Exactly what it says-what if Chang had beaten Mao rather than the other way around?
My first introduction to AH, a book-length collection of academic essays called What If?, had a KMT China as one of the scenarios. However, the author was, it seems, pretty right-wing, and had TTL China follow basically the same development path as OTL Taiwan did (with the justification that since both were ruled by Chang Kai-shek, they both would have turned out the same way), ending with China becoming a democratic first-world nation by the 1990's. I tend to dissagree-Taiwan was, compared to China, a relatively small, urbanized island. Making it into an economic powerhouse was much easier, IMHO, than doing the same 1940's China-land of over a billion people, the majority of them illiterate peasant farmers. Communism actually made some good strides here-particularly with primary education-but at the same time, it bought a good three decades of Autarky and epic fuck-ups like the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Backward. In this, I think, KMT rule will be better by default, since it probably won't try to wipe out its own intelligensia or such. Traditional Chinese culture and religion will probably have more continuity without the Cultural Revolution, and economically it will begin opening up to the US and Europe in the 1950's and 60's instead of the 80's and 90's. But China's sheer size, and low level of infrastructure and education (the last, particularly, is an area where the KMT might be worse than the PRC was), might hinder any democratization movements, and I'd put even money on China remaining an autocratic right-wing dictatorship up to the present.
In fact, if you consider that "autocratic right-wing dictatorship" probably comes closest to describing what the PRC has evolved into since Mao died, then KMT and PRC rule might not be quite as different as people commonly assume. The biggest difference, to me, is that China won't have a few "lost decades" of catastrophic Maoist mismanagement, and so the manufacturing boom that begun in the 1990's might start earlier, in the 1970's or even the 60's. This, of course, means that China will probably be a good deal more economically developed than it is today, with all the attendant benefits and problems that entails. I highly doubt it would have reached first-world levels, though, with the possible exception of some of the more well-off urban areas.
Also worth noting is that I just don't see a KMT government adopting something like the One Child Policy-it never struck me as being quite as into autocratic social engineering as Mao was. In that case, China would likely have, if its possible to imagine, more people, which might be enough to counterbalance the benefits of the earlier economic expansion. It would also make China a source for out-migration to other parts of the world, the way it was in the 19th century.
Any further thoughts?