Mao was a monster; Chiang was simply a Fascist thug. Unfortunately, the very monstrosity of Mao and the mundane hohum thuggery of Chiang would probably mean that a Nationalist victory see NOT today's China. But today's India at best, or yesterday's India more probably, or yesterday's Latin America at worst. Deng was able to transform China precisely becasue Mao was such a monster; there were no deadweight landlords or monopolistic industrialists left to misdirect Chinese modernization efforts. It's no accident that the Asian miracles happened under American neo-colonialism. Without the US to moderate domestic elites, rightwing modernization efforts tend to look like 80's Brazil at best, or Mexico at worst. We forget that the KMT Taiwan became an Asian miracle only after severe US pressure forced it to liberalize. Nationalist China would not be an American stoogie. It would be a proud Third World nation like India and liable to follow autarchic model of development like India than an export-driven model that the Asian Tigers followed. The history of large nonWestern countries in modernizing is not a pretty one. To date, only India and China have done well, and it took India a very long time before it would work and great deal of human tragedy in China before it worked there. Elsewhere, it has been a mixed record. The Brazilian experience is probably closer to what Nationalist China would've looked like. It was a rightwing dictatorship, large with numerous natural resources and people, and the corruption was endemic. The result of the Brazilian "miracle" was impressive growth in GDP, but also one of the largest disparity in income distribution in the world. The vast majority of Brazilians never got not a lira out of the so-called "miracle" that enriched only the teeniest numbers of elites. KMT China probably would've been the same: The ultrarich at the top and the endless sea of the destitute poor.