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.