AHC/PC: Chinese Stalemate

Is it possible for the PRC and the RoC to stalemate on the mainland? With the RoC capital in Nanjing and the PRC capital in Beijing. How does this affect the Korean and Vietnam Wars?
 

Kongzilla

Banned
You'd have to fix the massive amount of Corruption in the KMT first, and maybe the battle in 1946 that cost the KMT a large amount of troops (can't remeber what it was called) doesn't happen or goes better for the KMT maybe they don't get abandoned by the USA and institute some reforms.

China obviously won't be able to supply as many troops to the North Koreans if they start a war, and the North Koreans may not start the war with as many troops as 20,000 of their origional soldiers fought in the Chinese civil war and either returned home after the war and volunteered to fight or were encouraged to return home for the same reason in order to fight and without such a clear cut ending the Korean soldiers may not be able to return.
 
IMO it is hard.
CPC had full support of rural community, e.g peasants which gave them unlimited supply of manpower.
KMT had only managed to control large urban centers.
Only way might be intervention of US which in turn will invite USSR intervention. hmmm. maybe WW III starts in China....:rolleyes:
 
IMO it is hard.
CPC had full support of rural community, e.g peasants which gave them unlimited supply of manpower.
KMT had only managed to control large urban centers.
Only way might be intervention of US which in turn will invite USSR intervention. hmmm. maybe WW III starts in China....:rolleyes:

Maybe delay the end of the War in the Pacific. Get more USSR involvement, and get a USSR troops in the NOrth and US troops in tHE soUTH.

You could end up with a negotiated split like in Germany and Korea.
 
Maybe delay the end of the War in the Pacific. Get more USSR involvement, and get a USSR troops in the NOrth and US troops in tHE soUTH.

You could end up with a negotiated split like in Germany and Korea.

The most likely POD for such an outcome would be, FDR gets intelligence early in the 40's that the Germans really aren't at all likely to get an A-bomb and decides the US can't afford the Manhattan Project--I dunno, despite the astronomical cost of MP, the US certainly could afford it, especially because it started slow and relatively cheap, then when results indicated the Bomb was entirely possible, that must have shaded the probability estimate that maybe Hitler could get it after all somewhat darker--so, even if it was a longshot, the higher level of investment was clearly cost-effective.

Still, perhaps the Project stagnates, goes down the wrong path for a while and gets delayed, and it becomes clearer and clearer that the Germans aren't getting anywhere so it goes on the back burner. A cleaner break would be if the whole thing never gets started--which is tough since the British were doing Tube Alloys anyway.

But OK, say the Bomb is not ready to hand come 1945 and so no one plans on having it. Conventional wisdom, and indeed OTL Allied plans, have the US gaining a bit more ground in the Pacific then doing an invasion of the Home Islands, with predicted extreme losses and devastation of Japan of course.

What would it then take to divert the Allied war plan to focus on defeating the Japanese forces in China instead, before biting the bullet of invading Japan itself? This has always looked like an attractive alternative to the invasion of Japan to me, maybe because I'm a wimp!:eek: The advantage is, the various fratricidal factions of China could all agree that they hated the Japanese and so both Western Ally and Soviet forces could expect the local populace to support them. With Japan's Navy swept from the sea, and their Army destroyed in detail in China, I'd think the Emperor would force the militarists to accept surrender, if necessary by having most of them killed and forcing the rest to kill themselves. This would not happen until after the Allied forces took China pretty much entirely between them. The WAllies would come from the south, the Soviets from the north.

I'd expect Japan itself to be partitioned; the Soviets would get at least Hokkaido and everything north of there; they'd also have complete control of all of Korea and Manchuria. Nominally, when the war finally ends, they'd acknowledge Chiang Kai-Shek as President-Generalissimo of all the Chinese Republic with its pre-Japanese invasion borders, but his writ would be de facto null and void in the Red Army/Chinese Communist occupied zones. (OTOH if the Chinese Communists are prevailing with Red Army support, I expect Mao Zedong would either flee or meet an untimely death; Stalin really didn't like him).

The question is, can the WAllies--mainly Americans in numbers and influence I'd think but there would be a lot of Commonwealth forces there too, mostly ANZACs--possibly shore up and stabilize South China against local Communist subversion aided by the promise of massive north Communist aid if they can open the way for them? It's Vietnam writ extremely large. I presume Stalin would play rather nice, by his standards, at first, in a quid pro quo for a free hand in his assigned occupied zones, which would be quite a lot for the Soviets to chew on top of their occupation of Eastern Europe--that's why the Chinese Communists would get any independent play at all, the Soviets would have little choice but to rely on them and they'd have effective autonomy perforce. Perhaps Stalin would even find it expedient to leave Mao in charge.

But eventually, as the Cold War starts to sour, the northern coalition would become more aggressive, denouncing Chiang and the KMT, and grabbing what they dared to on their border, and pulling out all stops in encouraging unrest in the south. This would happen before 1950, I'd think, and the question is, under American/Commonwealth guidance, could the KMT regime possibly acquire enough legitimacy to hold, even given generous military and economic aid by the Americans?

Meanwhile--for this to have happened at all, the Bomb had to be off the table in 1945, but while perhaps MP could have been downgraded and put on the back burner, with the Soviet Union so much stronger (on paper maps anyway--there's some question of overstretch here!) I daresay it gets some continued funding and sooner or later a "device" will be made. The only way to butterfly that away is to prevent both MP and Tube Alloys before it from ever getting any funding at all; even if FDR never does an American program, surely the British will continue theirs (despite economic stringency post-war, the stakes are just too high) and it seems likeliest that the Americans will pick up the ball too, if only post-war. With Americans tied down for years occupying both half of China and the southern part of Japan, there will not be the deep demobilization of OTL. Perhaps the political unpopularity of failing to stand down will turn Truman out of office in 1948 but I don't think even a Republican administration could justify shutting down the war machine or just abandoning South China to its fate. So funding will be available for a Bomb project. If the Soviets see that both Britain and the US is pursuing that course they will set up their own projects too.

Sooner or later there will be nuclear confrontation thrown into the mix.

But it would be tough for the KMT to last even that long. If they do, I suppose that after a decade or so of Western occupation/aid, the South Chinese regime might be strong enough to stand on its own, but that assumes a whole lot of reforms that the Americans were wise enough to insist on and generous enough with aid to shepherd them all through.

Remember too, the American position is weakened by having to confront the Soviets within Japan itself, even if they are able to hold all of Honshu at the conference tables.

It's all a bunch of long shots concatenated together, basically requiring Americans to exert themselves in ways they sought to avoid doing OTL, and also fumbling the ball of A-bomb development for half a decade or more.
 
Would it be Vietnam writ large, or Korea writ large?

Or if the soviets have troops stationed there, are they going to allow that type of adventurism?

THat could lead to a direct confrontation between US and Soviet forces.
 
There is one misconception that needs to be corrected: a defence along the Yangtze River can last.

In fact, if a southern regime had already lost everything north of the Yangtze, its days are numbered.

The real last defence lies in the Huai River - Qinling Mountains line. This was the line the Eastern Jin and the Southern Song tried desperately to hold.
 
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