First and second paragraphs make sense, as for the third... that's gonna bite the Soviets on the ass down the line, badly.
With the existential threat that the Poles offered Moscow in the immediate years following Stalin's death they were looking for a lifeline.
But yes.
Regarding the fourth, even Mao's pro-rural policies were relatively limited in scope. Whenever he wasn't using the urban classes as leverage in power games against the rest of the CCP, his economic policies were remarkably like those which came after; industrial feudalism, essentially.
Pretty much, but it does open the door for a large portion of the Chinese Communist Party, Military, and skilled classes to be educated in Russian schools and by the (Russian) Soviet Party.
On that whole Intermarum-with-nukes thing I would like to lay a bet now on...
No.
I feel deceived and betrayed by the lack of an update.
Lol.
I feel like shit for going missing like that. But (And how I hedge) hopefully I'll have a few updates typed up over the course of the weekend to offer. And if I don't, I at least have most of them written down on paper, and the stack of books is noted in the right places, for several updates to come. And the Vignettes.
I revenue got a huge interest in Chinese politics in the 1920s so I started reading this. I'm not finished yet. Jut started with Wang Jingwei but I'm enjoying the devil out of it. One question, why did you have Hu become President after the Central Plains War and not Yan Xishan? My understanding is that everyone expected he would become President if Chiang lost the war with the famous Time magazine cover declaring him the next President of China. My understanding was that he had already made a deal with Wang to become President in exchange for Wang being Prime Minister. I'm asking because Hu's section doesn't even seem to touch on it, basically just saying the Nanjing clique go at together and compromised with Hu. Did they completely rule out having one of the outside warlords take over and we're willing to fight to prevent that? I guess I don't entirely understand the logic as it seems the warlord alliance was strong enough to press for President Yan after Chiang's death. Was making Hu President more just a means to a decentralized state as it is unlikely any warlord in power would not centralize their leadership?
First off its worth pointing out that Time Magazines predictions about China in the 1920's, and Henry Luce had tons of them, were often pretty far off the mark. That said, yes, Yan and Wang had a pact about this, and yes I should have expanded on it more in Hu's update and will in the final version of this, but that deal and those predictions were more or less based on the belief that the KMT government in Nanjing was about to crash in flames and their armies were going to be wiped out. Here the Nationalist Warlords have more or less won by a fluke, Chaing is dead but Nanjing still has secured its foreign backing and its still in the ascendant position, while the psudo-Nationalists I called the "Federalists" in this are still men without a base of support who happen to have armies under them. In that vacuum Hu, about the only figure left on the KMT side of things with a powerbase becomes a viable compromise figure, if he's willing to agree to certain Federalist demands, which in the name of power and avoiding continual civil war I have him do. He takes the job but the Federalists/Warlords do get to secure their bases of power and get most of what they want, without having to march all the way to the Pearl River Valley to get.
As an author I'll admit the real goal was to get Wang Jingwei into a position as the Fascist leader who shows up at the moment of crisis and drags China into a hell it had never seen the likes of before.