How powerful would a Kuomintang China be today?

[Catalunya]

I think we can all agree that in the upcoming decades China will replace the United States as the world's most powerful country. The PRC achieved all of this despite having been one of the most violent and underdeveloped countries for such a long time.

I always wondered what a China ruled by the KMT could've achieved. I do not necessarily think that Chiang's China would be a bastion of democracy and capitalism, but by avoiding events like the Great Leap Forward it could surely have surpassed the US economically by 2000. How would the presence of such a strong Chinese nation effect the rest of the world and especially the West? Would the US have less of major presence on the world stage and what would US-China and SU/Russia-China relations be like ITTL?

 

[d32123]

First of all, I think the premise that China passing the US is inevitable is highly questionable at best. China may be the biggest or close to the biggest economy in the world by some measures, but the US still has 100% hegemony over international finance and has a military several times more powerful than China's.

Second of all, how does KMT China survive? A KMT China that manages to avoid the Second Sino-Japanese War is going to be in a much better position than one that inherits a nation of rubble after 1949. In the first scenario China probably continues its path as an increasingly centralized right-wing dictatorship balancing the interests of rival powers. In the second scenario, China is going to need to rebuild, but unlike European countries of Japan, China is fucking huge and massively corrupt so I assume this will take much much longer.

I also question whether or not China would develop like it did IOTL at all. Like other East Asian countries, China will seriously struggle to develop its economy until its landlord class is broken. IOTL Taiwan this was possible because the KMT had no ties to the local landlord class, but in the mainland the landlord class was their base of power. I could easily see a KMT China stagnating like Cold War India, ruled by a corrupt dynastic party with its power similarly tied to the landlord elite.

Also despite both sides attempting to play this down given what happened later, a HUGE reason why China was able to develop at all IOTL was direct aid and support from the Soviet Union during the 1950s. I doubt the US government, which largely saw the KMT as useless thieves, would offer a KMT China the same benefits. I personally think that development of China was contingent on the overthrow of the incredibly corrupt and backwards KMT, and once a non-communist opposition forms the US will be eager to support it. I think China lucked out massively IOTL because they managed to go communist just in time to receive tons of aid from the USSR before they began to abandon internationalism entirely, and while the 1960s and 1970s were a bit rough they then managed to somehow switch to the US camp just in time to plug themselves into the coming neoliberal economic boom. 9 times out of 10 I think KMT China would miss these opportunities.

 

[Indicus]

like Cold War India, ruled by a corrupt dynastic party with its power similarly tied to the landlord elite.

It should be noted that the Indian National Congress did not in fact have power tied to the landlord elite, but rather to urban elites. One of the large political issues of 1950s India was land redistribution from landlords (specifically zamindars) to farmers, which was largely successful but less so in places like Bihar, which likely a reason why it’s so underdeveloped.

So, in that regard Kuomintang-ruled China would likely do worse than Congress-ruled India.