I'll reproduce (with a few changes) a couple of old soc.history.what-if posts of mine:
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Probably the freest national elections in Chinese history were the first parliamentary elections of the Chinese Republic in the winter of 1912-13. True, only property-holding literate males could vote. But "Despite the restrictions that limited the vote, these elections truly did constitute a national consultation. More than three hundred political parties and organizations took part in it. There were 40 million registered electors, twenty times as many as for the elections to the provincial assemblies in 1909. The political debate was open and free and was recorded by the press. In many respects, this poll seems to have been more democratic and more meaningful than any that followed." Marie-Claire Bergere,
Sun Yat- sen (translated from the French by Janet Lloyd), Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 226.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&pg=PA226
The clear winner of the elections was the Guomindang, a party organized by Song Jiaoren (Sung Chiao-jen)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Jiaoren in August 1912 out of Sun Yat-sen's old Revolutionary Alliance and some minor parties. Song felt that only a party with a powerful, united majority in parliament could check the ambitions of Yuan Shikai. The elections seemed to give him what he wanted: 269 GMD deputies out of a total of 423. Given the number of parties, and given how recently the GMD had been organized, this was a remarkable triumph, and Song deserves credit for it. Song kept the first two of Sun's "three principles of the people"--nationalism and democracy--but dropped the third, the "people's livelihood," which sounded too much like socialism to the merchants and gentry. (He also dropped another "radical" idea of Sun--equality of the sexes.) Song not only used the Guomindang to rally the local elites, but campaigned tirelessly himself, in his own province of Hunan and elsewhere. He attacked the policies of Yuan Shikai, whom he said was incapable either of solving China's financial problems or of preventing Russia from detaching Outer Mongolia from China. "He argued for a system of ministerial responsibility, for the election of provincial governors, and for regional autonomy. His message was well received by the elites, whose political awareness was rooted in their commitment to community interests." Bergere, p. 227.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&pg=PA227
To Song Jiaoren's demand for an all-GMD cabinet led by Song (which would in effect restrict Yuan Shikai to a figurehead role), Yuan gave his answer on March 19, 1913: assassins sent by Yuan shot and killed Song at the Shanghai railroad station. (At least it seems generally assumed that Yuan was behind the assassination: the assassins were linked to his premier. It is just barely possible, however, that Yuan himself did not want Song killed.) Yuan was soon to establish a dictatorship and to attempt unsuccessfully to restore the monarchy. His death in 1916 was followed by an era when China was torn between rival warlords, with no real central government.
What is a plausible POD for Song not being killed? For Yuan to accept a parliamentary democracy that would reduce him to figurehead status would be out of character for this veteran of the Qing court. The only way I can see for Song to avoid death is for someone to tip him off about the assassination plot and for him to flee abroad (where he would soon be joined by other GMD refugees from Yuan's dictatorship).
Would there be a rivalry between Song and Sun for leadership of the GMD? There were some interesting differences between these two leaders of the old Revolutionary Alliance. Some of Sun's followers thought that Song's dropping of Sun's more "radical" ideas in 1912-13 was a sell-out--though Sun himself did not object at the time. Also, there was a difference in the two men's attitudes toward Japan. Throughout his life, Sun retained an admiration of Japan, though on occasion he would admit it was treating China even worse than the "white" powers were doing. At the very least, Sun showed a willingness to make startling concessions to the Japanese for opportunist reasons--e.g., to get their support against Yuan Shikai. For example, in January 1914, "Sun Yat-sen gave his blessing to Chen Qimei's expedition to Manchuria. Not much is known of this expedition, but the plan probably involved having the revolutionaries make contact with Prince Su's monarchists and help establish the separatist kingdom of Manchuria that some Japanese leaders already had in mind. It is known that, unlike Song Jiaoren and a number of other revolutionary leaders, Sun had never evinced any passionate nationalism with regard to these regions of the northeast. Perhaps that was because they had formally been the territory of barbarian tribes, only annexed to China at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sun considered that these territories were 'not all of China,' if they were lost, 'the true China,' the China of the Han, would still remain." Bergere, pp. 265-66.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&pg=PA265
Also in 1914, appealing for Japanese aid, Sun offered Japan a quasi- monopoly of the Chinese market, explaining that this vast market and China's vast natural resources would support Japan's prosperity as India's resources had in the nineteenth century supported the expansion of Great Britain--and Japan would even be spared "the trouble and expense of stationing troops!" Bergere, pp. 262-3.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&pg=PA263 In 1915 he was willing to offer Japan even more than it had sought in the Twenty-One Demands, in an attempt to outbid Yuan for Japanese support. Finally, there was Sun's famous "pan-Asianism" speech in Kobe in November, 1924. [1]
(As one might expect, Wang Jingwei, when he became Japan's puppet "president" of China, loved to cite Sun's pro-Japanese writings as justifications of his course. Wang had an anthology of Sun's writings on Japan published under the title
China and Japan: Natural Friends-- Unnatural Enemies [Shanghai 1941].)
There is reason to think Song would have been considerably more skeptical of Japan (I already noted that he did not share Sun's attitude toward Manchuria):
"Neither the Zhejiang nor the Hunan [as noted, Song was from Hunan--DT] liked the slogan 'same culture, same race'...which Sun Yat-sen and Hu Hanmin had borrowed from the Japanese pan-Asian movement. In the summer of 1907, Zhang Binglin was elected president of the Alliance of Oppressed Nations of East Asia...which assembled in Tokyo emigres from India, Burma, Indochina, the Philippines, and Korea but excluded the Japanese, who were regarded as imperialists. Song Jiaoren passionately denounced Japanese imperialism and the pan-Asian arguments it hid behind: 'Some powers [Japan], however, utilizing geographical and racial affinity intend to swallow up China and, day after day, seek for an opportunity to deceive us...The arch-enemy of our country--past, present, and future--is Japan,' he wrote in his paper,
People's Stand (*Minlibao*) on February 8, 1911." Bergere, p. 146.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&pg=PA146
Whatever the relations between Song Jiaoren and Sun Yat-sen will be, one thing is certain--barring an assassination or an unlikely disease or accident, Song, who was born in 1882, should outlive Sun by many years. Following Sun's death in 1925, Song would seem a natural candidate for leadership of the GMD. But it should be remembered that in OTL Chiang Kai-shek prevailed over several people who could more plausibly claim in 1925 to be Sun's successor than Chiang could--e.g., Wang Jingwei
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Jingwei Liao Zhongkai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liao_Zhongkai and Hu Hanmin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Hanmin --and I certainly wouldn't rule out his prevailing over Song as well...
[1] The speech can be found at
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen's_speech_on_Pan-Asianism In fairness to Sun, it should be noted that (1) The speech is not quite as unequivocally pro-Japanese as people like Wang Jingwei later maintained. It ends by asserting that "the question remains whether Japan will be the hawk of the Western civilization of the rule of Might, or the tower of strength of the Orient. This is the choice which lies before the people of Japan." In other words, Sun did not regard it as settled that Japan would take the side of Right against Might. (2) The speech may have been an attempt by Sun to break out of what seemed like a one-sided dependence of the GMD on Soviet Russia. Even so, Sun in this speech praises Russia for breaking with the West and opposing the "oppression of the majority by the minority." It is doubtful that he would have approved of Japan's vehemently anti-Soviet policies of the 1930's or would have considered Japan's ruthless exploitation of China and other Asian countries to be true "pan-Asianism."
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In a later post, I noted that
According to Bergere (
Sun Yat-sen, pp. 143-46) the Revolutionary Alliance was divided into three groups:
(1) Those from Hunan (including Huang Xing and Song Jiaoren) and nearby Hubei. "These militants, from inland provinces that until the end of the nineteenth century had remained cut off from all foreign influences, manifested a touchy nationalism, great distrust of Westerners, and an abidingly strong attachment to tradition, and they maintained close ties with the gentry from whom most of them were descended."
(2) The Zhejiang-Anhui group also had nationalist and antiforeigner tendencies combined with social and cultural conservatism. "The Hunan-Hubei and the Zhejiang-Anhui groups both came from the Yangzi valley and were linked by a common strong attachment to tradition and by their collaboration in the abortive plan for an uprising in Changsha in 1904. Both geographically and culturally they were closer to each other than to the third group in the Alliance, the people from the province of Guangdong."
(3) "The group of Cantonese...constituted Sun Yat-sen's power base in the Alliance...[C]oming as they did from a province long open to the outside world and international relations, or in some cases having been born into emigre communities, they were distinguished by their cosmopolitanism, their interest in the West, and their desire to cooperate with it...The various groups held divergent views on the matter of tradition (more respected by the Yangzi revolutionaries than by those of Guangdong) and on foreigners: whereas the Cantonese were ready to ask for their financial, political, or even military help, the other groups in the Alliance were far more reluctant to do so."
So it seems that Song Jiaoren's group was nationalist vis-a-vis not only the Japanese but foreigners in general. And even if Song favors an alliance with the Soviet Union (given his hostility to the West and to Japan, there may not be much choice) he is going to be very suspicious of Chinese Communists--very likely more so than Sun was.