Geopolitics of a weaker China

Say China's economic reforms are delayed until the end of the cold war

What be the geopolitical impact of economical weaker China

Would the United States still try to pivot to Asia

What would be the impact on China's international influence

Would China still be as aggressive in the South China sea
 
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Manufacturing most probably pivots to India, Mexico, and ASEAN as sources for cheap labor.

China might be much more willing to accept permanent autonomy for Macau an Hong Kong as they have little leverage. The South China Sea gets split by Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
 
Manufacturing most probably pivots to India, Mexico, and ASEAN as sources for cheap labor.

China might be much more willing to accept permanent autonomy for Macau an Hong Kong as they have little leverage. The South China Sea gets split by Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
I think the PRC had some outposts in the Spratlys by the mid Cold War.
 
It's hard to delay the rise of China without something catastrophic like the Cold War going nuclear. The past 2 centuries are aberration in a previous pattern of China as a major great power.

A weaker China would mean that places like India, Vietnam, and Mongolia have less need to maintain close relations with the Soviet Union. Without the Sino-Pakistani alliance India would gain a major advantage in its simmering showdown against Pakistan. Bangladeshi independence may happen earlier, and more of Kashmir may be under New Delhi's control.

North Korea likely wouldn't exist without Chinese intervention in the Korean war, but a unified Korea (basically Asia's Belgium) would still face a delicate balancing act between Russian, Chinese, and Japanese influence.

Without China's massive appetite for natural resources, countries with large mining, hydrocarbon, and agricultural sectors would see less international demand and lower growth. Australian mining, Chile's copper industry, and oil producers around the world wouldn't have Chinese customers.

Agriculture in places like the US and Brazil is a major source of animal feed for China's growing pork consumption, a poorer China would mean a larger proportion of agricultural trade with India, Europe, or the rest of East Asia. The spike in world food prices after the Great Recession that contributed to the Arab Spring may not occur.
 
It's hard to delay the rise of China without something catastrophic like the Cold War going nuclear. The past 2 centuries are aberration in a previous pattern of China as a major great power.
Wouldn't China's current growth and economy be affected if the Market reforms are delayed until the early 1990s ?
 

Kaze

Banned
Look at what happened to the later parts of the Qing Dynasty - copy, paste, and repeat - that is what would happen if there is a weak China where in western powers would carve it up for colonies.
 
Wouldn't China's current growth and economy be affected if the Market reforms are delayed until the early 1990s ?
I'm saying its implausible for China's economy to be liberalized that late, its implausible for economic reforms not to happen in the long run (more than 2-3 decades later than OTL), sticking with Maoism for that long would be irrational to the point of economic suicide.

Chinese liberalization was driven by a different set of dynamics from the Warsaw Pact states. In 1976 Mao finally passed away, and his his successor Hua Guofeng had the Gang of Four arrested, ending the Cultural Revolution. Hua was overthrown by Deng Xiaoping and the party elite because Hua was unwilling to enact substantial reforms, and he was seen as an uninspiring leader without any new ideas.

Hua Guofeng's motto, "We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave", referred to as "The Two Whatevers" by its critics, sums up the extent of his creativity. He lost power because the party elite was tired of Maoism after the cultural revolution, so Deng's pragmatic faction took over.

The NEP from the '20s USSR is often cited as the inspiration for Deng's reforms, but by the late '70s Japan and the Asian Tigers also provided a successful model of export-based economic development.


Even the Party acknowledges the insanity of the Cultural Revolution and the personality cult around Mao. Nowadays Mao is only celebrated for resistance against the Japanese and winning the Chinese civil war. The party line has changed from viewing him as infallible to the idea that he was a great revolutionary leader and unified of the country, who nonetheless made mistakes (the biggest understatement of the 20th century).
 
Chinese liberalization was driven by a different set of dynamics from the Warsaw Pact states. In 1976 Mao finally passed away, and his his successor Hua Guofeng had the Gang of Four arrested, ending the Cultural Revolution. Hua was overthrown by Deng Xiaoping and the party elite because Hua was unwilling to enact substantial reforms, and he was seen as an uninspiring leader without any new ideas.
Could they shift to a soviet style system after Mao if Deng Xiaoping is removed or is otl reforms during the same time frame inevitable?
 
Could they shift to a soviet style system after Mao if Deng Xiaoping is removed or is otl reforms during the same time frame inevitable?

Difficult. I think by the time you get to Deng, there’s too much of a consensus within the Party that there has to be a different direction on the economy. There are differences on how market-oriented or how fast to pursue economic growth but too much of a consensus.

In OTL, Deng’s reforms took a beating from within the Party post-Tiananmen. But even then, it’s a case of Deng’s internal critics wanting him to slow down rather than wanting to switch to a Soviet system.

You would need a POD where either Deng does not come to power or Hua has his own ideas of how he wants to do things or both.
 
Difficult. I think by the time you get to Deng, there’s too much of a consensus within the Party that there has to be a different direction on the economy. There are differences on how market-oriented or how fast to pursue economic growth but too much of a consensus.

In OTL, Deng’s reforms took a beating from within the Party post-Tiananmen. But even then, it’s a case of Deng’s internal critics wanting him to slow down rather than wanting to switch to a Soviet system.

You would need a POD where either Deng does not come to power or Hua has his own ideas of how he wants to do things or both.
China's economic reforms were also much more gradual and decentralized than the in the end of the eastern bloc. One of Deng's important decisions was the choice to allow provincial and local leaders to experiment with different policy schemes. Unfortunately policy experimentation has tempered off under Xi Jinping. Deng only began by de-collectivizing agriculture in the early '80s, farmers had a dual track price system where they were required to produce a certain quota for the state, but any excess agricultural production was subject to normal market forces. Reforms affecting the rest of the economy like mergers and privatizations of small to medium sized and/or inefficient State Enterprises were only introduced later on over the course of the 1990s and '2000s.

The comparison between China and the Soviet bloc's trajectory is worthwhile, the CCP has devoted vast amounts of time and energy to studying how and why the USSR fell. Ideological stagnation is one the more commonly cited factors, which is part of why there's so importance placed on stuff like Xi Jinping Thought, the China Dream, and the 12 Core Socialist Values. The Soviet political system was too inflexible to tolerate any piecemeal reforms in the '70s and '80s, so the former eastern bloc in Europe was forced to disassemble their command economies all at once, leading to the recession in the '90s that China didn't see.

The experience of European privatization was by no means homogenous, but generally the countries that went through a faster, more aggressive form of shock therapy were economically better off afterwards. Poland, for example, went through a short, sharp recession during its privatization process, but Romania's economic were much more gradual and piecemeal, with different results. Poland, the Baltic States are one end of the spectrum that chose the most rapid forms of political reform and economic shock therapy, compared to the other extreme of countries where the communists lost power later ('92 in Albania), or there were basically no political or economic opening (Belarus, Turkmenistan, Moldova to some extent).

China still has somewhat wacky/nonexistent property rights though, the Houkou system makes its hard for economic migrants to get around. Rural people from the inland provinces migrate to larger coastal cities for economic reasons, but they can only access social services like education and healthcare in the rural areas where their household are officially registered. Without a Houkou registration, migrants in urban areas live in a grey area somewhat analogous to undocumented people in the US, migrant workers' children are often unable to register at urban public schools.

So far the party has decided to hold onto the system on the reasoning that the Houkou system makes slums less of problem than in other industrializing countries by restricting migration, and having a plot of land to farm and live off of provides a kind of safety net in case people lose their jobs in the city. The economy would probably benefit it people were able to buy/sell their farmland or use it as collateral for a loan, but the party is afraid of social instability caused by destitute, propertyless urban workers if a major economic crash occurs.
 
Say Hitler falls on his face in France in 1940, Japan still gets roflstomped by the US. Undistracted by Germany, the US and USSR come to loggerheads over China, which becomes a giant Korean war essentially once the civil war resumes. China is split into at least two parts, both horribly authoritarian regimes.

Short of nuclear war this seems the only plausible way to nerf china... well I guess you could try to have Japan conquer them but that's neatly ash and requires the US to be imploding.
 
The experience of European privatization was by no means homogenous, but generally the countries that went through a faster, more aggressive form of shock therapy were economically better off afterwards.

Really? Russia's shock therapy was extremely rapid and aggressive and the result was a massive depression that the Russians didn't start to recover from until the next decade and still haven't fully bounced back today.
 
Really? Russia's shock therapy was extremely rapid and aggressive and the result was a massive depression that the Russians didn't start to recover from until the next decade and still haven't fulbounced back today.
Russia's experience was far from universal across the former eastern bloc. Poland had a much smoother transition than Russia, while Ukraine's turnaround happened later than both Russia and Ukraine. Under the Balcerowicz Plan, Poland underwent the most rapid reforms and its GDP was growing again by 1992. A temporary increase in unemployment and a decline in output was more or less inevitable, but it was over much faster in Poland, Hungary, Czechia + Slovakia, and the Baltics than more delayed reformers in places like Russia and Ukraine. Poland and Ukraine have roughly the same population, ~40 million people, and they had the same levels of GDP as recently as 1990.
Ukraine_vs_Poland_GDP_per_capita_ppp_1990-2017.png

Screen Shot 2019-02-19 at 9.54.55 PM.png (Figure from Post-Soviet States on Wikipedia, data from World Bank)




This paper, Fifteen Years of Transformation in the Post-Communist World: Rapid Reformers Outperformed Gradualists, compares the economies performance of several different countries. Proponents of more gradualism argued that rapid, "big-bang" reforms would create greater social pain, but the reverse appears to have occurred. Both poverty and inequality were higher in Confederacy of Independent States (CIS, post-Soviet countries - the Baltics) countries with limited reforms (Belarus, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) and moderate, gradual reforms (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc.)
Screen Shot 2019-02-19 at 8.51.10 PM.png
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Russia's experience was far from universal across the former eastern bloc. Poland had a much smoother transition than Russia, while Ukraine's turnaround happened later than both Russia and Ukraine. Under the Balcerowicz Plan, Poland underwent the most rapid reforms and its GDP was growing again by 1992. A temporary increase in unemployment and a decline in output was more or less inevitable, but it was over much faster in Poland, Hungary, Czechia + Slovakia, and the Baltics than more delayed reformers in places like Russia and Ukraine. Poland and Ukraine have roughly the same population, ~40 million people, and they had the same levels of GDP as recently as 1990.
View attachment 441908

View attachment 441909 (Figure from Post-Soviet States on Wikipedia, data from World Bank)




This paper, Fifteen Years of Transformation in the Post-Communist World: Rapid Reformers Outperformed Gradualists, compares the economies performance of several different countries. Proponents of more gradualism argued that rapid, "big-bang" reforms would create greater social pain, but the reverse appears to have occurred. Both poverty and inequality were higher in Confederacy of Independent States (CIS, post-Soviet countries - the Baltics) countries with limited reforms (Belarus, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) and moderate, gradual reforms (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc.)
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Lets not fall in shock therapy traps here and star thinking that all countries work exactly the same. The "how" is far more important in this sort of reform than the velocity of them. Different countries have different structures, strengths and weaknessed, large scale reforms need to aknowlegde local circunstances and adapt the tools to the country.
 
What do we mean by a weaker China? Are we limited by a time period here? Because you could have Soviet imperialism see them make all of Mongolia, Xinjiang, and maybe Manchuria into satellite states with the right POD's in the 1920s.
 
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