WI: Japan knocks China out of the war by 1943/early 1944

Considering how most of Japan's troops were fighting in China during WWII, how would a defeat of the country by the aforementioned dates effect the rest of the war? Would opening a land route from Indonesia to Korea help relieve American submarine pressure on Japan's merchant marine? For this scenario, let's just assume Japan did better against China starting in 1937.
 
Can you please look on a map how long is the land road from Indonesia to Pusan, which are an archipels of islands and try to find if a decent railroad connect during all the way Singapore to Pusan.

From Googlemaps, from the North Korean border to the Vietnamese border, you have 3 300 km and the road calculated crossed the interior of China. I believe that in 1944, the best chinese roads are on the coast do you can add at least a thousand km.

Then from the vietnamese border, you need to down the coast to southern Vietnam, cross a part of Thailand and go down the Malaysian peninsula.

Then calculate how long a train will take to make the trip and compare how much a freight train transport in comparison to an average ship.
 
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And if the railroad link don't existed, you pushed the oil barrels by hands during severals hundred miles of jungle ???
 
Never found any positive confirmation of a complete link from Malaysia to Korea. There seem to have been substantial gaps in SE Asia.

A bigger issue is carrying capacity. The French and Brits were prone to build light capacity RR for local use. Even when the gauge matched to other regional railways these local tracks were limited in weight of locomotives and cargo wagons but also in daily & weekly volume.

Then there was extensive war time neglect/damage.

What was Japan's ability to rebuild the needed trunk line to a ten million ton per year capacity?
 
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The French never built a Saigon to Phnom Penh sector. Might have something to do with that small stream called the Mekong, which wasn't bridged until 1994 and then much further upstream.
 
To begin with, how does Japan knock out China? If they somehow conquered Chongqing, Chiang would just move the capital further west. Given how brutal the Japanese were and the way they alienated pretty much everybody they conquered, Japan would simply be overstretched even further in a country that was too big and with a hostile population. China was not invincible, but the way the Japanese conducted themselves made it almost impossible for them to break China. This was proven by the lack of any support amongst the Chinese population for their puppet Wang Ji Wei government in the Japanese occupied parts of China.
 
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