Nationalist China with Industry

Kongzilla

Banned
How early could the KMT have taken control of the country and unified it, also how can they get their industry up to a fairly high level and what is the earliest point that they can get German help. Final thing how can they beat the Japanese at the Marco Polo Bridge incident and in any attacks Japan may attempt.

Edit: Can Nationalist China also do what the soviet union did before WW2 and fund Nationalist groups in countries like Vietnam and Burma to have a Nationalist Chinese Sphere of influence.
 
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How early could the KMT have taken control of the country and unified it, also how can they get their industry up to a fairly high level and what is the earliest point that they can get German help. Final thing how can they beat the Japanese at the Marco Polo Bridge incident and in any attacks Japan may attempt.

Edit: Can Nationalist China also do what the soviet union did before WW2 and fund Nationalist groups in countries like Vietnam and Burma to have a Nationalist Chinese Sphere of influence.

Well, first you have to prevent Chiang Kaishek / Jiang Jieshi from taking over. If you keep Sun Yatsen's (dont remember the pinyin) direction, and if you rein in much of the corruption, youll end up with a rather stronger China. Whether said China can be strong enough to beat the japanese, i dont know. The ussr is allso more likely to be the main strategic partner of such a china than nazi germany is.


For an earlier pod, see hendryks superpower empire.
 
Easiest PoD is Yuan Shikai still somewhat respecting the trappings of the National Assembly in 1913-15 instead of nakedly grabbing power for himself. By the time he proclaimed himself Emperor of the Chinese Empire in 1916, the Beiyang Army had disintegrated, and no faction gave a damn about Sun and his lofty ideals. But Yuan never had respect for constitutional niceties; he needed to suffer an "accident" during the Republic's first years.
 

Kongzilla

Banned
What if Sun-Yat-Sean is severly wounded by communists and this breeds a hatred of communists for the rest of his life so that would allow him to refuse to work with the Soviet Union and with the Nazi's instead.
 
Sun Yat-sen died in 1925. Nazi came to power in 1933. It's a no go.

Besides I don't think that Guomindang can get substancial support in 1920s from somewhere else than USSR, so cooperation with Chinese communists is a must-have if Guomindang wants to have power to take over China.
 
What if Sun-Yat-Sean is severly wounded by communists and this breeds a hatred of communists for the rest of his life so that would allow him to refuse to work with the Soviet Union and with the Nazi's instead.

In which case Sun Yat-sen would have a burning hatred of his wife.
 
The nationalists did industrialize to some extent in the parts of the country they really controlled, as opposed to having nominal control through nominally subordinate warlords. The nationalist central government rarely had actual rather than nominal control over more than about 20-25% of China, though it was the most economically important part of China outside of Manchuria.

The best chance for more industrialization? Avoid or mitigate the ruinous Central Plains war of 1930, which nearly bankrupted the central government. This was a war between Chiang and a coalition of rival Nationalist politicians and previously Nationalist allied warlords. The warlords had been given positions in the Nationalist government, but balked when the Nationalist central government tried to reduce the size of the huge but ineffective warlord armies in order to build a smaller but more effective central army. The warlords resisted that because it would reduce their power base and chose to flee to their power bases and set up a rival government that they controlled.

As to how you avoid that war or make it shorter, I'm not sure. I've toyed with the idea of having Max Behr, Chiang's first German military adviser not die of smallpox shortly before the war. I actually did a pseudo biography of Behr where he helped build the Nationalist army and then went on to build an effective Iranian army in the late 1930s. Behr was a very sharp guy who really understood the logistics and industrial underpinnings of building a modern army and wasn't bad as a field commander. He might have made a big difference in terms of cutting the war short by making the Nationalist central army more effective early on.
 

Kongzilla

Banned
Little bit of threadromancy but I was thinking, if China manages to beat off Japan in Manchuria and the Marco Polo incident can there be a mini cold war happening between Japan and China up to and during ww2.

Maybe by this point or after China has an army as well equiped as any in europe and twice as many men as Japan so the emperor isn't going to go back any time soon and they can only rely on the fact that China isn't going to be able to compete in Naval and Air superiority any time soon.

I was thinking that now that Chinas up there with the big boys they are going to start some trouble in French Indochina sponsoring Nationalist Parties and whatnot to cause some trouble with the French and keep doing this with the Japanese invasions of the place.

I'm sorry if this doesn't make any sense it made sense in my head but I think it won't have come out as well on the computer in words.

(Also does anyone know how to change the title of a thread)
 
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