no. fillerIs there any plausible way of having Mao take leadership of the Guomindang (before '37)?
Considering Mao didn't have control of the CCP in 1937 (despite official histiography, Wang Ming's faction were still in most leadership positions at the time), I'm going to go with Thorfinnsson on this one.
There are a couple of problems with this scenario. The first is that the CCP was not actually an organized faction within the KMT: individual members joined the KMT on an individual basis, and while this did not mean that they magically lost their commie-ness, it did make it more difficult for them to operate as communists within the KMT organization. The second was the CCP's relationship to the Communist International. Stalin was perfectly happy to have Jiang as an ally, and would not have sanctioned a CCP move against the KMT leadership. Such a move would have seen the Comintern and Soviet Union come down on the side of the KMT. The third, which I brought up before, was Mao's non-leadership position within the CCP itself, such leadership being won long after the Long March which began, not cemented, his rise to prominence.I can sorta see it. You have to avert the CCP-KMT split, and then let the CCP take over the party. Once there, you might finangle Mao to the top, though I don't see hao...
Now, THIS ONE, I can believe.Note that the challenge doesn't specify that Mao has to be Communist. So there are two ways of getting there: either he ditches the CCP before the split of 1927 (and perhaps earns cookie points by turning in his former comrades, after all it's not like he didn't purge them when he had the chance in OTL), or he never becomes a Communist in the first place.
During the 1911 revolution, he joined the Hunan militia, but then left it to complete his secondary education in Changsha. That's where he met Yang Changji, a progressive-minded professor who took him to Beijing where he took part in the May 1919 movement; Yang would become his father-in-law and got him a job as a librarian at Beijing University, where he was exposed to Communism. So if you have him simply stay in the army and become an officer, not only do you butterfly away his discovery of Communism, but you also make it possible for him to rise in the Republican military and catch Sun Yat-sen's attention.