WI Mao dies soon after victory?

Mao chokes on a pork bun or something soon after proclaiming the PRC, so maybe around December-April 1949-50. What does the CCP do? Who emerges as leader, and is there a big power struggle? What could this mean in the long term for China?
 
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Zhou Enlai is the most obvious candidate for this. Ultimately down the line, since Zhou was a moderate who advocated peaceful coexistence and less radical domestic policy rather than a hardcore ideologue like Mao was, while I doubt Chinese intervention in the Korean War could be avoided, things like the Great Leap Forward, the Sino-Soviet Split and the Cultural Revolution could definitely be avoided.

I doubt there would even be much of a power struggle, if any, since this was before Mao is considered to have gone mad with power, and there was a clear line of succession within the Party for who would take Mao's place.
 
Mao chokes on a pork bun

Hah! :D

But seriously, the Red Front in China had pretty stable leadership outside of Mao.

If he dies, one of the other Old Guard would take over and the CCP would be just fine.

No Great Leap Forward & No Cultural Revolution.
 
Mao dying shortly after the end of the civil war is probably better for everyone really. Mao also probably gets remembered as a sort of saintly national hero who can do no wrong, having had the good sense to die before he could screw up.
 
Thanks for the response, guys. I wonder whether, paradoxically, this would actually lead to a stronger commitment to Communism than we see in modern OTL China, given they don't have the manifest failures of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution to make the CCP more wary of revolutionary talk.
 

abc123

Banned
I agree, without Mao there's probably no Cultural revolution, Great Leap or Sino-Soviet split. OTOH, without that, there's probably no deng and his reforms...
OTOH again, maybe Communism in China fals in 1990 as in the rest of E. Bloc...
 
I do have a feeling that Mao's personal role in CCP's mistakes and crimes are overblown. The entire CCP leadership was responsible for them.

A disaster like Great Leap Forward is inevitable as soon as the Communists took power.

Deng Xiaoping said:
Do not make such an impression that everyone else was right, and only one person (i.e. Mao) was wrong. I dare say this because I made mistakes as well. In 1957's Anti-Rightist Campaign, we were very active, and I have my own share of responsibilities in the worsening of that campaign, as the Party Chief Secretary. In the Great Leap Forward of 1958, we've become hotheaded, so did many of our old comrades here.

With the examples set by Stalin and CCP's early history, as well as a desire to "change things quickly" after decades of misery and delay, something similar to the Great Leap Forward would still happen, probably under the leadership of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

My predictions:

There would definitely still be some initial purges mixed with anti-banditry campaigns. After Korean War (Lin Biao might lead the army and get killed there), There would most probably be a large scale preemptive suppression after the Hungarian Uprising, followed by a movement similar to the Great Leap Forward with some Cultural Revolution style unrest at the bottom. Military men like Zhu De, Peng Dehuai and Chen Yi may intervene to put an end to this disaster, followed by a normalization period characterized by slavish imitation of the "more mature" Soviet and Eastern European model.
 
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