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Your detail puts the rest of us to shame - thank you again for putting in so much effort for us all. I look forward to more.
I second this.

Porkman said:
I think you're selling the Chinese universities a bit short. It's not the quality that hurts, but the quantity. Beijing University, Tianjin University, Jiaotong University and Qinghua have foreign faculties and have been operating for a few decades and are certainly on the level of a good public university in the USA.
As you're currently living in Taiwan, I'm shocked you didn't mention TNU, Tsinghua (the other one), Koxinga or Academica Sinica (or the mainland CAS for that matter).

Why do High-tech industries have to lag behind? Rather than try to emulate Deng Xiaoping shouldn't you be emulating the Japanese tech-boom of the 50's and 60's? Wartime devastation aside, China is in a much better position in this timeline than Japan was in ours.
 
I second this.


As you're currently living in Taiwan, I'm shocked you didn't mention TNU, Tsinghua (the other one), Koxinga or Academica Sinica (or the mainland CAS for that matter).

Why do High-tech industries have to lag behind? Rather than try to emulate Deng Xiaoping shouldn't you be emulating the Japanese tech-boom of the 50's and 60's? Wartime devastation aside, China is in a much better position in this timeline than Japan was in ours.

I was speaking of the state of Chinese universities in 1944. Tsinghua is a great school (my girlfriend was a student there) and I took Chinese classes at Chiao Tung. Unfortunately neither of these do or are likely to exist on Taiwan in this timeline. There were only three colleges on the whole island when Japan ceded it in 1937. Tainan Technical College, (modern Koxinga) Taihoku Imperial University (modern National Taiwan University) and Taihoku College (modern National Taiwan Normal University.) Only NTU could be said to compete with the famous mainland schools. What Taiwan does have is a much better model for education in general and it's being copied onto the mainland.

I don't mean they want to follow Deng Xiaoping in his focus on maufacturing, just that they are doing everything they can to foster foreign investment and integrate China into the world economy and bring up the standard of living.
 
I just caught up to this AAR, and I was surprised that you're wiling to initiate a status quo ante bellum for all of Europe. I think that . . .

-Spain should lose Galicia to Portugal
-Brittany should become an independent state
-Greece or Bulgaria should be given Macedonia (and I'm talking about F.Y.R.O. Macedonia)
-A unified Austria-Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, and Finland-Estonia should be established
-The United Kingdom of the Netherlands must be established also, with the new country inheriting all of the colonies of the Netherlands and Belgium

. . . And some other ideas that I have on my mind.
 
I just caught up to this AAR, and I was surprised that you're wiling to initiate a status quo ante bellum for all of Europe. I think that . . .

-Spain should lose Galicia to Portugal
-Brittany should become an independent state
-Greece or Bulgaria should be given Macedonia (and I'm talking about F.Y.R.O. Macedonia)
-A unified Austria-Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, and Finland-Estonia should be established
-The United Kingdom of the Netherlands must be established also, with the new country inheriting all of the colonies of the Netherlands and Belgium

. . . And some other ideas that I have on my mind.

Why make Brittany an independent state?
 
I just caught up to this AAR, and I was surprised that you're wiling to initiate a status quo ante bellum for all of Europe. I think that . . .

-Spain should lose Galicia to Portugal
-Brittany should become an independent state
-Greece or Bulgaria should be given Macedonia (and I'm talking about F.Y.R.O. Macedonia)
-A unified Austria-Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, and Finland-Estonia should be established
-The United Kingdom of the Netherlands must be established also, with the new country inheriting all of the colonies of the Netherlands and Belgium

. . . And some other ideas that I have on my mind.

Fantasy, all of it :D
 
These posts have always been the hardest to write because my european history is poor and it shows. The Chinese objective story wise is to make Europe into a place that can be largely ignored while China rises and sets its domestic house in order. Securing future economic interest and keeping the peace are a distant second and third priority. So essentially it's leaving Europe to be put back together by the rest of Allies in the form of economic aide. How they do it doesn't really matter as long as they don't step on any Chinese toes. The allies and America are certainly going to work to bolster Germany's neigbors but I don't know what methods they would use to do that. France has no high horse in this timeline and is largely dependent on the British diplomatically. Economically, they're one of the countries in the best shape because Southern France was untouched. They have a larger industrial base than the Germans for the time being. As far as markets are concerned, both China and America are in agreement that the europeans, including France, cannot be allowed to run their own economic policy without approval from the Allied Control Council which is officially jointly controlled by Britain and China equally, but, nominally, Chinese interests take precedent. German industry will remain under Chinese management for an indeterminate amount of time as part of the peace deal. Chinese companies have used that right to go through the German patent office. The patents, drawings and physical equipment taken in Germany included such items (or drawings for) as electron microscopes, cosmetics, textile machinery, tape recorders, insecticides, a unique chocolate-wrapping machine, a continuous butter-making machine, a manure spreader, ice skate grinders, paper napkin machines, and other technologies-almost all of which were either new to even American industry or at least far superior to anything of use in the United Slates. Access to German technical innovations and patents is a large carrot that the Republic will dangle to get foreign companies to open factories in China. China is also keen to get as much human capital out of Europe as they can in the form of professors and industrialists. Western companies don't really need much prompting; I imagine they're salivating at the size of the potential Chinese market and the cheap manufacturing costs.

How much of Eastern Europe's poor post war performance was due war time devastation or to the soviet admisnistration. Take the income per capita of East Germany in 1955 and compare it to the per capita income of west germany and find the "communist domination" economic penalty. In this timeline, Eastern Europe outside of the Soviet Union is not signicantly more devastated than Western Europe.

Also on that wikipedia site, Europe's population in 1950 was 547 million while China's was 565 million.

The way I write it, China will try to replicate the economic success of the Deng Xiaoping era much earlier and without the baggage of communist destruction of human capital i.e. make the 1990's come sometime in the 70's. How high tech they can get is going to depend on how much the Europeans want to stay in China in the post war period, (there has been no mass flight of foreign companies without Japanese occupation of the coast or civil war) and how much know how can be extracted from the Japanese and the Germans. (China still controls Japan as a puppet.) High tech industries will lag behind in general but they will probably dominate in one or two key areas. (China and Germany led the world's synthetic oil production and China now has all that research and no one else does. The highly advanced Chinese rocketry program will probably foster a few civilian applications as well.) Just as Taiwan manufactures 80% of the world's computer chips, China can probably corner the market on at least one high tech industry arising from war time research.

I think you're selling the Chinese universities a bit short. It's not the quality that hurts, but the quantity. Beijing University, Tianjin University, Jiaotong University and Qinghua have foreign faculties and have been operating for a few decades and are certainly on the level of a good public university in the USA. Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-DaoTsung-Dao Lee are both getting their degrees in physics at these universities in 1944 before going to america on Boxer scholarships to share a nobel prize in 1957. The best and brightest of China have opportunities to go to these schools and can reasonably travel to Europe or America for graduate work. The problem comes from how few modern colleges China has. Sichuan province is bigger in area and population than France but it has only one modern college right now. In China, the top .01% can get a decent secondary education, but there isn't volume to handle the 99.99% of students below that.

Thanks for the detailed reply. :) I know China had some very good universities even then, and some truly brilliant scientists, but as you said, in terms of sheer output it's nowhere near other countries who built their education systems in the 19th century. It takes time to expand them - you need to teach the teachers, who then teach more teachers, etc :) Hungary had brilliant Physicists in Szilard and Teller, but never developed much of a nuclear industry. You need more than a handful of brilliant professors to build a technology oriented industry, you need also lots of those less brilliant professors who nevertheless know enough to turn averagely talented people into competent specialists :)

Much of the difficulty that your China faces is similar to what the USSR faced in the 1950s. China had access to unprecedented resources, and finds itself having risen into a position of power that was unthinkable just ten years earlier. Yet their own country has not developed at the same speed as their expansion of power over foreign countries... and now China is dominating countries that are much more developed than China herself. Much like the USSR came to dominate Germany, Austria, Hungary and other fairly developed countries.

I'm thinking China has the better position, though - she will be more willing to retreat from her positions of power, and of course in this world the antagonism between China and the other great powers is much less bad than between the USSR and the western Allies. But China needs to be careful not to let its foreign commitments -Germany, Russia, Japan- become liabilities. Beyond the short term, France and Britain are MUCH better positioned to influence German policy, for example, than the Chinese could be, especially when they tempt the Germans with carrots like promises of a European economic union (shutting out China). China will find it difficult to impose her will on occupied nations on the other side of the world, once those nations decide they could find easier masters in others. ;)

How exactly does China project power into Europe, at present? If France and UK decide to shut their airspace and the Suez to Chinese shipping, and if they win over Poland to their cause of getting China out of Europe, can they impose an effective blockade on Chinese forces in Germany?

Also of course what is China going to do with Russia? I think this will be the most interesting update of your postwar stories :)
 
How exactly does China project power into Europe, at present? If France and UK decide to shut their airspace and the Suez to Chinese shipping, and if they win over Poland to their cause of getting China out of Europe, can they impose an effective blockade on Chinese forces in Germany?

I think they would be able to, unless China can dig her way to Germany.
 
A brilliant post and a very nice set up for post war Europe. Eagerly awaiting the redrawing of the Soviet borders.
 
Because he's hoi2geek! I'm surprised he didn't mention Catalonia or the Basque peoples.

Well, here's my plan for Iberia, since it's really too large and war-torn to be manageable for both China or Madrid.

-The Basque Country and Catalonia should be granted their independence with the Bayonne-Biarritz and Perpignan regions be given a referendum to decide which country to join.
-Galicia and Olivenza should be returned to Portugal immediately.
-A Spanish Confederation should be established with the King as head of state and twin capitals at the cities of Madrid and León.
 
Well, here's my plan for Iberia, since it's really too large and war-torn to be manageable for both China or Madrid.

-The Basque Country and Catalonia should be granted their independence with the Bayonne-Biarritz and Perpignan regions be given a referendum to decide which country to join.
-Galicia and Olivenza should be returned to Portugal immediately.
-A Spanish Confederation should be established with the King as head of state and twin capitals at the cities of Madrid and León.

Is it really wise to have two capitals?
 
Well, here's my plan for Iberia, since it's really too large and war-torn to be manageable for both China or Madrid.

-The Basque Country and Catalonia should be granted their independence with the Bayonne-Biarritz and Perpignan regions be given a referendum to decide which country to join.
-Galicia and Olivenza should be returned to Portugal immediately.
-A Spanish Confederation should be established with the King as head of state and twin capitals at the cities of Madrid and León.

LOL You are kind of late :D

On topic, will Soviet Union get split up into the different SSR:s or will you divide Russia up even more? You've claimed Tuva, Mongolia and the Primorsk area, right?
 
Well, here's my plan for Iberia, since it's really too large and war-torn to be manageable for both China or Madrid.

-The Basque Country and Catalonia should be granted their independence with the Bayonne-Biarritz and Perpignan regions be given a referendum to decide which country to join.
-Galicia and Olivenza should be returned to Portugal immediately.
-A Spanish Confederation should be established with the King as head of state and twin capitals at the cities of Madrid and León.

Think of it this way, if Germany was the main aggressor in WWII and kept it's borders why would Spain (one of the Allies) be punished by division?
 
Think of it this way, if Germany was the main aggressor in WWII and kept it's borders why would Spain (one of the Allies) be punished by division?

Well think.

The Iberian Peninsula is too large for any one nation to control efficiently, especially if that one nation happens to be on the receiving end of German aggression and occupation. Furthermore, it gives the Basques and Catalans a chance to govern their lands better.
 
The Iberian Peninsula is too large for any one nation to control efficiently, especially if that one nation happens to be on the receiving end of German aggression and occupation. Furthermore, it gives the Basques and Catalans a chance to govern their lands better.

I think Spain did a pretty swell job in OTL...
 
A great update! Most of the choices seem correct, although I would still have stuck with Vichy a bit longer. I'm interested of course, in Russia. A return of the Czar (reduced powers, of course) should be in order! And what smaller states are carved out, interesting to see.