WI: Chinese Communists win the Chinese Civil War before 1937?

If they Chinese Communists had somehow managed to achieve total victor and crush the KMT and the warlords before before 1937, is there anything they could have done to strengthen China so it could do better against Japan? Not necessarily defeat them, but at least lose less territory?

I highly doubt they could strengthen the economy much if at all, but how did the CCP's military leaders compare to the KMT's? Could they be more competent, or would it have not made any notable difference?

What about after Japan surrenders? How would the Cold War be affected with a Communist China from the start, rather than a few years in? Would China still get Taiwan after WW2, or would the US let Japan keep it?
 
I think this would have required a different Soviet policy in the 1920s. They would have had to have been much more alert that Chiang Kai-Shek was a military man hostile to the Communists, and avoided demanding that the CCP merge with the Kuomintang, instead supporting revolutionary struggle between 1925 and 1927 as noted here. Such a policy would have required a different power struggle in the years following on from Lenin’s physical decline and death.
 
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