What if?.....

[Bigfella]

I may have to defer this one to the Colonel and other avid China watchers. I'm merely basing my conclusions on indirect accounts and general feeling of the people rather than a comprehensive study by scholars. To my understanding, Mao made a mess in China between the fallout with the Soviets and the 1970s. He broke up families, forced people to work in communes, devastated manufacturing process, and destroyed cultural treasures. His understanding of an industrial economy was that of an uneducated peasant, no offense to peasants. He was a great motivator. But a ruler he was not.

Gunnut,

You are correct. Mao's policies in the late 50s/early 60s & again in the late 60s/early 70s were indeed a disaster. The first was borne of fear of the USSR & absurd ideological fantasies. The second a vicious power grab dressed up as a great revolutionary movement.

My point is simply that despite this, Mao & the CCP still managed to create a functional, unitary Chinese state that has continued for almost 60 years (and seems likely to do so for at least another generation or so). Like you, I'll leave it to experts to tell us when last China achieved this, but it wasn't under Chaing, and I doubt it ever would have been.

[beansprout]

but tell me guys. We knew Chiang were very incapable of Running china, what if the U.S had intervened in the war? the Truman govt was very unpopular when it lost china to the Communist. what if they sent supplies back to china again & sent a lovely general like stilwell to Help the nationalist fight. Would the fight be just like vietnam? or emerge as a capitalist nation like America?

[wessex]

Hello.

I think China was different during tose years. A lot of Little chinas due to the languages and geography (remember the Tibet) would have been an ally to the US policy to control that they in the next years called the Dominoīs theory.