-------------------------------------------------------
Kiang Liu is writing at the end of the 20th century, and he is doing so selectively when he mentions the outside (thus offering hints). Even he is grasping for accurate numbers even at this late date, as he laments in the text no one knows for sure how many died under the Lesser Mao and the warring states that followed him. Once the Lesser Mao destroys the cohesion of the nation, and it falls, then you are looking at something like a Lebanon or Somalia for the first little while, but on the grander scale. I used the estimates from Pol Pot’s reign in Cambodia and magnified them to fit a Chinese population of around 900 million which was the census figure around that time. The Lesser Mao destroyed all these records so tallying-up the death toll for what he did and what came afterward is numerical guesswork and extrapolation.
A note on fertility and infant mortality. From about 1975 until about 1990 China is not a place that you would want to bring new children into, and even when the biological happens their chances of reaching adulthood are limited by the conditions they live in. Again there are parallels with Somalia, but also other parts of Africa in this. It’s not just famine, although that is widespread, but also lack of clean water, diseases, unsanitary living conditions, migrant populations and brutality along with war all take their toll. The elderly who survive do so because they are already among the hardiest of their generation to being with. Children suffer and the conditions discourage having families.
I would expect the minority populations in China to suffer greatly under the Lesser Mao, so much so that a Soviet Sinkiang Republic or a Tibetan province under the control of an Indian State would be considered an improvement over the present condition. When the gates are opened I believe that it will be found that many of the minority groups perished as slave labour on the opium plantations.
The Soviets don’t intervene largely because an invasion of China would be a large undertaking, and attempting to actually govern the place would be a quagmire. I can see the Soviets pressing along the borders, perhaps creating a buffer zone inside the frontier area where they push Chinese forces back from their borders and establish refugee camps, but a greater effort to rule China itself would necessarily require an international partnership. Certainly Japan and the United States would view any such move as a threat to regional security, and the Soviets would be aware of this. However, the Wallace-Andropov accord on how to deal with the Kwangsi incident does present a template for further joint co-operation – maybe. Depends on the leaders.
For the United States to become involved in another land war in Asia would be politically tricky. The American people would have to be convinced that their own security was at stake in some fashion (the use of a nuclear weapon at Kwangsi won’t necessarily meet this criteria because many talking heads will point out that Chinese ICBM’s don’t yet have the range to reach the mainland United States).
Hong Kong and Taipei are pretty much the only two Chinese cities left, although I can see Taiwanese nationalism taking a distinct anti-mainland turn. Being a Hong Kong Chinese would be like being Swiss in 1945 – your home stands undisturbed while all around is devastation. The Swiss at least had their alps to hide behind.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
India is a project for the next decade. I see it being ripped apart by economic competing pressures as well as geo-political ones. Things have not happened yet as of ITTL 1979 which will have an effect upon India’s (and Pakistan’s) future. I was actually reading some history on the Indira Ghandi period and saw the seeds there; her assassination may have saved India IOTL. For now she remains in prison and Congress is a divided force. At this stage call it a concept in need of development as history unfolds (which is the underlying theme (zeitgeist or Schadenfreude) of this TL really).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’m going to document the end of the Iberian crisis, but you are correct to assume that the example of Noberto Bobbio will have an effect on thinking in Spain – and Portugal. Bobbio is going to be the winner of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize, and I can see a future for him as an active UN Secretary General.
To date ITTL there has not been the emergence of the G-7 and the evolution of the EEC to the EU has been much more sluggish.
The Basques are going to get a state out of this, which will have other effects.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The name of the Pope at the end of the 20th century, Pope Ecclesiastes, successor to Pius XIII. As the first non-European Pope since the Judean founders (foreshadow) he has chosen the name as symbolic of both a departure and a renewal of the Church’s mission to the global multitudes, beyond the past to the future. Thus the name reflects this meaning of the term, all worldly wisdom is in vain without spiritual vision, and that is the mission he seeks for his Papacy, thus:
As opposed to a world where the opposite is the case, and he sees the history of the church in Europe as having furthered that (though he may not say it as directly but imply it in his sermons and writings). I am also suggesting a future Pope who is influenced by ideas from Judaic teachings as well as the usual Roman Catholic cannon.
---------------------------------------------
As of 1979 the evil nature of the Lesser Mao’s regime is still not clear in the West. Much as rumors and stories of Stalin’s brutality were dismissed by the “fashionable” left and even more anti-Moscow elements as either propaganda or exaggeration, so the fans of Maoism in the west, whether strict ideologues or progressive idealists who embrace third world socialism as a cure to western imperialism and capitalism, would be seen as propaganda or exaggeration. I could even see western Maoists dismissing the refugees as anti-social elements fleeing the Maoist nation and suggesting with a straight face that they are the problem, rather than the regime. I saw such from orthodox Marxists in the eighties dismissing complaints about life in the East Bloc. The difference between us and the reason I knew they were full of B#@t was because I had been there, when most of them hadn’t. At this point in the TL I can see the exact same attitude pervading the left with a belief that the west must be wrong because the anti-colonial revolutionaries must be right.
When the truth does come out, in other words when the west can get in there to document it and provide evidence, then they are in for a shock. I imagine that denial will be a first response until the evidence becomes overwhelming, and even then there will be some who will never accept it. Holocaust denial will take on a whole new political cast.
In that context, I don’t necessarily see Ralph Nader’s remarks as being out of context with a left-progressive political movement. They have a hard time accepting a narrative which doesn’t view Communist China at this time as flawed, but making progress after colonial exploitation. To use a nuclear weapon against such a state would cause some on the left to be “ashamed of America.” In part because this reinforces the historical narrative that the United States has been the only nation to use a nuclear bomb in war. This could even acquire a narrative of “Kwangsi denial” along the lines of seeking alternate explanations for what really happened at Kwangsi such as: the U.S. did drop a bomb on China; there was an accident; anti-revolutionary forces based in Taiwan did it (either as a U.S. plot or more generally as a capitalist plot) etc., etc.. We hear a lot lately about how inventive the right can be in manipulating the narrative of events to suit its ideological predispositions, but people tend to forget that the radical left was just as good at this in the latter half of the twentieth century. How else could you get historical narratives that saw the Second World War as an anti-Soviet conspiracy, or Churchill and Hitler as clandestine partners in capitalist expansion?
I could see someone like Angela Davis or Noam Chomsky writing Kwangsi and the American Plot to Destroy the Chinese Revolution.
-------------------------------------------
