Nationalist China: overrated?

1. It's not so simple to look at OTL PRC and go, "ah, well Chiang would have never tolerated that" and imagined the lack of a Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution causing KMT China to do x% better than the PRC.

1.5. Such a narrative also erases the White Terror and the decades-long martial long in Taiwan, and that the KMT committed pretty fucked up dictatorial actions, on a smaller scale.

2. Chiang was also fairly corrupt and incompetent and didn't seem to have either the ability to present a united leadership than Mao did. Could he have pushed through a modernization the same way ruthless tradition-smashing fanatical Marxists could? Doubtful, the KMT barely had an ideology.

3. Most KMT China as ROC Taiwan but bigger scenarios think that it's as easy to modernize an island of 23 million to the scale of a disparate land of a billion. Not to mention assumes that the U.S. would provide the same level of development aid and favorable trade and that Chiang and his successors (no one hypothesizes who could've been president of China after him) wouldn't have gotten into diplomatic spats with the Americans, or the Soviets, or Japan. It just assumes that blue China would be left alone to become a powerhouse.

My take? KMT China would've ended up like Indonesia or India- a modernizing country with huge inequality, difficulties with democratic governance on such a massive scale with a legacy of corruption and military autocracy, and in the worst case with a period of bloody purges in the name of anti-communist state sponsored terror.
 
I agree - bluntly, China isn't Taiwan. Notably, in Taiwan, the KMT was torn away from their political base - the landowner class - and able to do reforms that the country of former Japanese colonial subjects and Mainland exiles would accept. If the KMT won on mainland China, it would still be stuck with the landowners and unable to institute vital reforms that went against the interests of this class.

fasquardon
 

longsword14

Banned
KMT China would've ended up like Indonesia or India- a modernizing country with huge inequality, difficulties with democratic governance on such a massive scale with a legacy of corruption and military autocracy, and in the worst case with a period of bloody purges in the name of anti-communist state sponsored terror.
Making such predictions for complex system is useless, which is why everybody likes to make TLs.
My own guess is that China would definitely be richer than it is today, with a per capita income 50% greater.
What odds would you have given to China in the middle of the Great Leap that they would be where they are today ?
I find that Chiang is horribly underrated in the West. All of his faults are well known but the WWII bias pervades throughout.
Have you taken a look at Jay Taylor's book on Chiang ?
 

kernals12

Banned
Making such predictions for complex system is useless, which is why everybody likes to make TLs.
My own guess is that China would definitely be richer than it is today, with a per capita income 50% greater.
What odds would you have given to China in the middle of the Great Leap that they would be where they are today ?
I find that Chiang is horribly underrated in the West. All of his faults are well known but the WWII bias pervades throughout.
Have you taken a look at Jay Taylor's book on Chiang ?
China has only prospered because of massive reforms done in the 1980s by Deng Xiaoping, reforms that could only be done because they were run by communists who had complete authority over the country. The KMT was dominated by landowners who blocked reforms and Chiang's level of control over the nation and the military was never at Deng levels.
 
To speak in generalities broad enough to be near meaningless, I would think that a modern ROC looks more like India, a more complex blend of capitalism and socialism, less ideological equality or revolutionary change, culture and tradition hold more sway and progress is a more convoluted route. Many folks forget that Mao was as much a nationalist as Chiang was a socialist, the struggle was to get China out from under foreign domination, to get her back as a peer rather than a servant. The KMT would likely struggle to hold a one party dominance and China would be ruled by the compromises between factions, much like how the Communist Party functions, it would sway between its left and right, it would have struggle to keep Chinese united in the push for modernization. The real danger is that China remains somewhat fragmented, the KMT had to fight to get China united and nationalism is a powerful thing but China is more diverse than that. Communism could reach across older language, cultural and historic divides, the KMT might be less successful, but a more regional China could be just as united. So I think there is more wealth inequality, more private enterprise, less land reform, as much bureaucracy, more haphazard and conflicting progress, and about as much incongruity as we see in nations that are still truly developing. I think the KMT is about as corrupt as any other one party state and its biggest challenge is how to transition to more representative government without anarchy or violence. Overall I think things look similar, in the details it can be vastly different, but gloss it over and the thing has as many bright spots as warts. A KMT influenced China will certainly take an independent course from the traditional Western powers once it has any strength to do so. So East-West relations will be "complicated," as they are now.
 
I think that generally speaking RoC would look like India because both would be large democracies that have uneven development compared to a communist-conquered state.
 
One of my pet hates of AH is the idea that KMT victory magically means that China becomes a giant version of OTL’s Taiwan. As mentioned above it’s far easier to stage an economic miracle on a small island that already had decent infrastructure from the Japanese Occupation and was strategically located. Chiang was nowhere near as component as Deng Xiaopeng was and I think he’d have struggled to turn things around much on that scale. Even if the KMT had succeeded in wiping out Mao and his followers during the Long March I think there would have been further uprisings and rebellions from the 1950’s on.

Best case scenario for a KMT China is something like a richer, less authoritarian Burma or a poorer, more repressive India.
 
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1. It's not so simple to look at OTL PRC and go, "ah, well Chiang would have never tolerated that" and imagined the lack of a Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution causing KMT China to do x% better than the PRC.

1.5. Such a narrative also erases the White Terror and the decades-long martial long in Taiwan, and that the KMT committed pretty fucked up dictatorial actions, on a smaller scale.

2. Chiang was also fairly corrupt and incompetent and didn't seem to have either the ability to present a united leadership than Mao did. Could he have pushed through a modernization the same way ruthless tradition-smashing fanatical Marxists could? Doubtful, the KMT barely had an ideology.

3. Most KMT China as ROC Taiwan but bigger scenarios think that it's as easy to modernize an island of 23 million to the scale of a disparate land of a billion. Not to mention assumes that the U.S. would provide the same level of development aid and favorable trade and that Chiang and his successors (no one hypothesizes who could've been president of China after him) wouldn't have gotten into diplomatic spats with the Americans, or the Soviets, or Japan. It just assumes that blue China would be left alone to become a powerhouse.

My take? KMT China would've ended up like Indonesia or India- a modernizing country with huge inequality, difficulties with democratic governance on such a massive scale with a legacy of corruption and military autocracy, and in the worst case with a period of bloody purges in the name of anti-communist state sponsored terror.

I broadly agree with this. Basically, China had it rough from the instigation of the First Opium War to the death of Mao in '76 (as well as that big earthquake that accompanied it, killing at least a quarter of a million people). Whether the KMT were better than the CCP in that equation is broadly besides the point. The KMT were just another link in the rotten chain between Maoism and the post-1911 revolution warlord period. Attempts to rehabilitate the ROC period in Mainland China have always been suspect to me. Obviously, the cartoonist propaganda of the early PRC shouldn't be our reference point, but I feel comfortable in not labeling Chiang as any kind of hero.

Weirdly, though, I think the modern PRC is trying to rehabilitate him somewhat, partly because they're partial towards the modern KMT on Taiwan, and partly because they like the idea of having a WWII leader of great stature, like the US, UK, etc... even a flawed one.
 
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