Mao Zedong was brilliant at running a political movement, brilliant at running an army, brilliant at running a revolution, and tragically incompetent at running a country; see the Great Leap Forward. But would Chiang Kai-Shek have been any better? He was a soldier, his notion of government was always to run it like an army, he had (as he later proved in Taiwan) no use for democracy, and his understanding of economics was probably as poor as Mao’s.
Didn’t Chiang Kai-Shek run Taiwan until like the 70’s? Assuming my often faulty memory serves, that should show pretty well the differentiations between them, and basically how Shek WOULD have ruled if the Nationalists had won in China. Basically, I don’t think you could have done worse than Mao, but it seems that Shek didn’t do so badly in Taiwan.
(I don’t think Democracy was in the cards, regardless, and most likely it wouldn’t have worked anyway at that time for China)
When Chiang died in 1975, Taiwan was still under martial law with wholesale human rights violations.
In the late 1940’s, his regime killed tens of thousands of Taiwanese. Over time, executing dissidents was replaced by sentencing to the Green Island prison. But this wasn’t likely because he became a nicer man. A better explanation is that maintaining US support was easier when you kept repression below the mass death level.
Also, although I’m not quite sure why, it is harder to kill vast numbers of people in a more prosperous and orderly country, and that’s what Taiwan has been for centuries as compared with mainland China.
When on the mainland, Chiang did manage to kill a lot of people:
I suppose Chiang never would have engaged in zany experiments like the GLF, because he had no ideological impetus to do so and probably lacked the imagination. But he would have been as rough on rivals and dissidents as the Commies proved to be.
I think such a Nationalist government in China would have been extremely corrupt and quite inept. The Kuomintang has always been a corrupt party. They might have had a slightly better human rights record than the CCP, but they’d still be like South Korea or Taiwan up to the 1980s - a “US-friendly”, highly problematic dictatorship.
That being said, I think China would have had massive economic growth back in the 1980s, a decade or two ahead of schedule.
Not sure what happens to Taiwan in this scenario - maybe the Communists would flee to Taiwan and it would be real life reversed - KMT on China, CCP on Taiwan? If so, I’d foresee Taiwan becoming a tropical-climate version of North Korea; a pariah state.
Or sort of like a Pacific Ocean Cuba. Our hypothetical communist Taiwan is too strategically placed for the US to leave it alone.
Also, I don’t think the Nationalists would have implemented a One Child Policy; maybe China’s population would be several hundred million people more than currently today.
Who knows how the Cold War would have turned out, with a Communist USSR facing an anti-Communist USA *and *anti-Communist China? And without Communist Chinese intervention, maybe South Korea takes the entire Korean peninsula.
Chiang was a Leninist, until obtaining Russian support became impossible. Once confined to an island, a similar set of incentives would have pushed Mao onto the capitalist road.
This is a bit of a case study in the impossibility of proving or disproving the great man theory of history vs. the idea that historical forces trump personality. My tendency is to think that objective circumstances are more determinative than which SOB was more cruel.
Mao isolated on Taiwan in the late 1940’s is a Mao surrounded by an extremely strong US Navy. The Taiwanese Mao would have no choice but to suck up to the United States. His situation would have been quite different from that of real-world North Korea, which has been, sometimes reluctantly, propped up by China.
Also, you may be underestimating the extent to which the KMT (Chiang’s party) damaged Taiwan’s traditionally good economy. Mao’s troops were, I’m thinking, more disciplined than Chiang’s, and thus would have done less physical damage. If I am right that Mao, isolated from any Russian support on Taiwan, would have become a capitalist-roader, the Mao on Taiwan scenario could easily have meant a better economic future for Taiwan.
Maybe.
I don’t know much about Cuban history. And I certainly don’t know how many Cubans were communists when Castro took over. But I can say that the number of Taiwanese who were communists was basically in the single digits.
The Cuba situation does show that a communist island in an American lake is possible. But it doesn’t show it is likely.
I don’t know about that. For one, I think that a communist Taiwan would certainly have received a great deal of support from the USSR, although it would certainly prove very hard to actually get it to them. Also, I don’t know that I agree about Chiang’s Leninism and subsequent switch to capitalism suggesting a similar situation with Mao. Mao’s people had literally fought a bloody, and harrowing revolution in the name of communism, and furthermore, in our hypothetical scenario they lose it, something that doesn’t predispose them to flip ideologies and to suck up to capitalists. I fully expect that they would clash with the local populace in Taiwan just as much as the KMT actually did.
And there would be a much greater divide between the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor. Chinese cities would more resemble Manila: an inner core of rich people and a vast outer ring of people living in cardboard shanties.
(Communism succeeds here: everyone is pretty darn poor. But at least it’s more close to equal. Except party members, of course…)
You’re absolutely right in that Cuba had a longstanding liberal/unionist trend that was not present in Taiwan. However, I think that the real world KMT’s history in Taiwan shows that imposing an outside political ideology in Taiwan would not actually be that hard for Mao, especially given that it would be nearly impossible to our Communist Taiwan to survive without Soviet aid.
When you look at rural China, that’s not too far off from the reality. Furthermore, during the Great Leap Forward, it was often worse than you are describing. Maybe Communism works, but mismanagement results in failure no matter what your ideology is.
Unless famines thinned out the population. They’ve always been a problem in China; the emperors used to buy grain when it was cheap, store it in silos, and dole it out during famines. Chiang’s government probably wouldn’t cause any famines like Mao’s did in the GLF, but probably would be too corrupt and incompetent and indifferent to relieve natural famines.
Well, that changes if Mao arrives in 1947 with what’s left of his army and his Party and all their extended families and all the Communist-indoctrinated peasants he can bring with him. He would have gotten all the volunteers he could take, too, the Communists were very popular in the parts of China they controlled during the Civil War.
One point to make:
A Mao who lost the mainland would not have been the same Mao. It would have been a less militarily competent Mao, a Mao less able to get others to do his bidding. So even if the real Mao who defeated Chiang would have been able to force a middle class society into communism, that doesn’t mean the other guy who never lived could have done it.
Another thing. Any Communist Taiwan would have to rapidly develop a nuclear capability, or be destroyed by the Nationalist government, since the USSR had no good way to stage a large naval force in east Asia.
Any sort of Communist Chinese bastion would be in Manchuria next to the USSR not hundreds of miles away in Taiwan-one of the reasons I think why the Chiang regime was able to flee to Taiwan was it retaining its navy.
Considering the record of culturally similar East Asian countries such as Korea and Japan, Chinese birth-rates would have fallen with prosperity. The population to-day would be somewhat larger but it would also be facing less demographic problems in the future with the costs of subsidizing an enormous elderly population.
There already are plenty of divides in China currently. A Nationalist China would more closely resemble Korea and Japan then Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines if anything.
Needless to say the world would be a much better place had the Nationalists won the Chinese Civil War. While Chiang was hardly a saint, he certainly wasn’t as blood-thirsty as Mao and wouldn’t have done anything so imbecilic as the Great Leap Backwards or the Anti-Cultural Revolution. I suspect, especially if the Communists posed a serious threat, Chiang would have wised up as he did in reality and implemented such reforms as land redistribution as he actually did. Additionally he’d pursue the same sort Tiger Economy model that South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan did and that Deng Xiaoping eventually would. Thus we’d see China a decade if not more ahead of ours with consequent greater prosperity. With a larger free world, the Cold War would have been less intense or fearful-less McCarthyite rantings about the Democrats “losing China” as well as no or at least much less bloodier wars in Korea and Vietnam. This in turn would have strengthened New Deal liberalism against the New Right perhaps ensuing a far more robust social welfare state in the American Republic and “vital center” liberalism not falling to the assaults of the New Left and New Right. Finally if history has shown anything its the fragility of right-wing military dictatorships compared to communist ones in the Cold War world-Pinochet fell as did the other Latin American juntas, Suharto fell, the military dictatorship in Korea and Japan etc. while CCP rule in China, the Castro borthers in Cuba etc. have not. Thus in almost all certainty China would have democratized before the turn of the century. To-day we would be seeing a much more healthier world without the world’s premier rising economic power under the rule of a quasi fascistic Marxism, bolstering US confidence.
Yet still vastly less bloodier and unpleasant than that of Mao’s.
Which would seem to be also applicable to Chiang on the mainland. And objectively speaking he was a “nicer” man-at least in the sense that Franco was “nicer” than Hitler. He wasn’t driven by a murderous totalitarian ideology like Mao Zedong was.
Taiwan was only more prosperous than the mainland since Japanese colonization in 1894, before that it was a fairly remote, semi-barbarous frontier province with a large aboriginal population. For that matter compare North and South Korea, the North was more industrialized and prosperous when partition occurred and well into the 1970s but now…