WI Deng Xiaoping's Reforms Never Happened?

I also believe that sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Perhaps in the last years of the 20th century, perhaps in the second decade of the 21st. But eventually, something is going to push China to reform(maybe internal like a nation-wide protest, maybe external after some sort of a crisis).
 
My suspicion when reading about twentieth century Chinese history is that a key goal, for all the factions, was to remove the economic stranglehold the Europeans had gained over China due to being first movers with the industrial revolution. Once it was clear that Mao's ideas were not strengthening the economy, they would have tried Deng's ideas or something similar.

However, though I think the crazier ideas of Mao would have been dropped, they could have tried a functional but poor and egalitarian economy, isolation from the rest of the world, and pouring what resources they had into a defensive oriented military (no attempts to project power over the Spratleys). They would have eventually reconciled with Russia like IOTL since that makes sense for balance of power reasons. This is sort of what Cuba wound up as, a poor country but functional and still independent of the USA and still communist.

This would actually be a huge boon to the world biosphere, and also help working people in Western countries. Without the world essentially shifting its industrial production to China you get more jobs in other places and much less carbon emissions. Chinese economic expansion also had distorting effects on various resource rich developing nations.

One question I have is whether they still try to control their over-population problem (also due to crazy Maoist policies). That was an undercredited factor in post 1975 Chinese economic success.

I don't think the Vietnames Doi Moi reforms happen without the Chinese example.
 
How much longer/ would the US keep it’s industrial base from rotting (I know that jobs were already moving to the south and that the “tiger economies” were competing with the US)?
 

Without Deng, I doubt reformers like Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang could get close to the levers to power. Maybe further down the line if the Dengless economic policy only brings China stagnation.

Economic policy under Chairman Hua would’ve been the purview of Li Xiannian. Who was kicked upstairs under Deng. According to his Wikipedia page:

“Li was a firm believer in orthodox central planning and sociopolitical conformity, so disliked Deng Xiaoping's more radical reform ideas. He had in fact been largely responsible for drafting the short-lived Ten Year Plan of 1978 which attempted to build a Soviet-style economy based around heavy industry and energy production.“
 
How much longer/ would the US keep it’s industrial base from rotting (I know that jobs were already moving to the south and that the “tiger economies” were competing with the US)?

My take is automation & other high tech woul still cut out the lower educated tiers of the labor pool.

There would still be a serious problem with short sighted management damaging manufactoring with short term profit policies.

In the much longer term the US manufactoring dominance mid Century was a product of WWII. Since 1910 there a had been a increasing stagnation of US industrial growth. That the US industrial plant of 1940 was operating at 70 percent or less of it's 1920 capacity was not all the result of the recent Depression.

By the latter 1960s the WWII effect was largely over & US management was largely stuck in the business model that sustained it through the 1950s.
 
Top