What If Mao Had Lost?
Posted: October 2nd, 2009 | No Comments »
An interesting piece from Al Jazeera raising the very pertinent question of what China would look like if Mao and the Communists had lost. Regular readers of this blog will know my personal opinion – that a KMT-led China would have been a better place and looked far more like today’s Taiwan, Japan or South Korea. Chiang would have been less rigid despite a rocky start in the 1950s but would have had more aid and been open to more ideas and been less ideologically rigid.
The KMT was certainly better at dealing with a free press, international relations and organising things like banking and finance. Chiang ran Taiwan as a one-party state for a long time but that doesn’t mean he would have done the same in mainland China – his Taiwan regime was a reaction to the PRC not the perfect model he aspired to.
The KMT system was far from perfect but had better tools to promote democracy, private enterprise and restrain corruption than the secretive and clannish communist party. Anyway, it’s a debate that’ll run and run as one of the great “what ifs” of history. Al Jazeera pulls in a few heavyweight notable quotables to offer their opinions. Click here.
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