AHC: Russia is Red, The East is Black - Marxist Russia, Anarchist China

Your challenge is to have Marxists come to power power in Russia but not in China - instead have anarchists in power in China. Changing the details Russian revolution is okay, doing away with it is not. A 20th C POD is preferable, but I'm okay with fudging that a few years.
 
I remember asking an Indian grad student some 20 years ago about Gandhian economists. He clenched his jaw for a long second or two and said, "Ahh . . the Gandhians are into handicrafts." Meaning might be hard to ramp up to an industrial economy.

All the same, love to see three different economic systems competing over a number of years. :)
 
Your challenge is to have Marxists come to power power in Russia but not in China - instead have anarchists in power in China. Changing the details Russian revolution is okay, doing away with it is not. A 20th C POD is preferable, but I'm okay with fudging that a few years.

Maybe even some sort of nationalist anarchists ?
 
Here's a few ideas. Have the civil war go considerably better for the Reds. In addition the Reds maintain their alliance with the Black Army and when the Kronstadt uprising happens the leadership of the Communist Party decide to negotiate instead of violently suppress.

As a result of their stronger position, when the Red Army pushes the Japanese out of Vladivostok they decide to continue fighting and liberate Korea. Fearful of the growing influence of the anarchists, decide to put Makhno and the Black Army in charge of the operation so that they'll be far away. The liberation is successful, and the combination of the largely anarchist liberation force, combined with a strong local anarchist movement, means that the political situation in Korea is heavily dominated by anarchists.

Back in Soviet Ukraine the Soviet forces begin a crackdown on the Ukrainian Free Territory. Resistance is much stiffer than expected, and the Korean Free Territory threaten to attack Eastern Siberia in retaliation. Eventually cooler heads prevail and a compromise is met whereby the Soviets recognise the anarchist order in Korea and will agree to uphold it as an experiment in proletarian organisation (IOTL there were some in the Communist Party who argued in favour of using the Free Territory as an experiment), in exchange for the subordination of the Ukrainian Free Territory to Soviet control. This results in an uneasy peace between the Blacks and the Reds, whilst also giving the Soviets a useful dumping ground for the more hard-line anarchist militants.

In China anarchist ideas, instead of Communism, become the hegemonic ideology of the far-left (particularly in the trade unions many of which affiliate to the IWW), in part due to the Korean anarchists being seen as more "Asian" than the "European" Soviets, and the far-left as a whole is in a stronger position due to Soviet and Anarkorean support for the KMT during the Northern Expedition. Chaing Kai-shek attempts a coup to eliminate the leftist influence in the KMT, which triggers a civil war between the rightist Chaing and an anarchist led alliance of Anarchists, Communists and fellow travellers. The Soviets and Anarkoreans intervene on the side of the leftists, whilst the Japanese, desperate to regain influence and prestige following their expulsion from Korea, intervene on the side of the rightists. Whilst the rightists are initially successful, managing to take the major cities and the Japanese landing forces in southern Korea and Eastern Siberia, the leftists eventually win out through a protracted guerilla struggle and peoples war in the countryside (whilst also being able to use Soviet occupied regions in Manchuria and northern China as bases for resupplying and reorganising).

At this point multiple military defeats had destroyed the myth of Japanese invulnerability, the armed forces have been severely beaten and a filled with dissidents, the officer corps has been decimated through a series of fratricidal coups and counter-coups, and the success of anarchism in Korea and China has ensured that the Anarcho-Syndicalist current in the Japanese left remains strong instead of being subsumed under Communism as IOTL. After Hirohito is assassinated by anarchist terrorists Japan falls into a brief civil war, with the anarchists coming out on top.

Rising tensions between the Soviets and their anarchist allies, combined with the growing power of the nascent anarchist bloc in Asia eventually results in a split between the two forces.
 
IIRC, there were many anarchists in the Tongmenhui, leading up to the Xinhai Revolution. Perhaps one of them takes power in China after Sun's death?
 
Another possible scenario, and I admit it's a bit of a long-shot, is to have China go Anarchist/Left-Communist during the Cultural Revolution.

During the Cultural Revolution there were various Left-Communist elements, most notably the Shanghai People's Commune and the Shengwulians in Hunan, who took the iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution even further than was permitted. These groups ultimately earned the ire of Mao and his supporters, and were ultimately suppressed, but if things had been different...

So here's a rough outline of how things could have gone down. Two weeks after the establishment of the Shanghai People's Commune Mao is assassinated, preferably by someone who people would see as a rightist reactionary within the party. This causes a massive power vacuum and a lot of chaos across the whole country. Without Mao dead he cannot condemn the Commune, which retains its aura of revolution and legitimacy in the eyes of many Maoists, but the Commune is able to co-opt Mao's memory and insist that they are the ones carrying on his vision. Throughout the country new People's Communes start to spring up, competing for legitimacy with traditional state power structures and revolutionary committees, and because the Party and Army are so divided no one is in the position to fully crackdown on them effectively. By the end of the year pro-Commune factions within the Party and Military have coalesced around a platform similar to the Shengwulian manifesto (the dissolution of the Party State and restructuring China around a system of democratic People's Communes) albeit with more deference to image and memory of Mao (insurrection against the Party State is justified on the grounds that "reactionary capitalist roaders and revisionists" took control of it after Mao was struck down). All they have to do now is win the ensuing civil war and bam, Anarcho-Maoist China.
 
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