Steevo said:
That doesn't entirely make sense as the communists and nationalists didn't actuall resume hostilities until after the war. I mean, that famous photo of Chiang and Mao toasting victory over Japan is from 1945, isn't it?
Appearances can be deceiving. After all, wasn't there a picture of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in the Yalta conference? Just because they're all laughing in that picture doesn't make them the best of friends.
Basically, counter to their interests elsewhere, the United States was actually quite partial to the Communist regime in China at the beginning. They felt that the Nationalists were poorly managed, filled with cronyism, and corrupt to the brim. On the contrast, their view of the Communists was a clean grassroots organization with the support of the people (it was as a result of a certain American mission to Yan'an whose name eludes me right now).
Vinegar Joe, IMHO a very competent leader (some authors actually consider him the best American general!), had little or no understanding of Chinese politics, and refused to let it get in the way of his views. He consistently fought with Chiang over things like why Chiang put *half a million* troops to blockade his ostensible allies, the Communists, instead of using those troops to fight the Japanese. Now, reading my posts from before will give you a good idea of why exactly Chiang did that (and I would argue, with good reason too, because the Communists took every opportunity to fill power vaccuums left by the Nationalists), but from a purely military standpoint, it was grossly inefficient, and, frankly, seemed like Chiang was cutting his nose to spite his face.
By the end of the Sino-Japanese war, the Americans knew that Chiang was losing the support of the people, and fast. And the Communists were becoming more and more popular. The reasons that the Communists were able to outgovern the Nationalist were many-fold, but I'll continue this as part of addressing your next point.
Personally, I believe that, had Chiang Kai-Shek won the war, China, with all it's people, land, and natural resources, would've been able to modernize swiftly and dominate asia economically. The difficulty with the communist Chinese policy, up until just recently, was that they insisted on micromanaging everything top-down, which, on a scale of over a billion people, is flatly impossible. China, as you all know, is allowing for capitalism to occur on a greater scale, which is the reason for it's fast-paced economic growth, but the fact remains that China, being the most populous nation on the planet, has an economy roughly twice the size of Canada's, that is to say that 1.6 billion people have the same sized economy as a developed nation with 64 million. Had Chiang won, I believe China would've outpaced the USA entirely decades ago as the number one power.
The problem again was that Chiang had to play a careful power-balance between all the warlords - even if he had won the Civil War, it would most certainly have been on the backs of some powerful warlords -- heck, even some of Chiang's loyal generals had 'cliques' of their own. Say Chiang got an overwhelming victory and somehow managed to destroy every last Communist. There's still a huge amount of popular dissent going around and China's infrastructure not only sucks at this point, but it's been damaged by 30-some years of continual warfare.
Another problem facing the Nationalists was the power structure. I mentioned the village leaders, landlords and local warlords who, on a small scale, basically ruled rural China. Sure these leaders and warlords paid lip-service to Chiang, but basically they could loot and plunder their people as they pleased - Chiang's government was in no position to really contest this, as the government structure wasn't strong, infrstructure wasn't good, and many of these people also provided the Nationalists with support. Plus, corruption is difficult to uncover.
The Communist solution was brutal and simple. Kill all the landlords, all the warlords, expropriate their land and distribute it amongst the peasants. This makes the peasants really happy, but if the Nationalists did it, it would be political suicide. In addition, killing lots of people isn't really a cool thing to do. Many warlords (for obvious reasons) and Nationalists really opposed the Communists for this reason. Now by the civil war, this type of behaviour was toned down greatly but the reputation of the Communists among the people was pretty big.
Another thing is that, a country's economic development is NOT a simple thing. People may point to Taiwan as an example of development done right, but it is one of the "East Asian Tigers", a special case, and to this day economic development agencies like the IMF are trying to replicate their successes (this is actually a whole other thread topic). One thing, though is that the USA and the western world pumped in funds to these land-poor manpower-rich countries, which helped them develop a lot. It's one thing to develop a place like Hong Kong (small, compact, lots of people, generally homogenous environment), and quite another to develop a massive country that had just lurched out of a civil war like China.
Also, Taiwan was much freer of the burdens that plagued mainland Chinese politics. So Chiang had a freer hand to try out some measures to improve his country, and on a much smaller scale.
One other factor that I'd like to note, is that China is, at least at the moment, found to be quite resource-poor. USA is, as I said the Juggernaut of the world, and this is no accident by any means. USA is actually a really rich country - grain in the middle, lots of nice iron and coal deposits, lots of minerals, oil in the south, fruits and vegetables in the temperate regions, and a big population. The USA is really quite blessed with all these things (By similar account look at how much land the Soviet Union had and it could only at best compete with the USA in resources). China on the other hand, because of its recent development has had to import all of these resources like oil, metals, etc. from abroad and because of this sudden mass importation, prices of these commodities are going up.
The Nationalists also dealt very much with a top-down bureaucracy -- it was difficult to meddle in the local affairs -- people are more likely to listen to the village elder than any government official who just arrived from halfway across the country (remember Chiang's policy of only picking those loyal to him). At least the Communists had local support.
Going back to these corrupt local warlords and village leaders -- I am almost 99% certain that Communist China, in the civil war no longer had its policy of killing the landlords, but most likely kept existing power structures (I'd surmise these local power structures were overseen by local party cadres). I'm kind of speculating here so feel free to correct me. If you guys are following my line of thought, that means that the corruption that was endemic throughout the Nationalist era under Chiang would have *persisted* under the Communists, do you agree?
In fact, you can see right now in modern-day China this fact rearing its ugly head. The corruption in Communist China is mainly on the local level. I think Chiang would have had actually quite a similar problem, if not worse. Perhaps being forced to retreat to Taiwan could have been one of the good things to happen to him.
