KMT wins Chinese Civil War?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 1487
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Deleted member 1487

How could you get the KMT to defeat the ChiComs in the post-WW2 Civil War? What impact would that have on the Cold War and what impact would it have on China? Would the US be its big patron and would that impact Japan's rise? I get the impression that Japan was built up as much as it was to offset the rise of Communist China.
 
Given all the structural issues the GMD was experiencing post-war, it's not particularly easy. And a ton of those issues were impossible to fix or out of the GMD's capability to tackle. Basically, corruption, bureaucracy and mismanagement by provincial and local officials all drastically eroded popular support for the GMD, and they didn't even have that much support to begin with among the majority rural population since the Communists were actually enacting popular reforms like land reform in Yan'an while the GMD was dithering on those issues. So to start you need to have huge changes that go all the way back to the Nanjing Decade, whether in the GMD or CCP and their means of securing and consolidating their zones of control.

That aside, even with an outright GMD victory and the destruction of Communist strongholds it won't be easy to get China back on the move like Japan was able to. Much of the country's economic power was completely obliterated when Japan invaded, and IOTL the PRC did rely on a good deal of foreign aid to secure short-term economic stability even though the land reforms also did help. Depending on how the Chinese government moves on with responding to the clamour for reform, a similar situation could arise, but instead of heavy-handed government intervention in industry and key sectors of the economy you could see a return of price mechanisms and a market-oriented economy when things stabilise like in the Nanjing Decade, as the war economy returns to a state of normalcy. The US might consider starting a Marshall Plan-type aid/investment plan to jumpstart things, but even then there'd be less allure for that because a GMD victory would probably butterfly the idea of the domino effect, and the fear of Communism spreading into SE Asia and the rest of the Asia-Pacific.

Speaking of the US, I think that China would seek to cultivate generally closer ties with the US to encourage investment and possibly acquire a major ally, but also do so with the USSR. OTL the GMD and USSR had decent relations until the Soviets began outright supporting the CCP when the Civil War broke out again, but if a POD involves the Soviets maintaining their ties to Nanjing it could make China become a sort of middle-ground nation that serves as a separate kingmaking superpower independent of both countries. That sort of influence is going to be huge in the UN and will likely accelerate China's rise to superpower status. Alternatively, if the Soviets still support the CCP like in OTL then China would lurch more to the US, but would be less dependent and would see itself as a more equal partner to Washington in containing the Soviet Union.

Finally, quick note on Japan. The US was already investing millions of dollars into rebuilding the economy under the occupation. To them, turning Japan into a very useful regional ally was another step in containment well before China fell. Even if the GMD resume control over all Chinese territory, the US isn't going to pull its investment out if it prevents Communism from making even further inroads into East Asia. Especially with the Soviet Union still a sea away from Japan.
 
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