No USSR: Effects on China

Was wondering what the sinophiles could ponder with regards to politics in China without a Bolshevik Revolution, or at least a failed one.

Reading up on interwar China, the political flow seems generally left-wing and quite fluid for some time, with Lenin nuzzling Sun Yat-Sen while also setting up a Chinese Communist Party.

Would the absense of Marxist-Leninism see the KMT remain the centre of left-wing radicalism or would other groups form anyway? Would the KMT, possibly bouyed up by would-be Leninists end up spliting between left and right factions?
 
In any case China would have imploded into rival fiefdoms controlled by warlords each claiming to be the legitimate leader of the KMT. Some of those warlords would still have been supported by foreign powers and much of the 20s and 30s would still be dominated by an n-way civil war.

Assuming WW2 occurs and the Japanese invasion still occurs, all the KMT factions will temporarily unite against a common enemy but will almost immediately turn on each other after Japan's surrender. So the first half of the 20th century probably won't be too different after all.

Chiang Kai Shek would probably have just been cannon fodder for someone else.
 
The effect on no USSR on China depends on the position of Russia. What happened to them and what is their views/designs etc. towards China?
 
My focus was more towards direct ideological ramifications, namely what does no CCP do to Chinese politics? Do modernising groups still look to a truly Marxist path or towards anarchism, peasant socialism etc.

Let's say Russia goes democratic, ala Hnau's SR timeline, so you have a social democratic Russia that is sympathetic to Sun Yat Sen but probably not interested in the short term to intervene directly and certainly not creating any revolutionary groups like the Comintern.
 
My focus was more towards direct ideological ramifications, namely what does no CCP do to Chinese politics? Do modernising groups still look to a truly Marxist path or towards anarchism, peasant socialism etc.

Let's say Russia goes democratic, ala Hnau's SR timeline, so you have a social democratic Russia that is sympathetic to Sun Yat Sen but probably not interested in the short term to intervene directly and certainly not creating any revolutionary groups like the Comintern.

What's the title for Hnau's timeline? Also, are we still going to assume that Wang Jingwei is still going to defect to the Japanese or would be emerge as another contender for the top post?
 

Hnau

Banned
Sibirskaya said:
What's the title for Hnau's timeline?

A Lenin-less World

Which I'm working on revamping currently...

So, my thought was that the Communist Party in the Soviet Union was a powerful force of organizing and standardizing socialist thought in other countries. They provided funds to those that agreed with their ideas, they trained young firebrands who became talented spokesmen for the party, and when their parties got off the ground they gave international recognition. After it was created, sustained and molded by the Stalinist period, the CP had the effect of drawing all socialists to it like a magnet and warping their ideas to match their utopian worldview.

A China without the Bolshevik Revolution, without a politically powerful and unified Communist Party, Chinese leftists remain much more divided. The anarchist movement there probably never dies out, but grows stronger and gains more and more unique 'Chinese' characteristics. A socialist democratic Russia could probably still have an influence on the political chessboard in China but nothing like the CP had. My guess is that you just have some version of the KMT (possibly stronger and slightly more to the left as it would have gained some individuals that WOULD HAVE joined the CCP IOTL) which would be the most important political player, and then you have various warlords and divided anarcho-socialist groups with varying amounts of power. The KMT remains the big dog in the kennel though, more so than OTL.

Just my ideas.
 
Top