Cold War w/out a Communist China

Would the Cold War have happened any differently w/out the communists coming out on top in the Chinese Civil War? One example I'm thinking of is that the Chinese wouldn't have had any reason to intervene in the Korean War.
 
Would the Cold War have happened any differently w/out the communists coming out on top in the Chinese Civil War? One example I'm thinking of is that the Chinese wouldn't have had any reason to intervene in the Korean War.

That depends on how you get a non-Communist China in the first place. However to accept the premise at face we're going to see a much smaller Cold War if we can even call it that.

The Fall of China in 49 effectively set the stage for the Cold War as we knew it. With Stalin at least considering Mao's idea to spread Communism in Asia or let Mao do it himself it gave Communist Parties in East Asia more accessible support. When the Sino-Soviet happened which I would say was in the making since Stalin, it created a new set of tensions for the Soviet Union, they had to compete with China in sending arms and spreading influence, as well as with the U.S. There's also the fact that the Korean War which I feel gave credence to the crackdown on Communism at home, was started when Stalin gave Kim Il Sung the green after assuring the Chinese if they supported the invasion, they would have Soviet support.

A Cold War without Communist China would be one where there's a very slim probability of any prolonged U.S wars such as Korea and Vietnam. If Khrushchev still takes power in the Soviet Union, there's still going to be peaceful coexistence. So it's from the surface to be a less violent Cold War, perhaps even with less domestic problems for the U.S.
 
You'd have your work cut out for you trying to envision a non-Communist coalition that could hold the Maoists at bay and ultimately defeat them in the first place. One step would be to have Stalin succeed in bumping Mao off, and any successor that bubbles up from Mao's faction or any other to take his place. But simply having Stalin so determined to keep control of international movements he cripples them all (which is OTL--at any rate he tried, and where he and his successors failed to enforce the Moscow line, that is where we see successful Leninist revolutions) just lowers the bar for a non-Communist movement. As far as I know there was just one alternative, the KMT, and as it developed after the death of Sun Yat Sen anyway it needed a low bar, because it was deeply corrupted and had few ties to the common people. So--you have to fix that somehow. Improve KMT or create a third party. And what would the improved KMT or third party's platform be, exactly, that allows it to be recognized by the majority of Chinese as their champion? Can such a movement be allied to the USA or any other foreign power, or will its rise seem just as catastrophic to the West as the OTL victory of Mao did?

Indeed, suppose that we are dealing with an ATL version of Kuomintang, one where presumably Chiang Kai Shek took a long walk off a short pier and no one has ever heard of him. Then, from the pages of comic books I suppose, we cobble together an honest and righteous KMT, one that inspires common people to support it and somehow deilvers good things to them yet somehow also does not alienate the very rich and powerful, both Chinese and foreign. Such a KMT takes control after WWII, any Communist pockets are mopped up somehow--you know this means mass executions and massive punishment of those deemed not necessary to kill, right? Even if Stalin has cleansed out Mao and a whole long string of genuinely Chinese patriotic radicals and replaced them with corrupt hacks who fail to inspire even 1/10 of the following Mao did--the Chinese Communists will be numerous and neutralizing them is going to be brutal.

All right, it is done. A clean KMT regime rules in Peking or Nanking or wherever they settle on for a capital. Now what? That is your question. One issue is that the USA is presumably an ally. But there are nearly a billion people on the edge of starvation in our new ally--how exactly does the richest country in the world relate?

I find it very hard to imagine going other than OTL myself. I suggest if you think you can define a path to a non-Communist Chinese solution, do that. Show your work. It will be ruthlessly criticized I suppose. If it stands up, now we have a framework on which to hang theories as to the pattern of foreign relations, and we can go from there.

If you ask me to do it, I probably would feel compelled to fall back on either some peasant finding a lamp holding a powerful wish-granting genie, or perhaps go back to the Taiping Rebellion and tweak it until they were a viable new dynasty.
 
You'd have your work cut out for you trying to envision a non-Communist coalition that could hold the Maoists at bay and ultimately defeat them in the first place. One step would be to have Stalin succeed in bumping Mao off, and any successor that bubbles up from Mao's faction or any other to take his place. But simply having Stalin so determined to keep control of international movements he cripples them all (which is OTL--at any rate he tried, and where he and his successors failed to enforce the Moscow line, that is where we see successful Leninist revolutions) just lowers the bar for a non-Communist movement. As far as I know there was just one alternative, the KMT, and as it developed after the death of Sun Yat Sen anyway it needed a low bar, because it was deeply corrupted and had few ties to the common people. So--you have to fix that somehow. Improve KMT or create a third party. And what would the improved KMT or third party's platform be, exactly, that allows it to be recognized by the majority of Chinese as their champion? Can such a movement be allied to the USA or any other foreign power, or will its rise seem just as catastrophic to the West as the OTL victory of Mao did?

The problem with keeping Twenty-One Bolsheviks in power if the GMD goes after the Communists like in OTL, the 21 Bolsheviks either to do a better job or get sidelined by Mao like in OTL, unless we're talking about a no or failed Long March scenario. Bumping Zedong afterward would require the Soviets to have some way to reach him in the first place unless this requires a butterfly net but some after 1933 Mao flees to Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang who was backed by the Soviets and if Barbarossa happens Sheng not also had Mao Zeming executed but also executes Zedong as well.

As for the GMD, all it would need are to have beaten the CCP early and possibly no Sino-Japanese War, which depending on what we are using for a POD shouldn't be too hard.
 
I'm not concerned with the soap opera of day to day intrigues, accesses, individual party standing, etc. I'm concerned with long term party viability. Mao managed to secure the allegiance of large numbers of countryside people, enough to prevail. Can other factions that are more amenable to Stalin's dictates have the same traction? I assume, no, not the same; any faction that owes more to foreign influence than local will smell of it and repel local support to some extent--thus I was suggesting Stalin trying harder and succeeding in bumping Mao off as a means of keeping his control over the Chinese movement--at the cost of losing effectiveness, giving KMT a better chance.

OTL the Chinese CP faction that did obey the Kremlin was given orders to cooperate with the KMT, and Chiang took advantage to try to exterminate them all. That's generally how Stalinist-obedient factions fared under Stalin's orders; he prioritized keeping control which meant promoting hacks over local leaders who had effective grass roots traction, and trying to govern the pace of revolution either in accordance with some half-baked Party line of the moment out of phase with on the ground realities, or often governed by balancing appeasement of pro-capitalist interests to smooth Soviet relations with Western powers, which inherently meant leaving the grass roots revolutionaries keen on seizing every opportunity out to dry. This is presumably why Mao did prevail in the end, ignoring Kremlin direction and doing what he thought best to advance CCP chances in China, to hell with Stalin's agenda. This is in fact how all successful Leninist revolutionaries everywhere in the world prevailed, in Yugoslavia (Tito tried to be obedient, but Moscow rarely sent any useful aid and he was on his own practically speaking, getting more help from the British and Americans during the war than from Russia), in Vietnam, in Cuba (Fidel Castro never was formally a Cuban CP member and purged the Cuban Party starting with executing its leader in the early 60s; his brother Raul was his contact with that Party, a junior partner in his personally led movement). And in China! To postulate a non-Communist regime in China one has to nerf the Chinese Communists; Stalin is a help here.

But even with Stalin doing the KMT favors, exactly how does that party get the legitimacy it needs to become the agreed upon leader of China and create some degree of lasting peace? As I understand it, China had fragmented into dozens of regional fiefs controlled by local warlords of diverse theoretical positions that in practice all boiled down to getting on top of a more or less traditional Chinese food chain of landlords, bureaucrats answering to the warlord rather than any central agency, and random capitalist-industrialist entrepreneurs, if I am not mistaken as likely as not to be foreign. The latter gave the Republic of China some sort of zombie-like legitimacy in that foreign investors obviously liked being influential on the powers on the ground, but overall the result was violent chaos, a complete lack of effective progressive vision (beyond merely enforcing the profitability of various enterprises by repressing the workers, who were quite numerous and disposable) and withal tremendous rates of population grown atop a ramshackle economy.

It is obvious enough to me how Maoist cadres got traction in the countryside in a situation like this, and eradicating them would be more than a matter of just killing off Mao. And without such a movement, how will the KMT balance the attempt to gain some grassroots legitimacy versus their commitment to the elites the OTL Maoists credibly were going to fight and overthrow? I can't see how they do otherwise than lean on top-down domination, double down on it until the masses despair of any alternative, and create a hypercapitalist dystopia. Perhaps an unopposed KMT can come under strong central leadership, impose some rough order on the warlord ruled provinces that imposes a sort of sullen interregional peace and steers the warlords from attempts at expanding their personal area of rule and toward kleptocratic participation in regional development instead. None of this results I would think in a situation objectively less terroristic and more prosperous for the masses than OTL Maoist rule with all its failings and brutality; it seems unlikely it could result in more effective per capita development.

The ATL does not have to provide a humane and democratic order to be sure! Only explain how the hideous mess is politically stable and capable of dealing with rival powers as effectively as the PRC did OTL.

Will the USA ally with such a China? Well I suppose we would. China after all borders on the Soviet Union. This helps explain why the Soviets were so keen to see China revolutionized. Without a deep POD early in or before WWII, it is hard to see how at least some Chinese territory does not fall to Red Army occupation and once occupied, how it would ever be handed back to an anti-Communist regime. That merely moves the border out from old Soviet and Mongolian borders of course, it does not do much to shorten the border. However it would buy the USSR a buffer zone comparable to Eastern Europe at the other end of the continent.

The Republic of China that might wind up allied to the USA then would probably be much shrunken, perhaps even driven out of the north of China completely. Let us suppose otherwise, that the eastern part that was densely settled would remain, with US aid, in KMT hands, while west and north Soviet occupation shelters a number of puppet SSRs of low population and development, swarming with forward Red Army bases and barely able to sustain these, let alone meaningful development.

Sure, there might never be a Korean War--although actually Soviet forces were poised to invade Korea directly at the end of WWII and probably would do so in the ATL, indeed American commitment to the RoC might divert the forces occupying southern Korea and hand the whole peninsula over to Soviet clients wholesale. There might instead be a Manchurian War, or a China War, trying to recapture core Chinese territory from Soviet control, or Soviets attempting to hold extensions of their power at dubious length from their core lands.

That instead of Korea there would be some Far Eastern alternative flashpoint seems almost certain to me. The Cold War might be shortened all right, by turning into a hot WWIII where Stalin lacks the plausible deniability he had OTL (in fact, I believe both that the South Korean authorities fostered by the US had their own loose cannon culpability in feeding the flames in Korea, and that the NK and Chinese leadership both defied Stalin in piling on too--neither Washington nor Moscow masterminded it, and that was one reason why over time it was possible to force a negotiated settlement--both superpowers wanted none of it, it was a matter of reining in their clients). In this ATL, we might soon have US military forces, with or without a UN mandate (impossible to get unless the Soviets walked out in a huff over other matters as they did OTL) fighting Red Army directly, and this could soon escalate into general war on all fronts, Europe wracked by terrible conflict once again, and US strategic bombing, now nuclear, pounding the Soviets into radioactive rubble, unless they call for a truce early in that process. (Nuking the USSR and clients until they glow would be a much slower process, since the USA had rather low stocks of A-bombs, and furthermore delivering them would be a matter of enabling fleets of piston bombers to reach interior targets despite vigorous Soviet attempts at interdicting them. It would be possible that relatively few Soviet targets would be destroyed before Stalin or a successor would offer terms for partial Soviet withdrawal. Meanwhile quite a lot of radioactive fallout, including most of the uranium or plutonium installed in the bombs, would be released to the severe detriment of ultimately everyone in the northern hemisphere. The upshot then might not be a short Cold War that goes rapidly hot ending in the destruction of the Soviet Union, but a costly and devastating WWIII leaving both sides still standing, the Soviets somewhat down on one knee to be sure, but both badly battered and with long-term damage lasting generations. And resumption of a new Cold War, even more bitter than OTL for the scale of mutual damage each side inflicted on the other. In this Cold War, the Sino-Soviet border becomes a huge hot zone, stretching nearly inconceivable distances across the most rugged and difficult terrain on the planet, with massive numbers of deployed Yankee and perhaps other Western allied troops salted in bases among huge conscript Chinese forces of dubious reliability (but very large numbers) drawn from a China devastated both by direct Soviet strikes, drained of loyal and well-trained manpower by the war, and poisoned by fallout from strikes in the Soviet east. The KMT regime might lean heavily on US support to remain viable at all, a South Vietnam Saigon regime writ monstrously large; to support our commitment on such dubious terms to something so grotesquely termed part of the "Free" world the USA and Western European nations might have to impose severely authoritarian controls on organization and speech and curtail freedoms across the board, not to mention exact substantial taxes--taxes that ought to be levied on the rich, but the more authoritarian the western regimes become, the less concerned with populism, and the burden would shift heavily onto the populace at large. Which might in turn legitimize Communist opposition underground in the West.

For it to be otherwise, the ATL KMT or whatever third party one might envision must achieve both mass legitimacy and competence pretty early, preempting the warlord period, perhaps effectively stopping the Japanese invasions of the later '30s and thus completely changing the course of history in east Asia long before OTL Pearl Harbor Day. The POD must be in the 1920s, or even earlier, and involve what I would presume to be a highly improbable development of a movement with something for everyone, that preempts both the top-down corruption of the OTL RoC under Chiang and the bottom-up radical populism of Mao. Give us that and perhaps something like OTL WWII goes forward in Europe, maybe the Japanese fight elsewhere than in China, or attempt invasion of China but are thrown out, and the the RoC (or ATL dynasty, or whatever) can keep the borders with Russia and deter a WWIII fight in the late 40s or early 50s. Such a China still must face how to address low per capita incomes, low literacy and general education, low levels of overall industrial development, and do so in the face of a tremendous and growing population it must either check the growth of drastically or expand industry at unheard of rate to get ahead, implying massive resource consumption that expands exponentially.

As I say the ATL author has their work cut out for them to explain China's mere existence as a sovereign power, let alone one peaceful and prosperous to help contain the USSR. To speculate it is a peaceful world with a subdued Cold War strikes me as pretty fatuous unfortunately. I'd settle for a Cold War as tense as OTL.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Would the Cold War have happened any differently w/out the communists coming out on top in the Chinese Civil War? One example I'm thinking of is that the Chinese wouldn't have had any reason to intervene in the Korean War.
The cold war as we know it wouldn't exist: the three big direct interventions of the cold war by superpowers were Vietnam, Korea and afgahnistan all three of which bordered China and the PRC played a huge role in all three instances. None of the three are likely to occur TTL.

A Kmt led China will not be overtly hostile against the USSR, and will be something akin to India: a neutral leaning towards one superpower but hardly anyone's firm ally or enemy.

If the Korean war still happens the Communists fold after Inchon and Korea is a unified right-wing capitalist state

There would be less/no mcCarthyism in the US, which began with the "loss of China"

Without Vietnam and assuming the US doesn't get into something equally as stupid somewhere else in the mid-late 60s: US domestic politics is going to be vastly different. OTL Vietnam destroyed the new deal coalition and the march towards social democracy in the US.

The Cold war might shift towards Middle-East and Africa since no Communist China greatly weakens power in SE Asia for the Communists.

The USSR might actually be in better shape since OTL they spent lots of money investing in China only to see it lost when Mao turned against the USSR, and OTL they stationed a huge number of troops on the Chinese border which TTL they would need less of.

I think the Soviets are significantly more likely to make a bigger play for the Middle-East TTL if Asia is out of their grasp.
 

RousseauX

Donor
But even with Stalin doing the KMT favors, exactly how does that party get the legitimacy it needs to become the agreed upon leader of China and create some degree of lasting peace? As I understand it, China had fragmented into dozens of regional fiefs controlled by local warlords of diverse theoretical positions that in practice all boiled down to getting on top of a more or less traditional Chinese food chain of landlords, bureaucrats answering to the warlord rather than any central agency, and random capitalist-industrialist entrepreneurs, if I am not mistaken as likely as not to be foreign. The latter gave the Republic of China some sort of zombie-like legitimacy in that foreign investors obviously liked being influential on the powers on the ground, but overall the result was violent chaos, a complete lack of effective progressive vision (beyond merely enforcing the profitability of various enterprises by repressing the workers, who were quite numerous and disposable) and withal tremendous rates of population grown atop a ramshackle economy.
Once the warlords are gone (and they could be defeated militarily and politically) and military power re-centralized the warlords stay gone, what drove warlordism was a specifically set of military arrangements which existed in the late Qing and what allowed them to last was the collapse of the central government followed by their replacement too busy dealing with the Japanese to consolidate power.

Once you eliminate the Japanese from the equation the warlords fall: the KMT has the mantle of Chinese nationalism legitimizing them plus direct control over the most prosperous parts of the country. Eventually whoever controls the KMT will buy/make enough tanks and artillery and money to muscle out the warlords and establish control over the whole country.
It is obvious enough to me how Maoist cadres got traction in the countryside in a situation like this, and eradicating them would be more than a matter of just killing off Mao. And without such a movement, how will the KMT balance the attempt to gain some grassroots legitimacy versus their commitment to the elites the OTL Maoists credibly were going to fight and overthrow? I can't see how they do otherwise than lean on top-down domination, double down on it until the masses despair of any alternative, and create a hypercapitalist dystopia.
hyper-capitalist dystopias are an absolute improvement over the previous arrangement in China from 1911-1949, capitalist dystopias in east asia actually did really well during the cold war.

The economic order you are going to have in a KMT China is not going to be some free market libertarian fantasy, it's going to look a lot like OTL Taiwan and South Korea where the state or at least people inside the government controls a large segment of industries directly or indirectly: not because of left-wing ideology but because that's how you keep power in the country and make $$$ and build up a constituency which supports you. Right-wing regimes in East Asia OTL tended to be state capitalist which in effect probably isn't too too different from soft-socialism.

The big question is if and how much the KMT can do land reforms because if they succeed at it they basically won over the peasantry for a couple generations even if it does piss off the gentry class, but the gentry class has being greatly weakened by the japanese invasion anyway. The South Korean government otl did land reforms after the Korean War and it was really successful and I wouldn't count out another right-wing east Asian dictatorship from doing the same.
The ATL does not have to provide a humane and democratic order to be sure! Only explain how the hideous mess is politically stable and capable of dealing with rival powers as effectively as the PRC did OTL
Almost every single post-colonial state were hideous mess and most of them had enough political stability not to collapse

The Republic of China that might wind up allied to the USA then would probably be much shrunken, perhaps even driven out of the north of China completely. Let us suppose otherwise, that the eastern part that was densely settled would remain, with US aid, in KMT hands, while west and north Soviet occupation shelters a number of puppet SSRs of low population and development, swarming with forward Red Army bases and barely able to sustain these, let alone meaningful development.
IF Chiang wins the 1945-1949 war the Communists are pretty much done unless the Soviets intervene to keep them alive in a People's Republic of China based in Manchuria or something. The Communists were defeated in the 1930s and only the Japanese invasion allowed them to build up again. In the event of an overwhelming conventional KMT victory the USSR probably doesn't prop up a counter-regime because Stalin had good relations with the KMT.

Defeating the Communists conventionally would have left the potential for a significant guerrilla movement to last but guerrillas rarely defeats the government on their own during the cold war, it might take decades but the CCP might end up something like the FARC in Columbia or the Naxalites in India: able to fight decade long low intensity conflicts but never getting close to overthrowing the state.

As I say the ATL author has their work cut out for them to explain China's mere existence as a sovereign power, let alone one peaceful and prosperous to help contain the USSR. To speculate it is a peaceful world with a subdued Cold War strikes me as pretty fatuous unfortunately. I'd settle for a Cold War as tense as OTL.
just a neutral china would have led to a significantly more subdued Cold War
 
Last edited:
Top