A Second Three Kingdoms Era?
People's Army, People's Republic
The People's Republic of China survived the collapse of the Lesser Mao's regime, but communism did not. When the People's Liberation Army formations watching the Sino-Soviet border in Manchuria turned their guns and tanks toward Peking, they passed through and seized the industrial complexes, oil fields, and field acres of China's great Northeast. Once in the Great Hall of the People, they publicly disowned the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that had reduced the Chinese population by over one quarter, and it was sworn that from then on, the People's Army was forever to be the army of the people.
While the replacement of a one-party state by a military junta meant that little had changed in political terms, the people's gratitude in being rid of the Years of the Skull seemed endless. The populations of Manchuria, Hopeh, and beyond received the new PLA enthusiastically and followed its orders in establishing a "wartime economy for the Great Reunification."
But the relatively simply conquest of Manchuria, with its robust infrastructure and productive base, was not easily duplicated in China Proper. Other former PLA formations had, it turned out, already established their authority locally and refused to accept the new authorities in Peking. Moreover, the abject poverty the PLA encountered as it marched south and west drained its supplies. The need to care for and govern tens of millions of starving peasants in Hopeh alone made the advertised campaign for the "Great Reunification" impossible.
By the 1990s, the People's Army could only claim full administrative control over Manchuria, Hopeh Province and the two cities of Peking and Tientsin. Former officers and bureaucrats in the inland provinces of Shansi, Shensi, and the city of Lanchow eventually deigned to join the reformed People's Republic; even then, they often questioned, willingly misinterpreted, or outright ignored orders from the capital.
While the Soviet Union gave the People's Army its word that imperialist adventures were out of the question, the collapse of Maoism encouraged the nationalist urges of Moscow's client states, North Korea and Mongolia. The years after Mao saw the sudden occupation of the Changpai mountain range on the Manchurian border, ordered by Pyongyang ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the Korean boundaries. What actually happened was nothing short of borderline genocidal ethnic cleansing, freezing PRC-DPRK relations to the present day.
The Mongolians, while not nearly as bloody as the Koreans, also moved to take advantage of China's misfortunes. Mongol forces entered the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region and effectively imposed their administration upon the steppe regions. PLA garrisons, outgunned and severely in want of supply, were ready to offer battle were it not for the timely intervention of Soviet military staff airlifted to Hohhot to negotiate a peaceful solution to the crisis. Mongolian advances would stop, cities would remain Chinese, and the tragedy on the Yalu would be avoided before it had a chance to begin. Both sides' forces were limited to garrisons, and Soviet aircraft enforced a no-fly zone.
In contrast to the days of Mao, Soviet-PRC relations in the new era were peaceable and even cordial by some measures. Soviet engineers introduced valuable technical know-how to their counterparts tasked with rebuilding China. Chinese students began to study in the Soviet Union, and PLA administrators opened their eyes to the strides made by Soviet economists. While modest in comparison with the massive Japanese-funded investment projects along the eastern Chinese coast, the benefits of "learning from our Russian comrades" were apparent well before the year 2000.
Meanwhile, war still raged on. The reformed PLA, apart from having to face hordes of uncooperative stragglers, was confronted by the northward advances of Nationalist forces from Taiwan as well as the nascent southwestern warlord armies that would form the infamous Szechwan cliques.