, mostly by pretending that it didn't happen, so that its diminishing but still-influential supporters could still tell themselves that it had been the proper implementation of Mao Zedong Thought against the bourgeois and feudal history of China that needed to be purified, and its detractors could persuade themselves that nothing like that would ever happen again. [2] Indeed, the New Leaf Policy could have buffeted Hua tremendously, had he himself not been enamored with Mao's legacy and had the Chinese famine of 1981-82 not struck at approximately the same time.
The early 1980s famine was nowhere near as severe as infamous famines such as 1907 or 1928-30, to say nothing of the Great Chinese Famine of twenty years prior that was associated with Mao's mishandling of the Great Leap Forward, but it nonetheless was a major challenge for the government and estimates range from between four to five million Chinese, primarily children and the elderly, starving to death between the harvest of 1981 and late spring of the following year. While Western media access to China was always haphazard, photographs and footage showed emaciated youths and conditions in some parts of the Chinese countryside that looked more similar to parts of Sub-Saharan Africa than the confident People's Republic that was presenting itself to the world after Mao's death and Nixon's visit a decade earlier. It also was a very dark and grim reminder of the Great Leap Forward at precisely a time when Mao's legacy was being interrogated within the CCP's upper echelons (his legacy was to say the least not up for debate within its middle and lower levels of internal organs) and it was an open question of whether his mistakes should be recognized publicly and rejected a la Khrushchev's policy on Stalinism. The trial and famine together thus served to present the Chinese people and leadership, simultaneously, with potent reminders of the two largest blemishes on Mao's record, blemishes which for most Chinese over the age of thirty were within recent and living memory.
With Deng's death, Hua's rise and the advanced age of many of the Elders, however, finding a suitable power base opposed to Hua was difficult and had to come from outside of the circle around Yang and Peng. The famine, ironically enough, provided just such a figure - from Sichuan province, where most people would have asked "what famine?" thanks to the efforts of the experimental agricultural management practices of local functionary Zhao Ziyang, [3] who had been rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution and had been regarded as having reached the limits of what he could achieve once his sympathizer Deng had passed. Sichuan's weathering of the famine and strong economic growth, especially compared with larger and wealthier provinces in the east, caught people's attention, however, and with that Zhao was invited back to Beijing to be within the Central Committee and help manage the end of the famine response, even if Hua didn't entirely trust the reasons for his enemies in the Politburo wanting the talented young reformer promoted higher...
[1] This is similar, though not exactly, to how the Gang of Four trial played out IOTL, where Deng's consolidated power and his broader support from the other Elders gave him much broader leeway.
[2] Suffice to say this is not how you generally solve problems
[3] Those familiar with Chinese history know why this name is important and why he's not going to click with Hua long-term, to say the least
Died of a heart attack in late 1978/early 1979 (or thereabouts), which many people found highly suspicious considering his power struggle with Hua/Hua's connections with the spooks, but which opens the door for a mild rapprochement between Hua and the remaining Eight Elders that keeps Hua in powerSo, what happened with Deng again? Please remind me.
"Happy" as in "not becoming an Orwellian nightmare." Maybe some sort of democracy and individual freedoms.Maybe indeed, though that depends on your definition of "happy"
I would say where China is headed is better than today, that’s for sure"Happy" as in "not becoming an Orwellian nightmare." Maybe some sort of democracy and individual freedoms.
Definitely keeps the heat on the CIA, I suppose. Other than that I don’t know too much about the manSomething occurred to me- how is Frank Church's continued presence in the Senate being felt?
Saw this title and immediately knew what I was in for. I shall now be unpacking this update point by point because I am physically unable stop myself from doing so.Arnulfismo
This seems to indicate a new constitution, because, beyond the difference in presidential term length between the version of the 1972 that was in place in 1978, there is absolutely no way to keep the 1972 constitution past the dictatorship without the 1983 reforms. But a clean break with a new, 1981 constitution rather than keeping the 1972 constitution like IOTL is probably better for Panama's internal workings.held the first week of December 1981, most importantly for a five-year Presidential term.
I assume these are Colombian police; the particularities of Panamanian politics (the line between the police, the military, and the later Dignity Battalions was always blurry, and they were be united in their hatred of Arias) and Torrijos's ideological vagueness (he was neither a creature of the left or right and worked with both accordingly, but gains an international reputation for leftism due to his allyship with leftist regimes that were borne more out of their common dislike of the US than any ideological congruence) probably mean even right-wing Panamanian policemen would be more Torrijist than Arnulfist.the police and right-wing paramilitaries opposed to them
*Insert "there's three, actually" meme*. And the second time (1949-1951) he actually got to serve more than a year. But 1941 was just a few months and 1968 he didn't even last two weeks before Boris Martinez decided he had to go.He had been a President before, twice in fact, with both of his previous terms ended prematurely by military coups less than a year into his terms
The country had been torn apart by violence between Noriega's paramilitaries, who were increasingly reliant on narcotrafficking from their FARC-ELN allies in Colombia,
Interesting - so Noriega gains his OTL reputation by drug smuggling and generally pissing on Panama's international reputation (plus, of course, the old memories of when he was Torrijos's intelligence chief) rather than by drug smuggling, generally pissing on Panama's international reputation, and running the country into the ground. Doubt the US population cares much about him (it was his time in leadership that really made him into an international pariah) but if he screws up the PR angle of his resistance movement (and given his generally ham-fisted approach to political repression IOTL, I'd expect he would) he could easily turn off the Panamanian population off Torrijism if the candidates are more associated with him than the actual Torrijos (plus there's the question of whether the Liberal remnants are still in bed with Torrijos's cohorts or if they read the US's room and decided to join the ones who already fucked off to the Arnulfist Party back in '68)his main opposition was considered too close to Noriegists
Arias took a very cold shower after this, I presume. And also helps explain his margin (Torrijists will be howling about hypocrisy given how Arias reacted to his 1964 loss).thus there were rumors of aggressive intimidation not only by Panamanian Defense Forces but also the CIA and United States military.
Minor question here: what was the Ford admin's policy regarding reopening old US military bases in Panama (Rio Hato in particular)? This is one of those things that has the potential to be a huge sticking point that pisses off Panamanians majorly but that, considering the sort of people Cheney and Rummy are and the US military's needs in the post-1978 I imagine they likely forced these. Lots of potential room to play there if and when the US wants an off-ramp regarding the Panama Canal...The Ford administration's response
Early 80's is probably too early for any movement but perhaps near the end of the Carey presidency, or during his successor's presidency, given their common partisan affiliation to LBJ, you could see them try unearth the old Robles-Johnson "3-in-1" proposal as a potential settlement. Whether Panama accepts is another matter (the National Assembly unanimously rejected it in 1968), but it might perhaps inform the US's starting position on negotiations, though perhaps tougher than the real Robles-Johnson (which may perhaps be regarded as too dovish in the post-Huele A Quemado world).This created a huge conundrum for the Carey White House.
Seems like things could still go any number of ways based on the info we have now. However, it’d be pretty ironic if China moves toward democracy while Taiwan stays mired in autocracy and doesn’t unite with the mainland.NGL, this is the the first TL where the PRC collapses similarly to the USSR rather than the result of a nuclear war or a worse Cultural Revolution.
Also I imagine Nixon's legacy will be even worse ITTL, as his policy towards China is going to be an utter failure
I (think?) this is correct, which at the risk of tipping my hand too much is one reason I wanted to explore it. Both of those other outcomes are a bit tropey so the PRC failing because it simply failed to properly reform and went into a stagnation seems more realistic to me and also more in line with the actual democratic transitions of a number of poor, authoritarian regimes in Asia, Latin America and Africa in the 1980s/1990s (not to mention E. Europe as the obvious example)NGL, this is the the first TL where the PRC collapses similarly to the USSR rather than the result of a nuclear war or a worse Cultural Revolution.
Also I imagine Nixon's legacy will be even worse ITTL, as his policy towards China is going to be an utter failure
This would be a profoundly hilarious outcomeSeems like things could still go any number of ways based on the info we have now. However, it’d be pretty ironic if China moves toward democracy while Taiwan stays mired in autocracy and doesn’t unite with the mainland.
Glad you liked it - your input helped craft its content!Saw this title and immediately knew what I was in for. I shall now be unpacking this update point by point because I am physically unable stop myself from doing so.
This seems to indicate a new constitution, because, beyond the difference in presidential term length between the version of the 1972 that was in place in 1978, there is absolutely no way to keep the 1972 constitution past the dictatorship without the 1983 reforms. But a clean break with a new, 1981 constitution rather than keeping the 1972 constitution like IOTL is probably better for Panama's internal workings.
I assume these are Colombian police; the particularities of Panamanian politics (the line between the police, the military, and the later Dignity Battalions was always blurry, and they were be united in their hatred of Arias) and Torrijos's ideological vagueness (he was neither a creature of the left or right and worked with both accordingly, but gains an international reputation for leftism due to his allyship with leftist regimes that were borne more out of their common dislike of the US than any ideological congruence) probably mean even right-wing Panamanian policemen would be more Torrijist than Arnulfist.
*Insert "there's three, actually" meme*. And the second time (1949-1951) he actually got to serve more than a year. But 1941 was just a few months and 1968 he didn't even last two weeks before Boris Martinez decided he had to go.
So you do have the chance to make this end hilariously by having this motherfucker fail to complete a full term for the fourth time (most probably by dying, though a fourth coup, this time because Arias pissed off the Americans (again), is also an option, though Carey doesn't strike me as quite coup-happy enough for this). In any case I seriously wonder who they'll run in 1986, as I'm assuming Arias will be term-limited and one of the things that screwed Arnulfism in the long-term was that IOTL 1989 was the first time since 1936 that party did not run Arnulfo Arias as its candidate (admittedly there's extenuating circumstances in that whenever Arias couldn't run either presidential elections were indirect (as in 1945, 1972, and 1978) or the party was banned (as in 1952, 1956, and 1960), but there remains the fact that Arias has no designated successor, Panamanian politics are and were deeply personalist, and the party is going to have to figure out how to deal with that fast).
Interesting - so Noriega gains his OTL reputation by drug smuggling and generally pissing on Panama's international reputation (plus, of course, the old memories of when he was Torrijos's intelligence chief) rather than by drug smuggling, generally pissing on Panama's international reputation, and running the country into the ground. Doubt the US population cares much about him (it was his time in leadership that really made him into an international pariah) but if he screws up the PR angle of his resistance movement (and given his generally ham-fisted approach to political repression IOTL, I'd expect he would) he could easily turn off the Panamanian population off Torrijism if the candidates are more associated with him than the actual Torrijos (plus there's the question of whether the Liberal remnants are still in bed with Torrijos's cohorts or if they read the US's room and decided to join the ones who already fucked off to the Arnulfist Party back in '68)
Arias took a very cold shower after this, I presume. And also helps explain his margin (Torrijists will be howling about hypocrisy given how Arias reacted to his 1964 loss).
Minor question here: what was the Ford admin's policy regarding reopening old US military bases in Panama (Rio Hato in particular)? This is one of those things that has the potential to be a huge sticking point that pisses off Panamanians majorly but that, considering the sort of people Cheney and Rummy are and the US military's needs in the post-1978 I imagine they likely forced these. Lots of potential room to play there if and when the US wants an off-ramp regarding the Panama Canal...
Early 80's is probably too early for any movement but perhaps near the end of the Carey presidency, or during his successor's presidency, given their common partisan affiliation to LBJ, you could see them try unearth the old Robles-Johnson "3-in-1" proposal as a potential settlement. Whether Panama accepts is another matter (the National Assembly unanimously rejected it in 1968), but it might perhaps inform the US's starting position on negotiations, though perhaps tougher than the real Robles-Johnson (which may perhaps be regarded as too dovish in the post-Huele A Quemado world).
And of course there's the role this all has on the wider LATAM spectacle (keeping the canal in US hands is probably not great for regional stability, I imagine, which may help bring about the generally bad vibes of TTL's 1980's in LATAM). Overall I quite like the update.
To an extent, perhapsThe POV in this update seems quite sympathetic to the US position
To be fair for a vast majority of the 80s it wasnt governed by a democrat. He was a trade representative during the carter admin so he did have foreign cache by the late 70sThat was a position he didn’t fill until the 1990s IOTL so idk where Carey would slot him. He’d certainly be somewhere in the admin, though.
Something occurred to me- how is Frank Church's continued presence in the Senate being felt?
I was rooting for him to be named director of the CIA just for pure chaos lol. I hope we see William Marvin Watson and Sargent Shriver + other LBJ and Kennedy acolytes involved in the Carey administrationDefinitely keeps the heat on the CIA, I suppose. Other than that I don’t know too much about the man