Challenge: Chiang the Comeback Kid

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have the KMT retake mainland China by Chiang Kai-shek's death with a POD after the end of the civil war.
 

Thande

Donor
The most obvious one I suppose is if the Korean War goes nuclear under MacArthur and proliferates into a wider conflict (maybe even World War III) with the KMT retaking China under American auspices after an Allied victory...does it have to be all mainland China, or just a KMT state consisting of part of it?
 
I don't know anything about the exacts of that time period and would be interested if anyone could provide more information, but anyways heres my idea.

Was Mao the type of personality cult person that his death could lead to a general organizational breakdown?

Would his closest start to kill each other over succession? That and some excellent timing could prove to be enough for Chiang to divide and conquer?
 
Probably the best POD for this is for the Korean War to escalate into World War III or a Great East Asian War. Even then it's unlikely that the Nationalists could retake all of Mainland China, or that the U.S. would want Chiang as its leader, especially given the difficulties they had with him during World War II.

Another POD would be for Nationalist pockets of resistance to hold until the start of the Korean War, upon when the U.S. might decide, as it did in OTL, that Chiang was worth propping up. Chiang lost China due to a post-war economic crisis and some utterly stupid strategic decisions in his offensive against the Communists, mainly pressing his attack too far and allying with warlords who had fought alongside the Japanese.
 
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The most obvious one I suppose is if the Korean War goes nuclear under MacArthur and proliferates into a wider conflict (maybe even World War III) with the KMT retaking China under American auspices after an Allied victory...does it have to be all mainland China, or just a KMT state consisting of part of it?

All the mainland.
 
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