DBWI: No North/South China

What would the world be like with China as a unified country, instead of a north/south split? I know there are still some die-hard anti-Communists out there and I know that this is unpopular to say, but I personally wonder if a unified China would have led to a safer, more secure Asia. Instead, we have to deal with a hodgepodge of warlords, the Nationalist dictatorship, Buddhist monarchies, Communist Northern China, and whoever else I've forgotten. I mean, the United States is still combating opium production in Xinjiang after fifteen years there, for Chrissakes!

What would a world with a unified China look like? Would Northern China still be the cesspool that it is in OTL?
 
I think that the split was fairly inevitable.

The only way there could have been unification would be for the Nationalists to have done something ridiculously stupid.

I know some think that if they had carried out the Manchurian campaign in '46, disaster would have occurred but I'm not so sure.

No matter what the commies did (or Peoples Republic of China, as Manchuria insists upon calling itself), I can't see them reaching places such as Shanghai, Canon and Nanking.
 
I believe that it is an unfair and biased statement for several reasons. First, the breakup of China certainly allowed the political growth of Tibet. The religious growth created a Buddhist Cultural Renaissance that helped the entire region in the 1960s and 1970s. Can anyone imagine a 1966 where the Quarrymen and the Dalai Lama weren't able to meet in Lhasa?

Second, with the Bandung Conference in 1955, the Third World was able to display political and economic unity, led by Zhou En-Lai (PRC) and Li Tsung-jen (DRC). Imagine the price that would have been paid by the nations of the Southern Hemisphere in a world didn't have the advocacy of both the People's Republic of China and the Democratic Republic of China on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Would they won such prized rights as the "New International Economic Order" in 1977? Would they have been able to enjoy the technological benefits of the "New International Information Order" in 1992?
 
Had all of China become Communist, China, with its billion-plus people, might have somewhere along the line been able to challenge the USSR for leadership of the Communist bloc, rather than being a Soviet Satellite and part of the Ulan-Baatar Pact with Hokkaido, Mongolia, Afghanistan, and East Turkestan.
 
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