Inane historical what-ifs: KMT won the war?

Yes, I do vividly remember the stock market boom of the 80s in Taipei & the subsequent bust culminating in the Asian Financial Crises. But it wasn’t just the stock market. Remember, the 80s was also the time of peak MIT (Made in Taiwan), with many prosperous SMEs and the sense that the entire economic pie would only get bigger for most people. Taiwan was a manufacturing & export powerhouse in those days.

Money wise yes, environmentally and building wise, no.

Agree. As much as people complain about Taiwan/Taipei air pollution now, it was far far worse in the 80s. A thick dense layer of brown as bad or worse than other air pollution disaster cases around the world. Blew my nose and what came out was black.

If you look at stats Taiwan is still an export powerhouse but Taiwanese business owners seemed to stop investing their money in Taiwan. Just putting it in China and squirreling it away in foreign bank accounts , life insurance funds or over priced property. Or else the nature of the exports changed …To be concentrated in some big biz areas such as semicon and chemicals.
Anyway you can see from Taiwan that trickle down doesn’t work.
I came after the bust when many companies were actively moving to China and there were still numerous foreign professionals here.

I like a good hypothetical …I think most of your predictions are probable enough. I bet Tibet would be an independent and sovereign nation as well.

I also think China would be more involved in US-led wars, like Vietnam and Iraq (similar to how South Korea sent troops and peace-keeping contingents).

China would probably already have boom and busted by now like Japan, since they would’ve modernized earlier.

They were never in the right position to have retreated to Taiwan, and the KMT had a firm hold on the island. Taiwan’s CCP, of which Lee Tung-hui was briefly a member of, never had much penetration. More likely Mongolia and Russia, maybe some elements would have gone south. Most likely they would have been defeated to the point of surrender and, given their popular support, integrated into the government, probably after a severe purging and in a very nominal way.

The communists themselves admitted that they won some major battles with the help of good fortune . Sometimes thats what it takes. You can plan and strategize all you want but you can’t predict the results.
In one major civil war battle 200k communists surrounded 30 k nationalist 74th division. They were in turn surrounded by 500k of nationalist troops of the 5th army.
Nobody could predict for certain the outcome of that pivotal battle.
In the end the communist annihilated the 74th division but it supposedly was as close as who got to a certain hilltop within a couple of minutes of each other.

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Communist Taiwan!

i actually think china would be in a far better place today. the newly victorious ROC would be very pro-USA and not at all pro-USSR (which had obviously thrown in with the CCP) and would receive a good amount of aid. it would be a fractured country but there wouldn’t be thirty absolutely atrocious years thanks to CCP mismanagement until zhou enlai and deng xiao ping were finally able to win out. the korean war would have ended in total UN victory, with a united korea under the dictatorship of rhee - but they would still eventually democratize in this timeline as well. the usa would funnel development to china as a bulwark against the ussr and a lot of the help that ended up making japan #2 would be instead diverted to china.

ROC china would be a dictatorship during the cks years and he would have been a bad leader, but he would not have ordered farmers to melt their tools for raw iron only to toss the unusable iron. ROC china up through the 70s would be pretty poor but not disaster level like PRC china was. after cks leaves the scene, the next gen i feel would open up due to US pressure and the trends of the world, much like it did in taiwan and sk. the late 70s and 80s would be boom years with a lot of growth. they would still be growing even today, slower, but without the one child policy altering their demographic pyramid, there would still be a lot of young people coming in to boost their economy. they would still be nominally USA allies, not as strong as taiwan, japan, and south korea are now (mostly because of the existence of the PRC and DPRK), but they wouldn’t flat out be rival-enemies like they are now. the area around shanghai including the capital nanjing, hanzhou, suzhou, etc would be the most developed in china. the area around hk would not be as developed as it is today without dxp’s southern policy and special area experiments. taiwan would be a more populated hainan, with mainly tourism and agriculture as the big industries.

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One major hypothetical and the reason I went down this diversion is, I got to thinking would the KMT have pursued the same land reforms in China that in my opinion were very successful in Taiwan?

Because for years I thought it was the Japanese who conducted the land reform but I realised it was actually the KMT who implemented it soon after arriving.

I’m wondering whether it was the pressure from and fear of Communism and the need to create a bigger supporter base that caused them to aggressively push land reform in Taiwan ? Would the same have happened in China?

a lot of the early reforms the kmt did in taiwan were actually somewhat encouraged by the US. it’s been a long while, i read a book in university that talked about this and how instrumental the US advisers and aid were in carrying out a lot of the initial policies and were a big reason for taiwan’s early growth. a kmt led china would certainly receive the same type of ‘direction’ and aid. in fact, as i recall, the original target was mainland china, but this quickly moved to taiwan when china fell to the commies. it would have obviously been a lot harder in mainland china but i do feel that many of the reforms taiwan ended up doing would have been (not as successful ofc) also done in the mainland.

the same ended up happening in many of the countries the US aided after the second war. south korea and japan both also had land reforms ‘encouraged’ by the USA.

there would be more resistance in china in this timeline since the kmt was super corrupt, but china in this timeline would really be very pro-USA, who had defeated the evil japanese and then helped them against the commies. CKS and the kmt would still try and plunder the cookie jar, but they would still follow through on a lot of the US supported initiatives.

Possibly, but large parts of the country would have been outside the direct control of the central government, and many areas with Communist sympathizers. They may have needed the support of landlords to keep some measure of control. Land reform in China and in Taiwan are very different undertakings.

The ROC was forced to implement reforms in order to receive funding from the US. If Taiwan wasn’t part of the Marshall Plan initiative then the KMT would have done fuck all, except for taking land off of Taiwanese landholders to give to demobbed soldiers.

North China - South China breakaway ala West-East German.
Hong Kong (and Macau) will be a free city ala Berlin before the wall.
Commie capital in Beijing.
Nats capital in Nanjing.
Taiwan parts of the Nats as war repercussion from the Japs.

1989, just after Tiananmen, the PRC collapse and horde of poor Northern immigrant flooding Southern cities.

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Is there any evidence land reform was directly related to Marshall Aid?

I would like to understand if KMT already had a roadmap or did some outside organisation give it to them.

Land reform isn’t talked about a lot in Taiwan but if you look into it that’s what really juiced the economy as many tenant and hill farmers suddenly had decent assets behind their name and a jump in standard of living. Later some of these farmers and villages opened factories on their land which results in a lot of the landscape we see today.

It’s what I’ve always heard and read. The Americans were certainly heavily involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-American_Joint_Commission_on_Rural_Reconstruction

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If you look pass the propaganda, you would realize the so called “land reforms” did very little to improve farmer livelihood, but instead allowed KMT elites and 5 big Taiwanese families that had good connections with the KMT to begin a land grab (Lien family falls in both categories), robbing lands from then Taiwanese middle class.

Farmers actually were doing pretty well under Japanese rule before the war went poorly for the Japanese. Many Taiwanese farmers did even better than farmers in Japan, as the demands for both Taiwanese sugar and rice created a balance that kept the prices up. The lost of the Japanese market post war was a bigger hit to Taiwanese farmers than the rent itself. Both late Japanese and early KMT government also straight up took rice away from the farmers to help with their war efforts, so they were equally terrible in that regard.

While it is a good thing to introduce the concepts of actual contracts (which the KMT didn’t do, but the land reforms did help initiate) and protect farmers from poor harvest due to natural disasters, wiping out the middle class in the process was completely unnecessary.

KMT already attempted the same breaks on farm land rentals in China. KMT land reforms in China changed the split from 50-50 to 62.5% to the farmer and 37.5% to the landowner, and they called it 25 rental break in China, as it takes 25% off the 50% rent. In Taiwan they just called it 375 rental break, as 375 is the highest a land owner could collect from the farmers. It didn’t help them win support from the farmers, and instead also alienated land owners.

In Taiwan, the land reforms post 1951 were met with little resistance because the Taiwanese public already saw what the KMT is capable of during 1947’s 228 massacre.

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Not exactly KMT winning the war, but a likely scenario if Chiang was halfway capable and kept the communists from crossing the Yangtze.

No no no.
The Japanese were taking a large wedge of farmers harvests since they arrived in Taiwan and were largely despised by rice farmers. Taiwan was their rice bowl and also to generate cash as a colony (hence emphasis on sugar cane etc). They also disappeared people. The only benefit locals told me was that the schools would give you food if you attended school and that you could leave your house unlocked as Japanese maintained strict order. KMT created a prosperous farmer class in Taiwan . Japanese literally stole the food out of farmers mouths (and giving a little bit back to the kids if they went to Japanese school).

KMT were and still are fairly popular in places like Miaoli, because they heard the stories about the Japanese and the KMT didn’t steal their rice. Instead the KMT helped them get more fertile plains land and move down from the hills and allowed tenant farmers to build up some land holdings. KMT were vastly superior to Japanese in their treatment of tenant and hill farmers and I am NO fan of the KMT.

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That’s not an accurate depiction of historical events.

Taiwan was initially extremely unprofitable for Japan. Since Taiwan has a very steep terrain and relatively very narrow plains, water retention was very poor, and during the summer drought season, most of Taiwan was not suited for farming.

That coupled with the high military cost of maintain peace initially, high death rate due to malaria and cholera, and unable to access the mountainous regions all added to the cost of maintaining Taiwan as a colony and decreased Taiwan’s profitability. Gold mine at Jinguashi also wasn’t really productive until 1933.

That was why between 1897 to 1900 Japan seriously considered selling Taiwan to the French for 15 million franc. That was proposed several times by Nogi Maresuke, the Prefect of Taiwan at the time, to the parliament and the prime ministers. I mean who can blame him, his wife died from malaria within 2 months of getting here.

The financial crisis of the prefecture only gotten better when the second Prefect Kodama Gentaro made reforms with the help from Goto Shinpei, and they were only able to manage it by selling opium to the Taiwanese.

Taiwan only became a viable agriculture base for Japan after extensive massive irrigation engineering by the Japanese, a full 35 years after annexation. Most Taiwanese farmers were and still are extremely grateful for the Japanese civil engineering efforts. It significantly improved their lives. However, even after that farmers on the Jianan plains had to take turns over 3 years to get water to their farmland for rice farming.

The lack of water resources was also why sugar was at first a much more profitable resources for Japan, which was encouraged by Goto Shinpei. With the most significant irrigation network for the Jianan plains underway in the late 1920s, Japan also introduced Japonica rice to Taiwan to replace the more prevalent Indica rice at the time.

It was only then Taiwan became a significant rice “exporter” to Japan. The massive success of Taiwanese rice in Japan caused the Sugar and rice price crisis that I mentioned before. Both sugar and rice prices were high, which dramatically improved farmer’s living.

It was what Japan did to put an end to the sugar and rice price crisis that was questionable. Although it mostly affected sugar farmers. When things went to shit for Japan in WW2, that’s a whole other story.