Mother Russia Will Never Surrender - A WW II TL

Ark Royal was several months after the PoD. I had that U-Boat that sunk it butterflied away :). As for East Prussia, I was giving that to Poland in compensation for something else Poland won't get and because the USSR gets some other additional territory ITTL...

The Germans retreated west and in April 1943 all of the Soviet Union’s pre-war territories had been restored to it and Finland had been occupied.

A quote from the TL ;).
 
Update time :). I hope everybody likes it.



Chapter IV: The Raising of the Iron Curtain, 1944 – 1965.


The Second World War had ended and the new balance of power had to be written down, which included peace treaties for the defeated powers. This was after 40 million deaths, including nearly 2 million Jews, and the destruction of much of Europe. Those peace treaties, however, would be mostly decided upon by the Allied powers of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union and their leaders: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt and Premier Joseph Stalin. They gathered in the Italian city of Ravenna for the Conference of Ravenna in which, unbeknownst to many at the time, the future ideological boundaries would be laid down. Roosevelt and Churchill arrived first with their own Secret Service and MI5 body guards, but Stalin was the most impressive as he not only took an entire legion of NKVD body guards with him, but also his entire entourage who needed an entire hotel for themselves. Stalin came forward acting quite brash with his demands, which immediately put a downer on the Ravenna Conference. Stalin demanded a sphere of influence as a buffer zone against ‘future western aggression’ which especially Churchill wasn’t too happy with although Roosevelt seemed to understand Stalin more. Stalin even showed the pictures taken of Nazi war crimes in the USSR (real and fake) to both Churchill and Roosevelt. The largest problem was that US and British forces in Western Europe had mostly demobilized and many of them had been redeployed to Asia. The Red Army, however, had some 10 million men in Germany and Austria. US estimates were that the Red Army could be in Calais in a matter of weeks, facing opposition only from occupation garrisons. Most of these were manned with inexperienced soldiers, while the 10 million Red Army soldiers were battle hardened, experienced and well equipped. Italy was ramshackle and would be overrun quickly too. Allied intelligence, however, ignored logistics, but Stalin held all the cards and the atomic bomb was another six months away. Churchill alluded to the atomic bomb, but Stalin already knew of that due to his moles in the Manhattan Project and was unimpressed since he could conquer Europe within weeks and present the world with a fait accompli.

Roosevelt and Churchill had to concede and Churchill announced that ‘an iron curtain had been let down over Europe’. In Germany elections were organized and the KPD was resurrected. These ‘elections’, however were rigged as NKVD internal troops brutally squashed any dissent and made opposition impossible. The KPD won the German 1945 elections with a wide margin and these would be the last German elections for some time and so Germany became part of Stalin’s sphere of influence. Wilhelm Pieck was appointed Premier and Walter Ulbricht became secretary-general. The same happened all over eastern Europe where communist leaders won and became Stalin’s puppet dictators: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (Tito had died under mysterious circumstances), Albania and Finland. In Finland the ‘Supreme People’s Assembly’ even voted to be annexed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the Finnish SSR, thus making the annexation official. Some other territorial redistributions took place too. Bessarabia was annexed into the USSR too and so all of the former Russian Empire’s territories were united again. East Prussia was awarded to Poland as compensation for the eastern territories lost to the Soviet Union which gave Poland a restive German minority which was solved by their repatriation to Germany, by force of arms in certain cases. Germany effectively returned to 1937 borders minus East Prussia. The end of the war was also the start of the Moscow Trails in which Stalin revealed that he had Hitler alive as well as a number of his high ranking underlings such as Goering and Himmler and a number of Hitler’s generals which ended the massive manhunt of the CIA and MI5. Over the course of many months all of them had been subjected to varying torture techniques although the interrogators had been specifically instructed to be not too harsh since Stalin wanted them alive to be put on a show trail. Stalin would not let his moment of supreme triumph over his arch nemesis be ruined by some insignificant NKVD interrogators of which he had many in his service. Hitler’s mental state by now had completely broken down and in his defence for as far as he got one he was erratically and incoherently raving on about Jewish and communist conspiracies in Moscow and Washington against Germany. At the sight of Stalin who was there to witness his demise, he exploded in a fit of rage and attempted to get to him in which he failed, being the mentally deranged physical wreck that he was (although he was consistent enough to not sign a confession so they had to forge his autograph). After the Moscow Trails were over, Hitler was executed on a field outside of Moscow by hanging on January 25th 1945. His grave was dug and he was left there; it went unmarked and those who knew where it was took the location with them to their grave after Stalin was sure Hitler was dead. The remaining high ranking Nazis were executed as well while many of Hitler’s generals were given lengthy prison sentences.

Some of Stalin’s prisoners, however, weren’t. Relations deteriorated almost immediately after the end of the war, starting with peace in Europe in 1943 already. Many of Hitler’s scientists had been working on new wonder weapons until the last days of the war and many hadn’t avoided capture, more so since Stalin had specifically ordered them to be captured alive and unharmed. Among them were Wernher von Braun, Otto Hahn and Carl Weizsäcker. The former was the leading scientist in the Reich’s ballistic missile program while the latter two were part of Germany’s small and unsuccessful nuclear energy program. Their leader, Werner Heisenberg, had escaped to France where Anglo-American forces had gotten their hands on him. With the war over and the economy switching back to peacetime production, Stalin ordered the immediate start of a ballistic missile program and a nuclear energy program geared to atomic weaponry, beginning with sifting through all existing German data. The Peenemunde facility and Mittlebau Dora were dismantled and shipped east to complete the A4, the world’s first operational ballistic missile, for the benefit of the Soviet Union and give the country a leap forward in missile technology. In the meantime, Hahn and Weizsäcker were added to a team consisting of Igor Kurchatov, Andrei Sakharov and Georgy Flerov among others who were all quite capable to the task at hand and motivated too after ‘encouragement’ from an NKVD political officer or two. In early 1944, the Soviet atomic bomb program began in all earnest on a large site east of Omsk and was supplied with ample uranium from sites in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia as well as seized stockpiles from Germany (stockpiles in the USSR wouldn’t be discovered until later). The program was put under the supervision of the ruthless NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria as an extra motivation. It was the missile program, however, that scored success first with the test launch of an A4 ballistic missile in summer 1944. Not long hereafter, the first flashpoint of the Cold War popped up: Persia.

Persia had been occupied since 1941 since its Shah was suspected of pro-German sympathies. Now Britain and the US wanted the Soviets to clear out, but Stalin refused since he felt strong enough to resist western demands. He had the largest standing army in the world, many European allies which enabled him to conquer Europe quickly and Mao had completed his conquest of China. The northern Soviet-occupied half of Persia was renamed the Democratic People’s Republic of Persia while the south remained under the autocratic rule of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi who received funding, weapons and training from the US and Britain. Moscow gave support to the North and gave even more weapons. Stalin went so far as to equip practically the entire army of North Persia as it would become known. Many former ‘re-educated’ SS officers turned Stasi or NKVD also helped in setting up a secret police to weed out dissidents which included the country’s many Muslim leaders. Very soon the entire Northern army was equipped with T-34, IS-1 and T-54 tanks, Yak-3 fighter planes, IL-2 ‘Sturmovik’ dive bombers and the brand new MiG-15 jet fighter which would compete with the F-86 Sabre, and AK-47 assault rifles. At the outbreak of the Persian War the Persian Workers’ Army outclassed the Imperial Army of the Shah by far in terms of equipment and could count on much more direct support from Moscow too. In 1947 war erupted when the North invaded the south with Stalin’s permission after intelligence had told him that the US possessed less than three dozen nuclear weapons which they were unlikely to use lightly and waste them while Stalin possessed abundant stockpiles of chemical weapons, including captured German supplies of nerve gas. Moreover, nuclear weapons were estimated to be as devastating as any one thousand plane raid like the ones Germany had seen (nuclear weapons were also seen as big explosives at the time since little was known about radiation). Stalin also knew that his own atomic bomb was only a year or so away from completion thanks to the efforts of his scientists and his enormous pre-existing military-industrial complex which provided ample supplies of natural resources and raw power.

Northern forces invaded, but the barren deserts and high mountains proved tough terrain although Imperial Persian border forces were overrun and the Shah requested American aid as enemy forces advanced south quickly in spite of organized resistance. The aging equipment of most of the Imperial Persian Army was inadequate. Only the Shah’s guard had been equipped with western equipment for now. The North also used R-1 missiles supplied by the Soviet Union which were the definitive versions of the A4 ballistic missile developed by Von Braun and his Soviet colleague Sergei Korolyov who ran the Soviet missile program which would evolve into the Soviet space agency. They were too inaccurate for anything but terror bombing which was their intended purpose. A US expeditionary force of 500.000 men strong arrived on the battlefield as well as British, French, Italian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian forces to stop the communists. Even the Jewish state of Israel lent its support to the Shah. The result was a bloody stalemate which wouldn’t end until 1949 after two million deaths. The armistice set the border as it had been pre-war and so the Persian War ended in a fizzle, without the feared and expected clash between the two new superpowers, the USSR and the US. In the meantime, the USSR had successfully detonated a 22 kiloton nuclear warhead in Siberia in July 1948. This ended the nuclear monopoly the United States had held since 1945. This also led to the formation of the Atlantic Defence Community or ADC in 1950, an alliance of western, democratic powers as a ‘cordon sanitaire’ against communism. The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Britain, Denmark, Greece and Sweden joined forces against the eastern bloc. Of the latter two, Greece had just fought a civil war with communists and Sweden was scared because communist powers dominated the Baltic Sea and wanted help in its nuclear weapons program. The response was the creation of the Leningrad Pact in 1952 which included the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, Mongolia and Korea.

China was becoming the dominant power in Asia with Soviet help. Mao Zedong’s Soviet-equipped Peoples’ Liberation Army had conquered all of China but Taiwan by 1947 despite American funding and weapons for Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces. Due to his land reform and anti-western, anti-bourgeoisie, anti-elite rhetoric he was very popular and gained in support. In 1947 he had begun his First Four Year Plan in his quest to make China a great power. Following Stalin’s example he collectivized agriculture and nationalized industry with assistance from Soviet advisors. Utilizing China’s massive labour pool Mao began to massively expand mainly heavy industry, electricity production and mining. Coal production doubled, pig iron production tripled and steel production doubled as well, but at the expense of 14-18 hour workdays and the massive use of forced labour to build Mao’s massive infrastructural projects such as roads, railroads, communications, canals and harbours. This was done with abundant Soviet aid as Stalin wanted a strong ally on his eastern flank. Stalin sold machinery, building plans and sent advisors who Mao reluctantly accepted despite his distrust for intellectuals (although they averted some of his more whacky economic policies).

Stalin’s death in 1954 at the age of 75 didn’t immediately end an era of relatively good Sino-Soviet relations, but the two communist great powers were bound to have a falling out since Mao wanted to assert his dominant position. The other problem was conflict with India which had gained independence from Britain in 1947. The USSR fostered friendly relations with India too. For the new Premier, Vyacheshlav Molotov, this was not yet pressing since the USSR was far more powerful militarily and the only communist power with nuclear weapons. In 1954, this difference was amplified when the Soviet Union tested a 3.3 megaton hydrogen bomb in response to the Ivy Mike test two years earlier and Britain’s first nuclear test in 1952, and advanced further with newer, more advanced ballistic missiles which continued the arms race between west and east. A far more pressing matter was the Middle East which Molotov wanted to dominate increasingly. After the failure of the Persian War, the Soviet Union started funding Arab Nationalist and Arab Socialist movements such as the Ba’ath party in Syria and Iraq which combined Arab Socialism and Nationalism in a new secular ideology. The result was the overthrow of King Faisal II of Iraq in 1956 by force of arms because he was seen as a western puppet ruler by many, including the Iraqi military which supported de coup d’état. The result was a new Arab Socialist/Arab Nationalist dictatorship by the Ba’ath party which ushered in a new era of development for Iraq and Syria as well since it too fell under the spell of a Ba’ath revolution. This opened up these countries for Soviet aid in the shape of military advisors and weapons and Iraq gained new funds after the nationalization of the oil industry which earned Iraq the ire of Britain and America. Iraq and Syria used the money to seriously modernize their armed forces, but also set up a modern education system for all, created universal healthcare, built a modern infrastructure, modernized the economic base of the country and lay the foundations for a modern, secular state. The result was also that Israel and South Persia (the Shah’s Persia) were included into the Atlantic Defence Coalition and Syria, North Persia and Iraq into the Leningrad Pact. As Israel joined, Saudi Arabia and Jordan remained neutral due to their bad relations with the Jewish state as well as Stalinist North Persia, and because they knew they would get help from one alliance if attacked by the other. The two did sign a mutual defence and economic pact which was later joined by Yemen, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates known as the Arab League.

The second Cold War crisis arose when Nasser’s Egypt, a country friendly to the USSR, nationalized the Suez Canal which earned Egypt the anger of France and Britain who threatened war in no uncertain terms. Britain dispatched aircraft carrier HMS Eagle (R05) and the French sent battleship Richelieu. These two and their escorts easily outmatched the Egyptian navy, but the crisis expanded when Molotov made an unexpected visit to the country to discuss Egypt’s future Leningrad Pact membership and military aid which led to fears of war between west and east. Iraq, North Persia and Syria pledged their support which led to fear of a Middle Eastern war. Leningrad Pact armies started to conduct large military exercises and fleet manoeuvres to further stir things up and Israel announced a partial mobilization. The whole situation winded down when President Eisenhower refused to support an Anglo-French war against Egypt and risk nuclear war. This put a temporary downer on relations between France and Britain on one hand and the USA on the other, but the latter mediated a compromise solution. The shares of the Suez Canal were reapportioned with 30% for Egypt and the rest divided equally among the four great powers of the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union who were the veto powers (besides Taiwan) of the United Nations. Egypt also entered the Leningrad Pact as did Libya.

This was only one of the clashes between the great powers. More would follow with the decolonization of Africa in which Moscow support communist independence movements. Africa would the scene of numerous proxy wars between western backed juntas and Soviet funded communist guerrillas. South America, known for its instable politics, would not see these wars. Most countries here had either feeble democracies or military juntas in charge, all of which were opposed to communism. All South American countries would join the ADC in the period 1950-1970 which opened them up for massive American and Western European economic investment, military aid, funding etc. In return for their alliance against communism, the west would turn a blind eye toward human rights violations and the like. Countries like Spain under Franco’s dictatorship and Portugal under the Estado Novo regime would join too in the late 1950s. They would not join the European Community, an alliance consisting of the Benelux, Sweden, Denmark, France and Italy. This was an economic alliance founded in 1955 which allowed for the free traffic of capital, goods and persons within the EC’s boundaries while installing tariffs to outsiders. Britain would join the EC for economic benefits in 1963. Both Spain and Portugal applied for membership, but according to the charter the EC only democratic countries were allowed to join. The alliance would expand to include Norway and Greece in the 1970s as they too were drawn by the benefits of EC membership which was also partially a response to the formation of COMECON by communist countries.

This economic and military integration also allowed for easier European cooperation, such as the suspected Franco-Swedish cooperation in the nuclear field. France had a nuclear weapons program of its own and is suspected of sharing knowledge and nuclear material with Sweden. France tested a 50 kiloton nuclear weapon in 1962 in the Algerian desert and Sweden successfully detonated a 25 kiloton nuclear warhead of its own in 1963 and laid the foundations for its own small nuclear deterrent. A European space agency was included as well since the USSR had so far scored all the successes due to its missile scientists Von Braun and Korolyov. In 1955, the USSR had launched the world’s first artificial satellite and in 1959, the first cosmonaut had been sent into earth orbit. Molotov responded to the Swedish and French nuclear weapon capability by giving increased aid to the Chinese nuclear program, including a non-functional mockup nuclear warhead. As a result, China became the first nuclear power of Asia and an Asian superpower ready to take its place in the pantheon of great powers consisting of the US, the USSR, Britain and France. Unwittingly, Molotov had laid the foundations for a much more independent China which would fare its own course instead of Moscow’s, leading to the Sino-Soviet split, ushering in a new phase in the Cold War.
 
Are Lebanon and Turkey ADC?

Extending the main alliances beyond the northern tier is very interesting. We could start to see African countries joining and leaving the alliances with every coup and counter-coup.

The idea of common Third-World non-aligned interests will be different as well, if it ever happens.

Also - Germany is ironically larger in this timeline. Is there a reason you decided not to give Poland Silesia and so on?
 
Update time. Last update ;). I hope everybody likes it.




Chapter V: The Sino-Soviet Split, Decolonization and Reform, 1965 – 2010.


The phase of armed peace known as the Cold War started to enter a second phase as another communist power started to assert itself. This power was the Peoples’ Republic of China, the second major communist power and the only one of them besides the Soviet Union with a nuclear deterrent. Mao and his Soviet colleague Molotov were increasingly growing out of touch as Molotov, being a Stalinist hardliner, was not in the mood for sharing leadership over the communist world like his predecessor Stalin had not done either. As much as Mao respected and admired both Stalin and his successor Vyacheslav Molotov for their leadership qualities, it was time to break with Moscow. Friction was heated up by the Soviet Union when it sold weapons to India which was in conflict with Pakistan, among them were the T-64 main battle tank and the recently introduced Red Air Force’s MiG-21 jet fighter which ranked among the world’s best combat aircraft. Border tensions on the Sino-Soviet border also heated up around the Ussuri River where both claimed swaths of land. This coincided with Sino-Indian border skirmishes. In 1968, the Peoples’ Republic of China didn’t renew its membership of the Leningrad Pact which was a blow in the face for the USSR as the most populous communist state broke with what they saw as the leading communist country. China signed a defensive alliance with Pakistan which brought tensions with India to an all time high as well. India therefore decided to join the Leningrad Pact and side with Moscow which promised plentiful economic and military assistance, including help in India’s nuclear program. The world was now divided into three blocs: the ADC, the Leningrad Pact and the Chinese bloc. The ADC included the Benelux, France, Great Britain (and the Commonwealth), Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Turkeythe USA, Japan, and all of South America. The Leningrad Pact had among its members the Soviet Union, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, North Persia, Korea, Mongolia and India. China was alone with only its Pakistani allies, but China would quickly expand its sphere of influence as it brought its neighbouring countries such as Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and in 1980 even Indonesia into its sphere of influence in their own third bloc aligned to neither the US nor the Soviet Union which was called the East Asian Community, a mutual defence and economic cooperation alliance. The result was a three way Cold War between the Soviet Union and the communist bloc, the western powers, with China and its economically and militarily dependent vassals caught in the middle. This also added a new party in the struggle for decolonization. Asia had been largely decolonized in the 1950s and 60s with the last ‘colonial’ struggle being the Vietnam War which had ended in humiliating American retreat. Decolonization was not, however, complete in Africa.

Communism had great appeal to many of the oppressed people in Africa who took up arms against their rulers. The Maghreb countries were among the first to shed their shackles in the 50s and 60s. Much of sub-Saharan Africa still needed to be liberated and it was a playground for the great powers. In the Congo, for example, a pro-western military junta took over shortly after independence, a government with one of the worst track records when it comes to human rights. In Angola and Mozambique communist guerrillas took over after a decade’s long struggle against Portugal which didn’t end until the overthrow of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal itself in the 1970s. Angola was more Soviet in its outlook while Mozambique was ruled by a distinctly Maoist oriented regime. The proxy struggle in Africa was now distinctly three way with all sides propping up their own dictators with money and weapons while trying to get to the continent’s riches such as diamonds, oil and gold. The Cold War itself remained marked by high tensions between the great powers although in the 1970s the US started to get increasingly friendly to China which even got Taiwan’s seat in the UN Security Council. Mao reciprocated the friendly gestures of the United States, but refused to make any commitments regarding mutual defence against the Soviet Union as he was busy reorganizing his sphere of influence in East Asia. A real hindrance in these attempts was Japan which was a US ally and buffer against communism in Asia. Japan refused to apologize for its war crimes which it massively downplayed to the outrage of Beijing and the Chinese people. The result was a hardened stance against the capitalist powers, making the Cold War three way definitively as China refused to enter one of the two other power blocs and turned inward, militarizing further. This isolationism and militarism was strengthened when Maoists won the power struggle against the reform minded leaders after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. They increased control over their Stalinist brute force command economy, gave an increased role to the military and centralized further while squashing any dissent brutally as China slipped away into Stalinist barbarity. This was the opposite of the Soviet Union.

Soviet leader Molotov, who had been in charge ever since Stalin’s death in 1954, was growing increasingly senile. The reform minded leaders in the communist party used this as a pretext to remove him from office in 1984 after a three decade spanning reign of terror which had been a direct continuation of Stalin’s legacy. He was already 94 at the time and was forced into ‘retirement’ while the reform minded clique took over the helm of the ramshackle Soviet Union. Molotov’s reign had seen increased spending on defence and the continuation of the Stalinist model of command economy which was clearly showing cracks. It had performed well up until the 1960s and had been held up by high oil prices in the 1970s, but crisis hit in the 1980s. The planned economy of the USSR could no longer cope with the modern world. There was no such thing as consumer industry in this economy, all industry was geared to supplying the Soviet Union’s state of the art armed forces and space program. The enormous, glaring inefficiencies and corruption were eating away at the fabric of the state which caused heated ethnic tensions which were further inflamed due to the enormous deficits on the budget which made it impossible for the Soviet Union to keep up its level of militarization as well as maintain a relatively high standard of living. The reform minded leaders started to seriously cut down in defence spending and the standing army was reduced from some 8.5 million men in peacetime to a more manageable 2.5 million which released funds for a much needed restructuring of the economy. A consumer industry had to be built from nothing and so western expertise was brought in, unthinkable under Molotov’s rule. Several sectors were privatized during the 1980s and 1990s, including agriculture, cars, textiles, consumer electronics, foreign trade and telecommunications although the state maintained a totalitarian regime. In the meantime, vital sectors like mining, electiricty and the avionics and arms industries remained in state hands. A strong centralized government allowed for reform without leading to collapse as rapid reform led to ethnic tensions because the entire state changed so quickly and thoroughly. The result was economic growth, starting tentatively in the late 1980s and reaching a steady, largely uninterrupted 7% growth from 1994 onward, making the USSR an economic giant. The USSR’s puppet states in eastern Europe followed suit as Moscow made it clear it could not keep up propping them up financially and militarily any longer. The opening of markets was heaven for western entrepreneurs and investors. The Soviet Union alone was a market of some 280 million consumers and rich in resources such as oil, natural gas, coal, iron ore, gold, copper and so on, and the USSR came with a well developed infrastructure too with communications, road and railroad networks and a constant power supply from nuclear power among other things.

This rapidly reforming Soviet Union also sought détente with the west. Talks were begun about arms reduction, specifically in the field of nuclear weapons. The Soviets had already reduced their conventional forces significantly and so the west was open for conversation. Nuclear stockpiles numbered 40.000 for the USSR and 30.000 for the US which was enough to destroy the world multiple times. In 1988 the agreement was made to reduce stockpiles to a more manageable, but still significant amount of 10.000 nuclear warheads for each. In the meantime, while the USSR modernized and reformed, China sank further away into isolationism and Maoist insanity. China was reduced to poverty as the shortcomings and inefficiencies of a planned economy came to haunt them too.
China remained a Maoist hellhole with its own personality cult, gulags, deportations and brutal economic exploitation. In China, tensions among the populace were rising as news seeped into the massive country about the rest of the world, including news about the new freedoms of the Soviet people. China was such a large country that total isolationism from the rest of the world was unfeasible, unfortunately for the country’s leadership. Tensions came to an eruption in spring 1989 when the police opened fire on a group of protesting students in Beijing which led to outrage from parents, families and friends alike. Within hours the small student protests had turned into protests from first tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of Chinese. There were numerous riots amidst what started out as peaceful protests. The police was overwhelmed and the army was mobilized, but they too could not stop the tide. News about the Beijing Uprising spread like wildfire across China’s east coast to every major Chinese city. Massive peaceful protests took place although violence erupted in some cities which led to fears in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party that a revolution was coming. This was compounded by army units when they refused to open fire on civilians as there were friends and family among the protestors. A mutiny erupted in Nanjing when an infantry battalion of the Peoples’ Liberation Army refused to shoot the protestors and sided with the crowd which made the situation critical.

Revolutionary committees were formed with the largest one in Beijing which declared itself the legal government of China and overthrew the communist leadership violently with assistance from elements of the military. Communism died a violent death in China which renamed itself the Democratic Republic of China, as decided upon by the new government formed in the aftermath of the Beijing Spring, Beijing Revolution or Chinese Revolution. This would be the start of reforms in China although the Chinese people would experience several more years of hardship and poverty as economic recovery was painfully slow. The new Chinese government grew into a moderately authoritarian democracy with nationalist tendencies, but nonetheless the largest democracy in the world with over 1 billion inhabitants. Now the long term goal of unification with Taiwan was coming closer and a tentative date was set in 2020 which could be brought forward if China’s recovery went quicker. Growth was achieved after several years of mismanagement and incompetence in the reforms . 3.5% economic growth was reached in 1999 and by 2009 economic growth as at 9% although large scale poverty remains a problem until today. Taiwan has, however, joined China’s East Asian Community as a precursor to unification which seems near with the slow but steady awakening of China as an Asian giant. With this, the constellation in which the world would enter the 21st century had been achieved and this world could only grow smaller with the fast pace of globalization and the dawn of the new millennium.
 
Good ending

I must say im a huge fan of your Timelines. Im a new member here but I have been reading your timelines for a while and i find them to be among the best on this website. I would love to see you end one of your Timelines with an epic Third world war again, but your timelines are still very good. :)
 
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