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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.
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