Before Chinese support to the Viet Minh, they only held a narrow strip of land in the mountainous regions of Northern Tonkin; had the KMT won the Civil War how would the Indochina war unfold?
Indochina War if the KMT wins in the CCW
- Thread starter EasternRomanEmpire
- Start date
Well, there was a "Vietnamese Kuomintang" of sorts (the VNQDD) that China would most likely try to support had the KMT won, so there's that to consider.
As a puppet regime or as an anti-colonial force? Because they didn't seem to be relevant once the French returned in Indochina.
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Both, probably. With the KMT remaining in control of China, and Sino-Soviet relations presumably fraught due to Soviet support of the CCP, the Viet Minh will probably be pretty hamstrung to finish off what remains of the VNQDD. Ho Chi Minh would probably have little choice but to mollify Chiang to avoid making their situation worse, maybe even hand over any CCP exile that sought refuge with them.
As for the VNQDD, they've been a spent force since the failure of the Yen Bai mutiny in the 30s, and even more so after the Viet Minh purged them in the immediate post-war aftermath. But who knows. Maybe an unknown person will rise to take the reins and challenge Ho for control of Vietnam, with KMT help.
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Not to mention that KMT will be busy dealing with communist guerillas in China and Chiang will probably move to crush the warlords after communists are not as pressing threat anymore, resulting in KMT having a very busy time even after a nominal victory.
I disagree with the bolded part, Stalin made sure to play both sides of the conflict, on the one side he signed some agreements with the KMT for technology IIRC and on the other they let the CCP have Manchuria and left Japanese weapon so that they could take them; after 1946 and the Soviet retreat from China the Soviets did nothing to help the CCP and the KMT wasn't the best friend with the West so they certainly aren't mortal enemies.
My question was more about what happens to the Indochina war without CCP support for the Viet Minh than what will Chiang do.
Viet Minh had showed decent survival/durability capability already. Forcing a final victory or making a military achievement like Dien Bien Phu would be tougher for the Viet Minh. Not having the over the border Chinese help is a disadvantage compared to OTL, but it is not some sort of spell of doom to "withering on the vine" within only five years or something.
Plus, the US will probably be less generous with support to to France in the region without China having fallen to Communists, as Indochina won't be seen as such a Cold War front line and next domino, but more of a French colonial problem, although Ho's Communist ideology will be known and disliked.
And France has a big empire to hold down. The timing of the outbreak of full-scale revolt in Algeria might well have had a relationship, perhaps inspired or accelerated by the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and France's agreement to concede to peace talks and partition, instead of merely being shaped by local factors in Algeria. But, I don't think we can expect Algeria to remain quiescent indefinitely. Algerians were also still nursing the grievances of the Setif uprising and massacre and its brutal suppression since 1945 and were not going to forget. When Algeria explodes into full insurgency, that will move to top French priority, and it will become tougher for France to keep fighting for total victory in all of Indochina.
Plus, the US will probably be less generous with support to to France in the region without China having fallen to Communists, as Indochina won't be seen as such a Cold War front line and next domino, but more of a French colonial problem, although Ho's Communist ideology will be known and disliked.
And France has a big empire to hold down. The timing of the outbreak of full-scale revolt in Algeria might well have had a relationship, perhaps inspired or accelerated by the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and France's agreement to concede to peace talks and partition, instead of merely being shaped by local factors in Algeria. But, I don't think we can expect Algeria to remain quiescent indefinitely. Algerians were also still nursing the grievances of the Setif uprising and massacre and its brutal suppression since 1945 and were not going to forget. When Algeria explodes into full insurgency, that will move to top French priority, and it will become tougher for France to keep fighting for total victory in all of Indochina.
Assuming the French start to negotiate in around 1956 is a peace deal where Cochinchina remains an independent nation from the rest of Vietnam likely? Since IOTL the Viet Minh accepted a peace deal with only half of Vietnam despite being in a much better negotiating position than ITTL (with the promise of elections but the French can still promise that).
The Viet Minh were already very nationalist: they put the goal of independence of Vietnam before any proletarian revolution; however simply being communist is enough to get a lot of bad attention including from the KMT.
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Hence the rationale for a rebranding, especially if the Vietminh is having trouble dealing with the French. If there isn't a Communist China to help and the USSR is far away, better to do some PR with the KMT and Americans, especially if Marxism isn't core to the Vietnamese nationalist movement to begin with.
While nationalism is preferred over communism in certain moments, the Viet Minh are convinced communists; you can't ask the entire Viet Minh leadership to forget about their ideological convictions just to please China and the US, and even if they did no one would believe them.
Yeah but what I'm saying is there isn't a definite need or even benefit to stay communist.
Like in the 1920s the KMT itself was socialist-leaning and had the post-Sun leadership been different it may have even ended up not so different from the OTL CCP. In fact you could say that by turning against the KMT left and CCP, Chiang Kai-shek was going against the broader political trend of his time and that contributed to his ultimate downfall since many of the bright and young KMT members were people who wanted progressivism and socialism. As time went on they defected to the CCP.
ITTL of course the KMT has won so there isn't an issue of that "socialist historical trend"; in fact it's the other way around since they have won and the CCP has been vanquished. What I'm saying is that IF the Vietminh doesn't find a way to kick out the French or unite Vietnamese society in the short term AND they can't get reliable support and aid from the USSR, AND Marxism isn't their main motivation for fighting to begin with, they might eventually opt for a different political line between the years of c. 1945-1965 to make their struggle for independence easier.
Of course if the KMT does something to convince the Vietminh that China intends to take over Vietnam or undermine its sovereignty, then they will definitely stay communist I suppose.
Chiang was completely different from Sun Yat-Sen and he allied himself with the old elites (bureaucracy, landowners and warlords) which were already present in China; in Vietnam the old order is the French and collaborationist regimes with the Vietnamese Emperor, the Viet Minh cannot do this.
Vietnamese society for a good part supported the Viet Minh.
Their main motivation to fight is anti-colonialism which is one aspect of Marxism, the Viet Minh are all communists, those who weren't went into other resistance groups. The Viet Minh allied themselves with other resistance groups during the Japanese occupation but that doesn't make them less Marxist, just more pragmatic. They were also nationalists but it's only a part of their ideology and nationalism isn't incompatible with communism.
This is like saying that the Bolsheviks could've changed completely their ideology as to appease the Entente and win in the RCW much more easily or that the CCP could've changed its ideology to appease the KMT.
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The idea that Ho Chi Minh and Co were just Vietnamese nationalists with a coat of red paint that would wash off with a KMT victory is false. The Vietnamese communist party actively fought alongside the CCP during the Chinese Civil War. Its members studied in both the USSR and China under the CCP.
The idea that Chiang would support a Communist party closely allied with his own Communist rebels and the USSR. Led by a man who actively fought against him is madness.
The idea that Chiang would support a Communist party closely allied with his own Communist rebels and the USSR. Led by a man who actively fought against him is madness.
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@LeX versus @EasternRomanEmpire & @walmart
I like your debate. I'm going to weigh in on it!
This is not likely, but it is not implausible either. Certainly crazier things have happened. There is precedent for this.
Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA movement in Angola embraced Maoist Chinese and North Korean patronage and Marxist-Leninist ideology at their outset of their guerrilla struggle against Portugal in the 1960s. By the 1970s he was also accepting South African and American CIA patronage. By the 1980s he was enthusiastically taking Reagan Administration patronage, rejecting socialist models, and embracing the importance of free-market models for Angola's future.
His main opponent, the MPLA led by Agostinho Neto, embraced Marxist-Leninist ideology and Cuban patronage from the outset of its guerrilla struggle against the Portuguese in the 1960s. In the middle 1970s, when the Portuguese withdrew, it was saved from being ousted from power by Chinese and South African and Zairean backed UNITA and FNLA forces by actions of pro-Marxist departing Portuguese soldiers and freshly deploying Cuban troops who stayed for over a dozen years. Nevertheless, the Angolan Marxist-Leninist regime by the mid-1980s, under attack by a Reagan Administration and Botha Administration backed proxy force, had cozy economic relations with multiple western oil companies. The MPLA party won the post-Civil War elections and dropped pretenses to Marxism-Leninism, which seemed to be paint it could just wash off, and enjoyed global support. Savimbi rebelled again, supporting himself off of blood diamonds or whatever other commodities he could but had no international institutional support from anyone. Neither side was Marxist anymore.
Current day Cambodian dictator Hun Sen started off as a young member of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Khmer Rouge, who was in a faction that defected to the Vietnamese either before, during, or just after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978. He was a subordinate to Vietnam's first ex-Khmer Rouge Marxist-Leninist puppet ruler of Cambodia, Heng Samrin, taking the top spot by the end of the 1980s. He took part in the end of the 1980s/early 1990s peace process bringing multiple parties together. He was one part of a multi-party government that had royalists for awhile afterward, then he had a coup and took sole power, which has been uncontested for nearly 30 years, and has been patronized first by Vietnam and seamlessly switched to China. In the meantime in the 1990s, he dropped all Marxist-Leninist ideology and trappings from the regime. I think the Laotian government may have done the same starting in the 1990s.
This has worked even more easily for individual politicians with successful careers. Park Chung-hee was a Communist youth group organizer as a young man before he rose up in South Korean politics and became a right wing South Korean dictator and avatar of managed industrial capitalism. Lee Teng-hui was involved in *both* Japanese armed forces, and Chinese Communist Party youth organizing as a young man on Taiwan, before becoming a successful KMT politician in Taiwan who later represented more of the "native Taiwanese" portion of the population and boosted the island's de facto independence and democracy. That guy literally tried everything out.
I like your debate. I'm going to weigh in on it!
This is not likely, but it is not implausible either. Certainly crazier things have happened. There is precedent for this.
Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA movement in Angola embraced Maoist Chinese and North Korean patronage and Marxist-Leninist ideology at their outset of their guerrilla struggle against Portugal in the 1960s. By the 1970s he was also accepting South African and American CIA patronage. By the 1980s he was enthusiastically taking Reagan Administration patronage, rejecting socialist models, and embracing the importance of free-market models for Angola's future.
His main opponent, the MPLA led by Agostinho Neto, embraced Marxist-Leninist ideology and Cuban patronage from the outset of its guerrilla struggle against the Portuguese in the 1960s. In the middle 1970s, when the Portuguese withdrew, it was saved from being ousted from power by Chinese and South African and Zairean backed UNITA and FNLA forces by actions of pro-Marxist departing Portuguese soldiers and freshly deploying Cuban troops who stayed for over a dozen years. Nevertheless, the Angolan Marxist-Leninist regime by the mid-1980s, under attack by a Reagan Administration and Botha Administration backed proxy force, had cozy economic relations with multiple western oil companies. The MPLA party won the post-Civil War elections and dropped pretenses to Marxism-Leninism, which seemed to be paint it could just wash off, and enjoyed global support. Savimbi rebelled again, supporting himself off of blood diamonds or whatever other commodities he could but had no international institutional support from anyone. Neither side was Marxist anymore.
Current day Cambodian dictator Hun Sen started off as a young member of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Khmer Rouge, who was in a faction that defected to the Vietnamese either before, during, or just after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978. He was a subordinate to Vietnam's first ex-Khmer Rouge Marxist-Leninist puppet ruler of Cambodia, Heng Samrin, taking the top spot by the end of the 1980s. He took part in the end of the 1980s/early 1990s peace process bringing multiple parties together. He was one part of a multi-party government that had royalists for awhile afterward, then he had a coup and took sole power, which has been uncontested for nearly 30 years, and has been patronized first by Vietnam and seamlessly switched to China. In the meantime in the 1990s, he dropped all Marxist-Leninist ideology and trappings from the regime. I think the Laotian government may have done the same starting in the 1990s.
This has worked even more easily for individual politicians with successful careers. Park Chung-hee was a Communist youth group organizer as a young man before he rose up in South Korean politics and became a right wing South Korean dictator and avatar of managed industrial capitalism. Lee Teng-hui was involved in *both* Japanese armed forces, and Chinese Communist Party youth organizing as a young man on Taiwan, before becoming a successful KMT politician in Taiwan who later represented more of the "native Taiwanese" portion of the population and boosted the island's de facto independence and democracy. That guy literally tried everything out.
UNITA was fighting communists, never fought alongside the ANC, and was the only option. This doesn’t apply to Vietnam.
And there already was a "Vietnamese Kuomintang" of sorts (the VNQDD) that Chiang could prop up, for that matter.
I doubt, they weren't very relevant once the French returned (all resistance movements outside, and perhaps even including, the Viet Minh were irrelevant).