DBAHC: No Indochina Tigers

The countries of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaya and to a lesser extent Bengal and Borneo are economically prosperous with high HDIs. However, was there ever a chance that they could have been poor, or at least not as prosperous as OTL?
 
OOC- Just curious, how are the OTL Asian Tigers and China doing ITTL? Perhaps how they turn out would influence your DBWI.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Well for starters, if the Japanese hadn't reformed the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere into being a true Co-Prosperity Sphere instead of a means to extract resources to feed their own economy than all of these countries would be much worse off.
 
OOC- Just curious, how are the OTL Asian Tigers and China doing ITTL? Perhaps how they turn out would influence your DBWI.

OOC: I don't want to be too controlling of the scenario so someone else can tell how they are doing ITTL.

Well for starters, if the Japanese hadn't reformed the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere into being a true Co-Prosperity Sphere instead of a means to extract resources to feed their own economy than all of these countries would be much worse off.

It is a bit ironic how those countries managed to overtake Japan due to the 1990s Japanese Depression, and the ensuing political instability from there. In fact, the headquarters of the sphere is set to move from Tokyo to Phnom Penh in 2020.
 
It is a bit ironic how those countries managed to overtake Japan due to the 1990s Japanese Depression, and the ensuing political instability from there. In fact, the headquarters of the sphere is set to move from Tokyo to Phnom Penh in 2020.

True. Though Japan's still the leading military power - they're the ones with the nukes and the world's third-largest navy.
 
You've got to go back to the fall of French Indochina for this. During the Great Russian War (or "War of Vengeance and Freedom" if you're German) the European Powers got really bogged down fighting the Soviets, and Britain and France in particular got really freaked out that Stalin was going to cut a deal with the Japanese. London chose to throw Paris under the bus and basically sell Indochina to Tokyo on France's behalf to save their own empire. It remains a sore point in Anglo-French relations to this day. If France kept Indochina I would expect a far bloodier decolonisation than what happened IOTL when the US ramped up the pressure on Japan in the 60s. What we got was a collection of more-or-less functional states with strong potential for the future being released peacefully as part of a greater pan-continental economic pact (the Prosperity Sphere). What we could have got was France fighting tooth and nail to hold the region, before clocking the Imperial Age ended over 50 years prior and so simply chucking a bunch of carpet-bombed hellholes out of the back door. I would expect civil wars abound that could get really ugly in the 60s and 70s. Indochina won't be a world-leading economic centroplex after that ordeal!
 
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