WI: Nationalist China won the Chinese Civil War in 1949

I should add a couple of points (although they would be quite obvious):
  • Taiwan remains part of Mainland China.
  • Hong Kong and Macau are handed over to China as in OTL, but are directly annexed (no need for them to be Special Administrative Regions).
I wonder if the French would have managed to keep their own port.

Anyways, Taiwan was really never part of mainland China. It was an area where various people from Southern China sometimes went to, but indont believe there was any solid government control of it. I do wonder about the Ryuku Islands. They were not Chinese, and China let the Japanese annex them despite supposedly having Chinese protection, but apparently there was some talk that they were supposed to be given to China.

Ahh, and did Stalin still have Chiang Kai Shek's only son as a hostage at this point?
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
IIRC, the Soviets were backing Chiang against the Japanese up until the Soviet-Japan non-aggression pact, which left the door open for the United States to step in. I think it's plausible for both those events to still happen, and after the Chinese communists are eliminated, the Soviets are the next biggest communist threat. Nationalist China fights ferociously against the Japanese and has sole control after the war. Can get a lot of aid if Chiang plays his cards right, so China could be on the right track from 1945, even if getting back to world power status takes some doing. Could possibly see a long standing Singapore style one party state dominated by the KMT gradually forming once it's no longer life and death.
Considering how corrupt the KMT leadership was I think we'll get a corrupt junta, a massive banana republic in Asia.
 
Much of the corruption took root because they were locked in a life or death struggle with the Communists and Japanese, and thus had to rely on the support of anyone they could get, to the point of farming out tax collection and conscription to the warlords; with both threats gone, the opportunity will be there to rein in the corruption to reasonable levels (big difference between your parking meter running out faster than you thought and, say, a company building a facility in a congressman's district and funding his reelection ten times in a row). Maybe the U.S. attaches some strings to its post war aid package, or at least monitors how its being used. Conservative Rural Reconstruction, foreign investment in Jiangnan and the pearl river delta, token opposition parties trotted out to satisfy more egalitarian observers, gradual delegation of power once there's no one else for officials to support. Not quite Salazar or Lee Kuan Yew, but not a Mugabe or Trujillo either.
 
Yeah, the thing about corruption is that if people feel that their lives are improving, they won't really care that much. The KMT was corrupt, but it proved more than capable of building institutions and pushing reforms when it felt the need, in a much less-heavy-handed (and disastrous) manner than the CCP.

What doomed Chiang's efforts on the mainland was that the combination of Japanese invasion and communist agitation meant he could not consolidate enough power to ever quit relying on shaky warlord cronies or enforce the existing laws.
 

Deleted member 94708

Crossposting from my comments in a similar thread:

The Nationalists winning the conventional war would put them in control of the country, with the Communists broken to the extent that they cannot actually take and hold territory.

The problem is... what then?

The Nationalists were, as many have said, essentially a coalition of the urban middle, professional, and commercial classes with the rural landowners, many of whom were barely better than feudal lords. It was clear during the Nanjing Decade that Chiang Kai-Shek was aiming to bring the latter to heel, sooner or later, as his government made real and substantial improvements to governance and infrastructure which favored the former over the latter, as well as investments in industrial and commercial enterprises which did the same. These were ultimately aimed at improving the lot of his urban powerbase such that he could use it to force reforms upon the rural landowners without losing control of the whole ensemble. The problem is that these improvements were largely destroyed during the war against the Japanese, as was the bulk of the Nationalists' combat power, which set any reform program back by at least a decade.

Even working with US aid, the KMT would not be able to quickly or easily rebuild its development initiatives and build the strength necessary to force reforms upon one of the two pillars of its support. It would likely take into the late 1950's or early 1960's before they could eye land reform with any reasonable chance of getting it through landowner opposition. Which begs the question... what do they do to keep the countryside from open revolt in the meantime? The CCP has long since transformed itself into a party of the downtrodden rural workers. If the KMT cannot begin improving their lot they'll face a situation much like that faced by the South Vietnamese government IOTL, or the Japanese in China before them, wherein they control and have support from the urban centers and major transportation links between them, and can generally hold the countryside under ordinary circumstances, but a Communist insurgency can, when it concentrates its forces, take places away from them temporarily. This is NOT a recipe for success when it comes to economic development, as South Vietnam proved IOTL.

It's likely that, in the long run, even the landholder class will figure out that they need to give some ground or die, especially since Chiang seems to have realized this even before WWII and begun directing some of his energies and political capital in that direction. However, the road from 1949 to the point where major land reforms take place isn't going to be short, and it won't be pretty. It will take until the 1960's before they can really finish rooting out the Communists from their rural hideouts, and there probably won't be a Chinese economic miracle along the lines of Reform and Opening until little more than a decade before schedule.

On the other hand, by the time the KMT has gotten the security situation under control and is in a position to implement a major program of export-driven economic growth, there will be a substantial and sophisticated urban commercial and professional class which isn't completely entirely a part of the KMT itself, which means that its economic growth over the coming decades it less likely to be quite as corrupt and cronyist as the PRC's has been. That in turn will positively affect its prospects for long-term liberalization and democratization.
 
IIRC on Taiwan the KMT had a land reform program under the general Chen Cheng who bought off the landowning class by compensating them with shares in various companies. It seemed to work pretty well, all things considered.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Now I have come to the conclusion that a better timeline to see what I was hoping for, would be for the Communists to win the Chinese Civil War and for events to follow our timeline until the mid 1950s, where Mao Ze Dong would be booted from office, and Deng Xiao Ping style economic reforms are implemented. This would have meant less events being butterflied away (the Korean War, Vietnam War, etc) and kept things closer to the 1978 reforms being implemented earlier, and China taking off in the 1950s and becoming a great power by the 1970s or 1980s, instead of the 2000s as in OTL. Anyway, this can be for another thread in the future as it goes to far off topic from this thread.
that wouldn't have happened because in the 1950s-60s the Soviet Union grew faster than the US because they were still realizing their easy gains from industrialization. During that time it really did look to the third world that the Soviet model was superior and hence why everyone (see eygpt and india) rushed to emulate it to various degrees. Deng did run the economy in the 50s-60s and it looked like a Soviet planned economy when he did. It was the cultural revolution which discredited communism as an economic model in china. Liberalization and opening wasn't possible until the 1970s at least.
 
Relating to the topic of the thread, a KMT victory in 1949 is impossible.
Would it be possible to give the KMT a better time of it during WWII by putting some super communistphobes in the IJA (more than OTL) who waste time butchering the communists instead of going strait for the KMT's throat?
I've been working on a TL that's wound up ending the Pacific War six months early (early Feb '45), before the Soviets got involved in Asia and secured Manchuria for the communists. Would this allow for a likely KMT victory in the Civil War?
This thread has been very helpful in wrapping my head around what a KMT victory could lead to, but I feel the question of how the KMT might win is still hanging.
 
Considering how corrupt the KMT leadership was I think we'll get a corrupt junta, a massive banana republic in Asia.

The corruption of the Kuomintang was real, but is vastly overstated. The period from 1943-1949 was very bad, but that had to do because of the pressures of the war. The economy Chiang was left with in China after the Burma Road was closed was simply not large or productive enough to support the expenditures of the government at war. Similarly, the chaos of postwar China meant Chiang neglected to settle this - a crucial mistake that cost him power. He kept believing he could crush the Communists and THEN turn to the issue of eliminating corruption in China. Chiang had learned bitterly during the Central Plains War of 1930 how dangerous "premature reform" could be. Chiang felt he needed to eliminate any major military opposition before he could do that.

Chiang himself was not corrupt. He lived quite modestly and patterned his own behavior on his image of an ideal Confucian statesman. Furthermore, his closest aides and allies were also not corrupt like Chen Cheng (his designated political successor), his son Chiang Ching-kuo, and Zhang Qun. There were also major factions within the KMT that were against corruption and wanted a thorough housecleaning.

Of course, Chiang did tolerate much of the corruption and did not take measures that could have reduced this, but this was a political calculation that he needed these people's support. They were various warlords, Shanghai's Green Gang, the CC Clique, and even members of his wife's family (both HH Kung and to a lesser extent TV Soon seemed to personally benefit, but both were also reformers to a degree). However, everything indicates Chiang tolerated them only to the extent he needed to. Once he was exiled to Taiwan, Chiang was ruthless in removing these people from any role in running Taiwan because he did not need their collaboration to rule Taiwan at all.

While the corruption of the 1943-1949 period cannot be denied, people who claim the KMT leadership was corrupt need to explain why the KMT central government (as opposed to warlords nominally in the KMT, but outside the government) was one of the least corrupt factions in China during the 1927-1937 "Nanking Decade" period, and why Taiwan was so clean under Chiang's rule after the war.

I've studied this period much in the last several years, and I've become completely convinced that if Chiang had won the civil war, he would have significantly reduced corruption. Given the size of China and other power centers in the KMT, they would not have been eliminated as much as in Taiwan, but it would have reduced them to an acceptable level. I don't think such a China would have been as singularly successful as Taiwan was, but it would have been well governed and certainly no Banana Republic.
 
I've been working on a TL that's wound up ending the Pacific War six months early (early Feb '45), before the Soviets got involved in Asia and secured Manchuria for the communists. Would this allow for a likely KMT victory in the Civil War?
This thread has been very helpful in wrapping my head around what a KMT victory could lead to, but I feel the question of how the KMT might win is still hanging.

This is definitely possible. but there are several things that are absolutely needed.

1) The Nationalists need to be able to move their forces into Manchuria and secure it before the Communists can. While this is likely the case in any scenario where the Soviets do not enter the war, it is not entirely certain. It really depends on where Chiang's best armies are, and how quickly they can get there. But an intact Kwantung Army and Manchukuo Army will likely prevent the Communists from seizing control until the Nationalist armies reach them.

2) The Nationalists occupy the border provinces and cut off the Yenan Soviet from direct contact with the Soviet Union in order to prevent any aide from being sent.

Most likely the Nationalists will need to fight and wipe out Communist forces which expand after the war ends and attempts to keep contact with the Soviet Union/Mongolia. This is within the Nationalist capabilities provided no dumb headed American mediation effort implements a ceasefire before it can be done. This is what essentially happened in January 1946 when the Nationalists attempted to move into Jehol (Rehe) and Chahar (Qahar) Provinces. The ceasefire meant the Yenan Soviet was linked to Manchuria and could get Soviet aid directly. If the Nationalists had cut them off, the Communists would have needed to dealt with the Nationalists as they were.

In most scenarios, I see this happening. However, the details matter.
 
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