WI: The OSS assassinated Chiang kai-Shek

During his stint as commander of US forces in Burma and India during the Second World War, Joseph Stillwell absolutely loathed the Nationalist government of China and had a particular loathing for Chiang Kai-shek for his corruption and procrastination. In his diary, Stilwell began to note the corruption and the amount of money ($380,584,000 in 1944 dollars) being wasted upon Chiang and his government. The Cambridge History of China, for instance, estimates that some 60%–70% of Chiang's Kuomintang conscripts did not make it through their basic training, with some 40% deserting and the remaining 20% dying of starvation before full induction into the military.

Eventually, his frustrations grew to the point that not only did he propose cutting off Lend-Lease aid to China, but he even ordered the Office of Strategic Services to draw up plans to assassinate Chiang if his position was under threat from internal rivals. Obviously, this never happened and Chiang would later lose the Chinese Civil War and flee to Taiwan, where he remained in power until 1975, where he died from kidney failure.

But what if the OSS decided Chiang Kai-shek was too much of a liability and decided to assassinate him before the end of the Second World War? Who would succeed him in such a scenario?
 
Corruption & mismanagment was not a product of any single individual. What Stillwell witnessed then, and during his previous two Army assignments to China in the 1920s & 1930s, was a long running cultural artifact that had been created during the Manchu dynasty.

Chiang represented the unifier in a coalition of wealthy businessmen, and quasi facists or idealists of the KMT party. Have him drop dead & either someone with equal or better coalition building skills steps in, or the group falls apart & the KMT government falls apart followed by the Army & any other remaining institutions. Anyone who takes over in Chiangs place would be relatively ineffective in fighting the Japanese for a while, as they'd be focused on consolidating their position as the coalition leader. It very unlikely they would be any less inept or tolerant of corruption.
 
It would be like Vietnam, whacking Chiang would get you back to a revolving Door of Generals, little better than the Warlord era.

That said, an actual accident or Assassination by Communists or killed Japanese could lead to better result

Or just 'interesting' result of Soong Mei-ling taking over from 'Peanut' and have a real Dragon Lady running things from 1943 onwards
 

Driftless

Donor
The stuff of spy thrillers..... Have Soong Mei-ling orchestrate the assassination and make it look like Mao or the Japanese were responsible....
 
The stuff of spy thrillers..... Have Soong Mei-ling orchestrate the assassination and make it look like Mao or the Japanese were responsible....
Dateline: September 1942, Chungking China
Place: the Soong family Compound
The Players:
Wendell Willkie, loser of the 1940 Presidential campaign, send by the winning FDR on a worldwide fact finding, goodwill mission
Madame Chiang Kai-shek, nee Soong Mei-ling, aka 'Little Sister' of the powerful and rich Soong Family
and an irate Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, suspicious of what kind of 'Goodwill' was being shared between those two

Accounts differ, but it ended up with ta dead Generalissimo full of .45 caliber bullet holes, and then a frenzied search for a Communist assassin, who wasn't caught. Or was never there, as some later dared whisper.

In any case, Ernest Hemingway claim that she was the modern "the Empress of China" came true. The chain smoking 'Dragon Lady' ruled China, with Willkie staying as an advisor to the new leader of the KMT, but most thought him 'First Consort'-- though the feelings displayed between the two seemed quite real: obviously smitten with each other
 
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