Sun Yat Sen Lives: effects on China and WWII

[The Undead Martyr]

Dr Sun Yat Sen is the only polticial figure revered in both Taiwan and thr PRC, and for good reason- he was one of the greatest political leaders in modern Chinese history. His premature death to cancer in 1925 undoubtedly hampered the ROC. So what if he lives longer and is able to unify China?

For starters I think that the Second Sino Japanese War would be averted. Absent the warlord fragmentation Manchuria won't be such an easy target to peel away.

China is likely to view regaining the lost provinces of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Qingdao as a fairly high priority. They would likely draw closer to Weimar Germany and the USSR, but could curry favor with the US as well, probably taking a tack similar to Turkey. I wonder whether China would be able to acquire a navy- probably built by the US. They'd certainly want one to deal with Japan, but can they afford it is another issue.

In the long run a unified China undoubtedly averts the Second World War as we know it, but the alliances are anyone's ball game. I could see the Anglo Japanese alliance clinging on a bit longer- Chinese revanchism would threaten both Britain and Japan, and the issues re- the United States could presumably be ironed out.

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

China possibly goes fascist and we see a Berlin-Rome-Beijing axis///

 

[MildSeven]

Dr Sun Yat Sen is the only polticial figure revered in both Taiwan and thr PRC, and for good reason- he was one of the greatest political leaders in modern Chinese history. His premature death to cancer in 1925 undoubtedly hampered the ROC. So what if he lives longer and is able to unify China?

For starters I think that the Second Sino Japanese War would be averted. Absent the warlord fragmentation Manchuria won't be such an easy target to peel away.

China is likely to view regaining the lost provinces of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Qingdao as a fairly high priority. They would likely draw closer to Weimar Germany and the USSR, but could curry favor with the US as well, probably taking a tack similar to Turkey. I wonder whether China would be able to acquire a navy- probably built by the US. They'd certainly want one to deal with Japan, but can they afford it is another issue.

In the long run a unified China undoubtedly averts the Second World War as we know it, but the alliances are anyone's ball game. I could see the Anglo Japanese alliance clinging on a bit longer- Chinese revanchism would threaten both Britain and Japan, and the issues re- the United States could presumably be ironed out.

He was certainly revered in both the PRC and ROC, but I wouldn’t exactly call him “one of the greatest political leaders in modern Chinese history”. He was chosen as president of the newly formed Republic of China because of his political impotence. Having spent most of his career as a revolutionary outside of China raising funds for the Tongmenghui, he was seen as acceptable to all factions.

Unfortunately, almost as soon as he took his post, Yuan Shikai betrayed the revolution and declared himself first president then emperor of China. This set the stage for China’s disintegration into the Warlord Period, not Sun’s death. An excellent alternate scenario on the lack of a setback on the scale of the Warlord Period is Hendryk’s Superpower China 1912.

Chiang’s China already had a very close relationship to both Weimar Germany and the USSR, and I don’t really see how Sun being in charge would have helped China receive more aid from them than OTL.

As for the navy, even throwing money at a problem isn’t going to make it go away. As Admiral Cunningham once said, it takes 3 years to build a ship and 300 years to build a naval tradition. The Beiyang Fleet was seen by observers of the First Sino-Japanese War to be superior to its counterpart yet it was soundly thrashed.

China possibly goes fascist and we see a Berlin-Rome-Beijing axis///

Not sure how a longer living Sun Yat Sen would turn China fascist???

 

[danteheadman]

China possibly goes fascist and we see a Berlin-Rome-Beijing axis///

I don't see it. Sun Yat Sen was a revolutionary nationalist, but that doesn't necessarily make him a protofascist. See Fascism and Sun Yat-Sen by A. James Gregor (U.C. Berkeley):

In the case of Italian Fascism, one of the most important political that was to shape doctrine was Italian Nationalism, a critical but distinctive component. Italian Nationalism traced its origins to a prefascist ideological tradition that began to take form around the turn of the twentieth century and found fairly rigorous doctrinal expression among members of Associazone Nazionalista Italiana between 1910 and 1912. Whatever similarities M. N. Roy or Marxists and Western academics found between Italian Fascism and the revolutionary ideology of Sun Yat-sen derive almost exclusively from their shared reactive and developmental nationalism. Whatever similarities obtain between Sun Yat-sen’s ideology and that of Italian Fascism arise out of their doctrinal nationalism. Marxists interpreted the nationalism of Sun Yat-sen and that of Italian Fascism as instrumental—of interest only as it might be marshaled to the service of proletarian revolution. In China, the literary and philosophical reformism of the nineteenth century gave way to the anti-Marxist, developmental nationalism of Sun Yat-sen.

I don't think that revolutionary nationalism would necessarily transition to fascism in a WW2 context.

 

[ramones1986]

How would Sun tackle the emerging factions within the KMT, particularly the leftists and the rightists?