Would KMT China become a bigger super power than CCP China is today?
- Thread starter sirjackalot
- Start date
marathag
Banned
But there was economic growth under the KMT
Look at what they were doing before 1932
It was not substantially different from other massive but corrupt countries. Look at India. Even with British colonialism and the License Raj, there was some growth. It was not enough to alleviate poverty or make the country rich, but enough to prevent reform (after-all, no one wants to give up control).
There was significant pressure to grow in South Korea, which may or may not be the case in China.
Kind of hard because the Viet Minh is the only independence movement that still has widespread support throughout the country. And Chinese involvement would only galvanize the Vietnamese.
Instead there’d be kmt insanity, which may be ”better” or worse, but it’d still kill millions.
That in an of itself is significant. The purge of China Hands OTL was because they were viewed as communist sympathizers so that probably doesn't happen in this situation.
marathag
Banned
Once the Communist threat in China is finished, so would the large killings, like when the KMT knocked down that dam. They just were not going to be doing a Great Leap Forward and other goofy, but deadly to the Chinese people, type mega programs
Such as? I'm not questioning that said party is a den of snakes, I'm curious.
Ganishka
Banned
Why would he kill millions? Chiang was a brutal dictator but I don't see he being particularly inclined to practice a genocide of such magnitude.
Maybe he would kill all communists, I see him doing that. But nothing like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. I rather live in Chiang's China than in Mao's China.
Well , that is a bit pessimistic given that right next door India also had poor infrastructure yet was able to sustain a democracy , albiet a corrupt one
Ganishka
Banned
Yeah, and China is more ethnically and religiously homogenous. So chances are their democracy is going to work better, albeit less for the minorities.
100% agree. I never understood the argument that the KMT would commit similiar acts to the CCP. Sure they’d probably do some purges and kill thousands but I’ve heard people say that I’d be worse then the GLF and CR. How do you get worse then a famine that kills 45,000,000 and a revolution that kills 2,000,000 and wiped out the culture and sets the country back a decade? Yes the KMT was corrupt and disorganized but they always struck me as just a regular corrupt regime.
Optical_Illusion
Banned
Probably not? Oh, I expect they'd be richer for sure, but would they focus as much in industry and exports, industrialize at exactly the time that globalisation and that post-industrialism makes it most favourable for China to become workshop of the world, reinvest the same amounts in prestigious national projects, adopt an assertive international stance, try to strategize towards an alternative world system of institutions - essentially do all the things that point towards being a "superpower"? Seems less likely. I think development would happen more gradually, with more gradual wage growth, demographic transition, offshoring, and international hostility and ambitions would be restrained, which would not lead to superpower ambitions. As distinct from being a better place to live, contributing more to science and technology and so on.
(It's also possible that they wouldn't be richer or more developed... but it seems more probable that our timeline is an unusually lucky one for the Chinese Communist Party - performing well beyond what be expected due to lucky circumstances - than that an alt-timeline would be unlucky one for non-Communist China).
(It's also possible that they wouldn't be richer or more developed... but it seems more probable that our timeline is an unusually lucky one for the Chinese Communist Party - performing well beyond what be expected due to lucky circumstances - than that an alt-timeline would be unlucky one for non-Communist China).
India didn’t go through a really really harsh civil war, though (20 million dead in total from all camps) and China also fits right into the corrupt democracy, considering the fact that (contrary to popular belief) it’s not technically a one party state and there are elections for the NPC. Remember that the KMT held out in Yunnan until almost a decade after the Civil war ended- and the KMT wasn’t exactly as unified as the CPC, meaning that there would be even more damage to infrastructure than OTL- further limiting the chance for a central democracy.
They have multiple parties. They are objectively not a one party state. They are debatably corrupt because there's not too much ideological difference between the parties, but the rest of the world really has that issue too.
Anyhow, this is getting off topic. Would the outcome have changed significantly had Chiag Kai-Shek not taken over the KMT and someone else taken his place?
Problem with that is that most of them are satellite parties of the CPC due to the United Front, and primarily exist to cater for certain groups of people not catered for by Communist Party membership. So they are less political parties as non-Chinese understand them and more like mutual benefit societies. This is actually not a new strategy, as Mexico under the bad old days of the PRI, for example, used a similar strategy vis-à-vis the PARM (for the PRI's right-wing) and the PPS (for the PRI's left-wing). Due to its reorganization along Leninist lines as a result of the First United Front back in the '20s, it's also not surprising that the GMD also employed a similar strategy, especially during the martial law period in Taiwan. So it can be easily said that China now and Taiwan from 1949 to 1986 (though deteriorating after Jiang Jieshi died, especially with the rise of the Tǎngwài movement) are one-party states.
This is one of those areas I'd like to address when I get to my big post, but it depends on if he loses the power struggle (in which case, who knows who and what takes his place) and is limited strictly to military matters or if he gets pushed out in the 1940s. Of course, any TL where Jiang has a minimal presence, if not in power, would generally be an improvement, but it depends who you are looking at and what portfolio you'd like to engage with. If the warlords were totally defeated instead of being integrated into the GMD as various cliques, for example, that would reduce some of the tension within the GMD, but not all of it. One would still need to address the corruption problem, though, and especially trying to limit the influence of placing T.V. Soong and his family's interests above everything else - which Jiang benefited from due to his marriage into the family.