Mao Zedong dies in 1956

Unless the PRC had a full-scale civil war, this wouldn't go well.
Jiang had the whole idea of Project National Glory in OTL but I doubt it would get off the ground with Mao dying earlier than him dying later as per OTL. If anything this might make it harder as this PRC is without the insanity of the later Mao regime implemented.
 
Why wouldn't it go forward? You can have thriving agriculture and industry at the same time. The US did. A thriving agriculture can strongly help industrialization as you need fewer and fewer people to grow more and more food so you can move them into factories without starving anyone.

which is what the great leap forward was, except if the improvement of the agriculture fails, it all has to be reversed to prevent a famine. It has to be done in steps, not a great leap. You have to focus on modernizing and improving the agriculture first before even considering moving people to the cities and into factories. That takes decades, especially with the half a billion population of China in that time. Chinese agriculture was depended on manpower mostly.

If you get mass immigration as a lot of people suggest, you get stagnation. Next to that mass collectivization leads to decline in agriculture as the great leap showed.
 
which is what the great leap forward was, except if the improvement of the agriculture fails, it all has to be reversed to prevent a famine. It has to be done in steps, not a great leap. You have to focus on modernizing and improving the agriculture first before even considering moving people to the cities and into factories. That takes decades, especially with the half a billion population of China in that time. Chinese agriculture was depended on manpower mostly.

If you get mass immigration as a lot of people suggest, you get stagnation. Next to that mass collectivization leads to decline in agriculture as the great leap showed.
Modernizing agriculture means millions of peasants lose their jobs on farms and need some other way to earn their bread and butter, usually by going to the cities to find work as day to day laborer or factory worker. If those jobs are not there in sufficient quantities they might get revolutionary ideas, like getting someone into power to raise up those needed factories, and damn the greedy kulaks for not giving the money needed for this!

Not doing both at the same time is not really an option.
 
which is what the great leap forward was, except if the improvement of the agriculture fails, it all has to be reversed to prevent a famine. It has to be done in steps, not a great leap. You have to focus on modernizing and improving the agriculture first before even considering moving people to the cities and into factories. That takes decades, especially with the half a billion population of China in that time. Chinese agriculture was depended on manpower mostly.

If you get mass immigration as a lot of people suggest, you get stagnation. Next to that mass collectivization leads to decline in agriculture as the great leap showed.

Agreed, it will take decades. A country can't become industrialized with a flip of a swhitch.
 
Modernizing agriculture means millions of peasants lose their jobs on farms and need some other way to earn their bread and butter, usually by going to the cities to find work as day to day laborer or factory worker. If those jobs are not there in sufficient quantities they might get revolutionary ideas, like getting someone into power to raise up those needed factories, and damn the greedy kulaks for not giving the money needed for this!

Not doing both at the same time is not really an option.

The point of improving agriculture is to free up labor for industrialization. Nobody here is saying China shouldn't industrialize. If you need 10% fewer peasants then you stick that 10% in building factories.

The idea here is you don't pull a huge number of peasants in factories overnight and hope people don't starve and that doing everything in a rush won't produce extremely low-quality products that does nobody much good.
 
The point of improving agriculture is to free up labor for industrialization. Nobody here is saying China shouldn't industrialize. If you need 10% fewer peasants then you stick that 10% in building factories.

The idea here is you don't pull a huge number of peasants in factories overnight and hope people don't starve and that doing everything in a rush won't produce extremely low-quality products that does nobody much good.

And you definitely don't have people melt down their hoes, shovels and cookware to meet a "steel" quota.
 
I was assuming Taiwan wouldn't get thrown under the bus by the UN like what occurred in 1971 in real life. I mean we had US military troops stationed in Taiwan back then...

If China still splits with the Soviets ITTL, the US government is still going to want to get the PRC on-side at some point.
 
If China still splits with the Soviets ITTL, the US government is still going to want to get the PRC on-side at some point.
In other words: Taiwan gets thrown under the bus still ? Imagine being in Taiwan's situation, getting dumped during the honeymoon period...
 
Bookmarking this thread for a thorough analysis/speculation of the situation, but long story short, EVERY CHANGES. The economic and political history of China is entirely rewritten, Mao goes down in Chinese history as a brilliant martyr-saint, and there are so many butterflies.

Taking my grad level courses on Chinese Economic Development, East Asia Security, and Internal Politics now, so this is highly relevant. Want to give it the analysis that it deserves.
 

Lusitania

Donor
What I have read is that the only reason Chinese leaders in the 1970s and 1980s were able to convince people to ditch communist economic doctrine and adopt capitalism was due to the Chinese people's anger and dissolution with the Cultural revolution which had killed millions of people and been complete failure. A Communist China with the cultural revolution and under different leader would of followed traditional communist development policies. Industrialization would of continued under state control, agrarian policies would of continued as before and we would not of witnessed the great leap forward or modernization of China we see today.
 
If Mao died in 1956, I don't think China would be able to avoid some kind of devastating high-level feud or even all-out civil conflict, probably right after the Great Leap is forcibly reversed and confusion sets in over what exactly to do next. With Mao gone so early and leaving an already-controversial legacy behind, intra-party conflicts aren't just over policy-- they're over a martyr's legacy, and factions are going to use adherence to that legacy as a measuring stick for themselves and each other. Combine that with the latent potential for mass mobilization... All it would take is one embittered high- or even mid-level functionary feeling like Liu Shaoqi isn't bringing about the Revolution he (or she?) wanted, and then putting up a big-character poster in Beijing University.
 
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Bookmarking this thread for a thorough analysis/speculation of the situation, but long story short, EVERY CHANGES. The economic and political history of China is entirely rewritten, Mao goes down in Chinese history as a brilliant martyr-saint, and there are so many butterflies.

Taking my grad level courses on Chinese Economic Development, East Asia Security, and Internal Politics now, so this is highly relevant. Want to give it the analysis that it deserves.

Ooh. i look forward to it. :)
 
So let's start off by considering the immediate impact.

The death of Mao would specifically mean mean several key policies would change, effectively butterflying the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (and almost certainly Deng's economic reforms). First, the agricultural reform debate goes in favor of Liu Shaoqi as Mao is no longer among the living, thus mechanization takes precedent over (forced) collectivization as agricultural policy, as opposed to Mao's and OTL's policy of collectivization (primarily) and, later, Mao's belief in the mass line and "walking on two legs". As Mao is not behind the wheels to put his foot down on the accelerator and drive the (at the time, prospering) economy straight into a brick wall, agricultural productivity would not take quite the same shock as it did in the 1958-1962 period. Moreover, Mao is not alive to effectively try and make war against reality at the Lushan Conference, which meant the upper party members are more likely to actually respond to the crisis, which means it is unlikely that there will be a policy-induced famine that causes some 30 million deaths by starvation with 30 million delayed births. He would not be around later to advocate for "permanent revolution" and argue that class struggle was a feature of socialist societies as well, and would not be around to criticize and undermine the new CCP bureaucracy that would culminate in the Cultural Revolution with his mass mobilization of students. These are all undeniably huge positives in the short term.

Liu Shaoqi (and his protege, Deng Xiaoping) will be the immediate inheritors of Party leadership. By this point, he was effectively appointed the #2 spot in within the party (despite Mao's own preferences and his rivalry with him) due in part to his own power base within the burgeoning bureaucracy and his effectiveness in organization and policy administration. Liu Shaoqi was Moscow-trained, and favored Soviet-style development, focusing on a command economy & "strategic" heavy industries, which is economically (for China's comparative advantages) the worst approach to take. Heavy industry is capital intensive, a high degree of technical knowledge, and good infrastructure, all of which China is severely deficient in and thus dependent on Soviet aid and, particularly, loans (which at this time was piling up in terms of debt, much to the resentment of Mao and some others in the Politburo). Liu Shaoqi is likely to continue and double down on this strategy, which while comparatively stabilizing for China in the short term is actually quite detrimental to the long-term economic development of China. Part of the impetus for the Great Leap Forward was the economic demands that Soviet loan repayments was having on Chinese finances, and thus demanded increased extraction from the peasants (land/agricultural taxes being the primary form of revenue for highly agrarian states). The GLF and the Sino-Soviet split disrupted this (with tragic human results), but staying on course as Liu Shaoqi is likely to choose will worsen this fiscal problem, which will come to a head eventually.

Without Mao, the cult of personality that bound together the nation and legitimized the CCP begins to fade; Liu Shaoqi was quite the bureaucrat and lacked the same personal charisma that Mao had, whom with my own meetings with former ambassadors who met with Mao stated that he just exuded an undeniable eccentric magnetism that drew people to listen to him. He was an old peasant revolutionary, fighting against the ossification and bureaucratization of the CCP along the Soviet model, which while pro. His political struggles with other CCP leaders utterly broke party norms, creating inter-party factionalism and promoting adherence to the state line. The aftereffects of the GLF and the Cultural Revolution meant that everyone, urban and rural, party cadres and the workers themselves, and even party leaders recognized the fundamental failings of socialism and Maoism, and would facilitate and allow for a major paradigm shift in CCP policy, leading itself to reform.

Without that impetus and drive for a radical change in direction, China is likely to continue along in the Soviet model, bureaucratized by the party proper. Meanwhile, continued frustrations with the bureaucratic machine would continue to build, until you likely see a more explosive version of the Cultural Revolution if any weakness in the state is seen. Mao did not create the movement out of nothing: there was building frustrations with the Soviet developmental model and within students and workers that was harnessed by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. I'd speculate that without Mao, China goes down the road of other Soviet-style economies and implodes during the 90s, instead of initiating reforms in the late 70s/early 80s and being able to economically reform and develop since.

In foreign policy, the Sino-Soviet split is likely to be delayed; Mao is not alive to seriously drive foreign policy, and on the Chinese end it was driven in particular due to Mao's distaste and hatred for Khrushchev, but also the secret provisions of the Sino-Soviet treaty, the mounting pressures of Soviet loans, and the leashing of China's foreign policy to Soviet interests. The neutrality of the Soviets in Indo-Chinese border clashes, or highly delayed support for China during crises during the Taiwanese Straits all exacerbated the split into open border clashes (and finally the Brezhnev doctrine made it readily apparent), but the primary split occurred during the late 50s and ruptured in the early 60s due predominantly to Mao's own personality and approach to foreign affairs. Long term, a delayed or butterflied Sino-Soviet split means that there is likely no major US rebalancing in the region as was done by Nixon/Kissinger's "opening of China". That required a prominent, "anti-communist" president well-versed in foreign affairs (and Kissinger as a force of nature as National Security Adviser), but also a receptive Chinese leader looking for allies, and a Sino-Soviet split so obvious/tangible that even the most die-hard anti-communists in the USA could look past ideology.

Sino-American rapprochement was necessary, long-term, for China's economic reforms. While China's economic "miracle" started in the countryside as decollectivization took place, creating a surge in agricultural productivity that freed up labor to go into rural Town-Village Enterprises (TVEs) and into private businesses, urban development was funded both by FDI and by the growing export-economy made possible by access to the liberal world economy as "light", labor-intensive consumer industries, long neglected by Soviet style industrialization, flourished as "low hanging fruits", readily picked up by the growing market. Again, a China ideologically and geopolitically bound to the Soviet Union would not be free to pursue market reforms, not to mention to lack of domestic receptiveness to such a reorientation of policy.

Thus, the legacy of Mao is incredibly complicated. It's very hard to disentangle China and Mao during the 1950s-early 1970s because of the sheer impact he had on shaping the country, and while the disasters under his belt are plainly obvious (the GLF in particular), in many ways he paved the way for China to undergo reform as opposed to continue along the lines of a Soviet-style economy.
 
What happens to Lin Biao?
Never becomes a major power player in intra-CCP politics in the first place. His rise through the military was facilitated by Peng Dehuai's purge at the Lushan conference in 1959 led by Mao on very spurious grounds (in an effort to strike at Liu Shaoqi), and Mao's immediate promotion of him based on his loyalties to Mao. No Mao=No Purge of Peng Dehuai=No Lin Biao as Minister of Defense, particularly as the PLA was quite solidly behind Peng prior to the purge due to his reputation as the hero of the Korean War.
 
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