raharris1973 said:
China as a big Taiwan -
It's the first one you think of, but I really doubt it, even with steady reforms. Taiwan had gotten improved infrastructure and education from the Japanese and a hefty concentrated dose of US aid. The mainland has too many backward provinces million times over exploitable peasants for this to work.
Other models-
India - in an economic and social sense, its worse off than OTL.
Pakistan - Oh joy, worse off in a social sense, but no stable democracy either.
Indonesia - May be most likely, authoritarian, bt eventually with good economic policies, and better growth than South Asia.
Best case - Thailand style growth and standard of living.
My pick for the best political set-up for Chinese economic growth is -
The Communists take over, and do land reform, but begin to do
decentralizing reforms right *before* the Great Leap Forward. In this
way, they've gotten rid of the deadwood of the old land tenure system,
but they have not yet done the worst of collectivist experimentation.
So the optimum time for market reform would be sometime between 1955 and
1959.
Before you dismiss the idea of getting rid of landlords as redistributionist mumbo-jumbo, remember that Japan and Taiwan benefitted from the break-up of large holdings in the 40s and 50s, and that landlords exert a baneful influence in India and Pakistan to this day.
Well, democratic is not what I would call nationialist china. It could not have been, with literally millions of illiterate peasants. The question would have been to whom, in fact, you turn over their vote. Landowner? village priest? communist agitator?
Anyway land redistribution is a hard point.
First, you bring up countries which were in quite dissimilar economical and social conditions: japan, taiwan, (with it´s influx of a huge group of refugees many of them skilled only as soldiers and peasants).
The main problem with redistribution is it often (read: nearly always) does not take into account the important factors concerning farms: humidity, soil depletion, access to water.
Then, there is the question of eduction in a sense of how willing are the peasants to work together to construct irrigation systems or what ever. I know i generalise, but i think i remember that communities in the mountains and the ones in the flood-areas (nile, euphrat, indus) are given to his kind of work even without adminstrative efforts (whipping their backs), while the "typical" peasant needs encouragement.
And if you have a large class of landless peasants, the chances are really good to distribute i so you have uneconomical farmsizes.
As desastrous,smallholders tend to produce for self-subsistence. So on the one hand, you are likely to get food shortages in the cities, on the other hand, you have a dramatic decline in cash-crops.
So you are going to have a real problem.