Yuan Shikai's Republic - a Chinese TL

I was wondering whether you should give Taiwan to China, since the Japanese still held so much territory and while it's better than OTL, they probably would have a hard time accepting this peace. On the other hand, I suppose that Taiwan/Formosa is sort of like China's Alsace-Lorraine: if they have a chance to get it, they want it, and otherwise there won't be a peace.
 
OK, time for the last update. I hope y'all enjoy it.


Chapter V: Cold War, the Death of a Leader and the World’s Largest Democracy, 1945-2010.


Joy in China was enormous, the populace was overjoyed after Chiang’s most recent speech before the National Assembly in Beijing. China had become a great power which was exemplified by membership in the Security Council of the United Nations beside the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France. China also possessed the largest standing army in the world with 20 million men under arms in 1945 (with the Red Army second with around 13 million men). China had recovered from the weakness and fragmentation during and after the Qing and was a superpower once more, or so President Chiang said. China was indeed powerful since, even during the war, a remarkable economic development had taken place as the state had nationalised key industries like steel, coal, armaments and heavy industry while millions had learned a new trade in the army or in the weapons industry and the economy shifted toward industry. The state had expanded these industries to wage war; after the war millions were demobilized and found work here or as construction workers to rebuild China.

In the meantime, under UN supervision the referendum regarding the fate of Korea, as agreed upon in the 1942 Treaty of Beijing, was held in June 1945 and the result was in favour of independence; 96% of voters was in favour of independence while 4% (mostly the Japanese minority and Korean collaborators) were opposed. Japan naturally opposed the outcome, but UN supervisors reported that voting procedures had been largely correct and that the outcome was therefore valid. An interim government under Synghman Rhee, who modelled himself as a strongman like Chiang Kai-shek, was set up which proclaimed the Republic of Korea and China was the first to recognise it followed by the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. Japan followed suit reluctantly, later in 1946.

Elections were held in October 1945 and Synghman Rhee’s Korean Nationalist Party was the major winner with 48% of popular vote while Kim Il-Sung’s communists gained 29% in highly disputed elections. Rhee outlawed the communist party with support from other parties and was granted the privilege by the Korean National Assembly to rule by decree for four years to build up Korea. He declared martial law, suspended the provisional constitution, outlawed all political parties but his own (and co-opted those willing to support him into his own party), rounded up political opponents who were tried in show trials, and censored the press, thus establishing a pseudo-fascist one-party state based on the Chinese regime which was Korea’s patron. The four years of rule by decree eventually became forever with the excuse that “Korea needed a strong leader to defend it”. Stalin protested against this, but the West and China accepted the regime as a bulwark against communism in Asia which led to a freeze in Sino-Soviet relations. Rhee, with China’s implicit blessing, signed a decree which authorised the expulsion of the 850.000 large Japanese minority which had been subjected to discrimination, oppression, violence, economic and political isolation, and “Koreanisation policies” from his assumption of full power in October/November 1945, leading to new depths in Korean-Japanese relations. The regime assumed a fiercely anti-Japanese foreign policy and didn’t even have an ambassador in Tokyo until 1966; this was part of a general snobby xenophobia of the new government. After the Chinese model, Korea nationalised a number of key industries like heavy industry, electricity, mining and infrastructure and adopted central state planning to expand these sectors, leading to rapid development with Chinese help. The Korean “Leader” then visited Beijing where Chiang received him in the Forbidden City, from where he ruled as de facto Emperor, with similar pomp as Churchill and Roosevelt had been in 1942. Political analysts of the time noticed very similar relations as had existed between the Qing dynasty and its various tributary states which had now simply been remoulded into a modern shape; indeed, many spoke of alternatively the “Yuan dynasty” or the “Chiang dynasty” although not as imperial, but as political dynasties (especially “Chiang dynasty” became popular after Chiang Ching-kuo succeeded his father in 1975). Chiang and Rhee signed a military alliance and established customs union between the two countries.

In the meantime, China competed with the Soviet Union for influence in Southeast Asia with both supporting independence movements there. However, China’s geographic proximity made it the prime candidate to look to for Asian independence movements. Besides, China’s pan-Asian nationalism and anti-imperialist, anti-Western rhetoric was much more popular than communism and class struggle rhetoric since there wasn’t much of a proletariat in Southeast Asia. China became a model for a successful, modern Asian state for many Asian revolutionaries. In many places, communist organisations were absorbed into wider nationalist independence movements. China by now had exceeded Japan as Asia’s prime industrial power and was third in terms of heavy industry and natural resource extraction behind the USSR and the US (although somewhat lacking in consumer industry). China supplied weapons and advisors to Ho Chi Minh’s coalition of anti-French forces, Aung San’s Burma Independence Army and Sukarno’s rebels in the Dutch East Indies. This of course led to friction between China and the West. The US was more ambivalent: on one hand they supported the Western powers, but were not pro-imperialist and preferred Chinese imposed non-communist regimes as the next best thing. In the end, after US mediation, Burma, French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies all gained independence and were ruled by home grown, Chinese oriented and supported nationalist movements. China expanded its military alliance and customs union to these new states in the shape of the East Asian Coalition; it provided in mutual military assistance, free trade, free traffic of capital, services and people and common tariffs to non-members. China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Indonesia founded it in 1954 to counter the Warsaw Pact, COMECON, NATO and the ECSC as a Third Block. Japan responded by strengthening ties with both the USSR and the US. Malaya, with EAC support, gained independence in 1955 and joined then and later formed a federation with Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore to form Malaysia in 1959. They automatically became member states too.

China also participated in the arms race, following both the USSR and the US. Before the war, Chinese nuclear physics had been in an infant stage. There hadn’t been much research into it and there weren’t many Chinese nuclear physicists, mostly because the government had invested money into more practical matters. In 1942, however, Western magazines had auspiciously stopped publishing about nuclear physics or related subjects (this was due to the Manhattan Project) which led to speculation in China that the US were building an atomic bomb. Chiang ordered the creation of a Nuclear Energy Committee in 1943 to research the possibility of nuclear weapons and most of the theoretical work was laid down in the mid and late 1940s. Due to the war effort and reconstruction a full-fledged nuclear weapons program wasn’t possible at the time, but work kept progressing slowly, but surely. In 1952, a heavy water reactor was built after sufficient amounts of uranium had been enriched in large centrifuges in north-western China. From late 1952, this installation in Outer Mongolia started to produce plutonium and several more reactors were built which also provided nuclear energy for peaceful uses up to 250 megawatts each. In 1955, the long project delivered fruit as a 20 kiloton atomic bomb was detonated in Outer Mongolia in the Gobi Desert, a feat which was widely propagated and presented as a testimony to Chinese engineering. In 1959, a 2 megaton hydrogen bomb was detonated in the Gobi Desert as well and by now the Chinese nuclear arsenal already counted 150 nuclear weapons and a missile program was underway.

This made China the first nuclear power of Asia although Japan and India both had their own nuclear weapons programs which were less successful. The Japanese had two separate programs under navy and army supervision and hadn’t booked much success, also because the program had been underfunded. Now, renewed importance was given to the program because of Chinese success in order to maintain some kind of parity against China. In 1960, Japan tested its own atomic bomb in an underground test on the Kuril Islands and tested a fusion weapon in 1962 which made them the quickest in progressing from fission to fusion weapons. India wouldn’t achieve nuclear weapons until 1968 with some foreign help in the shape of centrifuges and light water test reactors.

In foreign relations, Chiang Kai-shek attempted to maintain neutral relations with both NATO, the Warsaw Pact and China’s neighbouring countries with different measures of success. He visited India in 1950 and met Nehru there and the latter expressed his admiration for China, saying “the Republic of China was a bright light for the oppressed peoples of Asia”. He signed an agreement in which China agreed to provide India with oil, coal, iron ore, pig iron, grain and engineering assistance to help build an industrial base for India while the latter would provide China with finished goods in return. India didn’t join the EAC later as Chiang had hoped, but did maintain friendly relations with the Chinese, but then they also maintained friendly relations with the US and the Soviet Union (with the former only until the mid 1950s when they started supporting Pakistan). Despite Chiang’s neutral position at this time, relations with the Soviet Union remained rather chilly at best until Stalin’s death; they improved after Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 when he denounced Stalin’s personality cult. Khrushchev paid a visit to Beijing in 1957 and some informal talks were held in which relations were improved and in which Chiang expressed his admiration for the USSR’s launch of a satellite into space. Besides friendlier Sino-Soviet relations and increased trade, the meeting had no concrete results for China though except for chillier relations with the Eisenhower administration in Washington. The US improved relations with Japan for the first time since the war after these meetings; in the end both China and Japan couldn’t be pulled into either alliance block and remained the Third Block and a smaller Fourth Block respectively (although Japan’s position as a “Fourth Block” was increasingly becoming an illusion to the militarist regime which they didn’t realize at this time). Chiang’s first priority, however, remained ensuring his dominance over Asia. Chiang therefore maintained this equilibrium in foreign policy of more or less neutral relations with the major powers, and economic and military dominance over his smaller neighbours.

The post-war years allowed for an economic boom in China as manufacturing really got off the ground. A lot of Chinese industry had avoided destruction in the war because Chiang had dismantled it and transported it away from Japan’s advance and the frontlines. After 1945, China had begun selling heavy machinery, fuel and grain to war ravaged Europe which was in need of these materials and it had brought profit to Chinese entrepreneurs. In the 1950s the European economy started growing again, leading to a boom in the latter half of the decade and China started to export consumer goods. After the formation of the EAC, China started to invest into the member states heavily; for example, the China State Petroleum Company delivered oil drilling equipment to Indonesia in return for a percentage of the profit. The EAC’s member states largely became economically dependent on China since the Chinese had the manpower, capital and machinery to develop their economies. The East Asian Coalition became an economic powerhouse in the 1960s, producing a wide variety of cheap consumer goods for markets in Europe, Asia and America. In this way, wealth spread and by the late 1960s Western levels of affluence had been achieved at least in the urban regions of the EAC’s member states.

Internally, China’s economic growth disrupted traditional economic patterns because of its unseen speed. It led to increased urbanisation and larger importance of industry, but also of the services sector which increased the need for educated personnel. China’s population by the 1960s was largely literate and many attended high schools or even universities as affluence rose tremendously. Intellectuals started to criticize the oppressive nature of the regime from the 1960s. Chiang Kai-shek remained the “Great Leader” and suppressed these first manifestations of dissidents while the new affluence and his personality cult kept most Chinese loyal. He successfully maintained a balance between the army, the party and the people, but cracks in China’s regime were already showing before the war. In Korea, President Synghman Rhee died in 1965 after twenty years of rule as Korea’s strongman and revered “Father of the Fatherland”. He was succeeded by Kim Chang-ryong, head of his security forces and his right hand man, but this succession was disputed by groups demanding democratic elections since Korea no longer needed a strong leader because 20 years of independence under Rhee had built up the country enough. In 1965 shortly after Kim’s succession to the office of President, a large group of students and university professors gathered in Seoul and Pyongyang to protest against the oppressive regime and the utterly suffocating intellectual climate. Within days, tens of thousands had gathered in the country’s two biggest cities into an enormous, uncontrolled manifestation which was violent towards the police. It was large enough that the Korean regime couldn’t ignore them and so security troops were sent in and they opened fire, killing 167 and wounding many thousands. Kim Chang-ryong maintained dictatorial powers and arrested many thousands of suspected dissidents and used torture against them before putting them on show trials and sentencing them to death, life prison terms or long terms in labour camps. A similar event took place in Jakarta, Indonesia, where Sukarno used the army against protestors.

Nothing like this took place in China against the authoritarian regime even if there were dissidents. Economic growth, peace, order and progress led to a relatively quiet time even if the populace muttered about the corruption. China kept on progressing and actually launched a satellite into space in 1969 and a manned mission in 1972. It didn’t disguise the deficiencies of the regime like corruption, lack of freedom of expression, authoritarianism, lack of contact with public opinion in the government, and lack of democracy. In 1975 Chiang Kai-shek died after 36 years of rule over China, ending an era. He was succeeded by his son Chiang Ching-kuo who was inaugurated in a grand ceremony in the Forbidden City.

In the meantime, in 1977 Japan, similar protests to those in Korea arose and the military regime suppressed them, but unlike in Korea which was heavily backed by China, they spread to other major cities. The Japanese regime declared martial law across the country, but widespread violence between civilian mobs and government troops continued. Civilian protestors shouted slogans like “loyalty to the Emperor, down with the military, long live democracy!” in order to signal their basic patriotic loyalty, but also them being fed up with dictatorship. In a so far unheard-of act, Emperor Hirohito flaunted the oligarchy of military officers which had recently been joined by industrialists, ordering them to stand down and order elections. Support for the Emperor rose to unseen heights after this and the political chaos across Japan ended almost overnight. Democratic elections were organised in which a coalition of liberals and social-democrats emerged victorious. China largely blocked the event from the media except for a small mention on the third page of the state newspaper among the ads and sports news; the same occurred in state media across the EAC although the news slowly seeped in anyway.

The economy progressed from a purely consumer economy into an information economy in the 1980s with the rise of the computer. Internet didn’t exist yet, but some communications networks were set up in China too which were difficult to control. As China launched a manned mission to the moon in 1982, discontent slowly mounted because the much more educated populace realized its position of power. Chiang Ching-kuo was tolerated because he descended from the “legendary leader and war hero” Chiang Kai-shek, but criticism against him was much greater than against his father. He passed away in 1988 and by now the regime’s position had become untenable, leading to mass demonstrations, first on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and later in major cities across China, demanding democracy and freedom of speech. Tens of millions took to the streets across China and the regime buckled, leading to the promise of free electionsin 1989 and they indeed took place a year later. For the first time in over 75 years the “Fatherland Party” founded by Yuan Shikai ended up in the opposition while a coalition of conservative liberals and social liberals assumed power.

In the meantime, the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev reformed too, but at the loss of a lot of power. The severely stagnant planned economy was reformed to a more market based model and the Red Army withdrew from the Warsaw Pact countries in 1989 after which the alliance was dissolved a year later, leading to German reunification among other things. The country formed a looser confederation and China took its place as the world’s second economy while approaching the 1.7 billion people marker the following decade and overtaking the US economy in 1995. Around this time the Philippines joined the EAC while Sino-Japanese relations improved enough for a limited economic partnership. China was the world’s largest economy, had the largest army and was the world’s biggest democracy in terms of population as it entered the 21st century.
 
Here's the map.

Yuan Shikai's Republic2010.PNG
 
On the one hand I'm rather iffy about the 'democratization of Japan', I doubt it'd be that simple an affair given their penchant for traditionalism, but then again the Emperor is probably busy studying Jellyfish or something :) I do enjoy the timeline so far
 
Communists would've won a fair election in Korea. Great last update anyway - I've always loved the quick pace of your TLs
 

LittleSpeer

Monthly Donor
Now this is a damn good TL. A still strong USSR with a no official end to the 3 way cold war. China holds a strong position and my favorite part. A Japan that is not inhibited by a treaty and can developed all they wish with ever nuclear weapons! Also a strong Germany with Austria and the easter lands over the Oder with EAST PRUSSIA. No world war one borders but thats ASB anyway. About the only city that I loath entirely is Kaliningrad.
 
I'm on a tear bumping China threads, this is a pretty solid one going a different direction than some of the other Yuan Shikai ones out there... the 20th century went by awful fast though. I'm interested in what life in this TL is like
 
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