And the regime murdered Charles Evan Hughes and Jack Pershing, two people notable for being respected by a large degree of the American population.
For the Republic: A History of the Second American Civil War
- Thread starter The Angry Observer
- Start date
On that note, I wouldn't be surprised if more of Europe here ends up trading the race-based totalitarianism of National Socialism with the class-based totalitarianism of Marxism-Leninism ITTL.
While immigrants are certainly suffering in general, the post-Russian Civil War refugees are not actually the targets of any specific reprisals. In part, this is because of the need for manpower in the NatCorp armies and factories, but also because of loud and lucrative support for the regime on the part of former Russian nobles among the White émigré class. These rabid anti-communists have, by-and-large, thrown their entire lots behind MacArthur, and the common descendant of the former Russian Empire has benefitted from this as the regime holds up the White émigrés as "model" immigrants.
And on that note, reports of the Holodomor would lead to the NatCorps getting the support of Ukrainian immigrants. And speaking of which, maybe we could have recognition of the NatCorps (in response to the Soviets backing the Republicans) be a stain on Pilsudski's record as he lies dying that the Soviets would 100% use against Poland?
Poland was pretty heavily dependent on Franco-British support, especially since it fully expected a rematch of the Polish-Soviet War and figured that the Allies would bail them out in such a conflict. Piłsudksi recognizing Mac and the NatCorps would be a massive breach against France and Britain that would leave Poland diplomatically isolated and further anger the Soviets on its border who are actively supporting the Republic. Regardless of his preferred outcome (and Piłsudksi would prefer the Soviets get humiliated in this conflict), the only way to avoid losing Allied support and provoking Stalin is to stay well out of the SACW.
Yeah, massacre of the Supreme Court would have been a huge no-no for most Americans of those days.
Maybe Poland and Yugoslavia could recognize Smith as America's legitimate leader but keep their diplomats in Washington or something like that (speaking of which, where are foreign embassies right now at this point) with how both are fiercely anti-communist with little love for the Soviets but know openly supporting the NatCorps would be suicide, especially with them needing Anglo-French aid and all that?
Deleted member 191087
My my, what a rogues gallery the whole NatCorp alliance/movement is. From extremist military men like MacArthur and ”Bombs Away” Lemay, to power hungry business leaders like Morgan and Ford, to street thugs like the KKK and the Silver Shirts, to the ultra-greedy and reactionary Russian nobles to goat-nuts obsessed quack doctors such as Brinkley. Sounds like something out of a cheap pulp comic series of the time, excerpt, tragically, real.
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Hey guys-- @GaysInSpace, the other half of this project, very graciously made a write-up on the Chinese Civil War up to this point. As we have said in the past, the fate of China is very important for where we eventually intend to take the story. I'll be uploading that in the next few minutes.
"White Sun Over China" (Chapter 13)
"White Sun Over China"
"When the nation can act freely, then China may be called strong. To make the nation free, we must each sacrifice his freedom." -Sun Yat-sen
Chiang Kai-Shek
To call the Chinese Civil War complex is a massive understatement. The wild and tangled web of personal and political relationships that spanned the twenty-year conflict has been the subject of numerous books whose veracity ranges from reasonable at best to outright propaganda at worst. Therefore, a summary of the Chinese Civil War up to the Xi’an Agreement of 1936 is necessary.
Chiang Kai-Shek
Following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Sun Yat-sen, the father of Chinese republicanism, assumed the presidency of China as a member of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party. He was followed thereafter by Yuan Shikai, who attempted to restore the empire with himself at the head.
This brief restoration failed, resulting in a chaotic period in China known as the Warlord Era, whereby dozens of competing governments spanning the whole of the political spectrum squabbled amongst themselves. The Warlord governments ranged in size from large portions of the country to handfuls of impoverished villages, and their lifespans could often be measured in days, weeks, or even mere hours.
From 1916 to 1928, the Warlord Era raged across China. In the southern city of Guangzhou, Sun and the KMT gathered to reform a new government. They purged or aligned with various warlords in the region, eventually mustering control over the south of the country. Meanwhile, a rival government known as the Fengtian Clique, so named for its origins in the eponymous Manchurian province, occupied Beijing, the traditional Chinese capital, and enjoyed the most recognition as the legitimate government of China.
In 1925, with the groundwork laid for the Kuomintang to begin its reconquest of China, Sun Yat-sen died of natural causes in Guangzhou. His successor was Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the KMT military and close confidant of Sun’s. Chiang would declare the Northern Expedition, seeking to eliminate the Fengtian Clique, which was in a weakened state due to its infighting with the Zhili Clique, which had previously been aligned with Fengtian in an arrangement known as the Beiyang Government. With the Zhili forced to retreat to their mountainous holdfast and the Fengtian still licking their wounds, Chiang struck.
When the Northern Expedition was launched in 1926, the KMT first went against the wounded Zhili, targeting its leader, Zhang Zuolin, in Hunan. In the Second Fengtian-Zhili War, Wu had been within mere inches of claiming victory over the Fengtian, only for a betrayal to result in his army being devastatingly routed and forced to retreat to Hunan. The first two month campaign of the KMT’s Northern Expedition ended with the total annihilation of the Zhili forces and Wu’s surrender. However, troubles on the home front would soon result in further strife for the KMT and China at large.
Throughout most of the 1920’s, the small but growing Chinese Communist Party had been in alignment with the Kuomintang. They, and the other various leftist factions within the party became known as the Left Kuomintang, while Chiang’s faction was known as the Right Kuomintang, or the LKMT and RKMT, for short. After Wuhan was captured in 1926, the Kuomintang relocated to the city, and a government soon cropped up which was dominated by the LKMT.
While nominally loyal to Chiang as their leader and generally cooperative, the LKMT did not shy from defying him when they felt strongly enough. With the main party organs under explicitly leftist and pro-Soviet control and the army under Chiang and the RKMT, a clash seemed inevitable. The taking of Shanghai in March of 1927, the latest in Chiang’s successes, saw a communist-backed general strike turn the city over to chaos as the Beijing government failed to defend it.
This strike, while paramount in allowing a swift capture of Shanghai, made Chiang and the rest of the RKMT extremely wary of their leftist allies, fearing the same betrayal that had cost Wu Peifu and his Zhili their victory over the Fengtian Clique earlier. Thusly, at the same time that the rest of the party voted to expel the LKMT from its ranks, Chiang began a purge of the left known as the Shanghai Massacre in April of 1927.
The slaughter and expulsion of the LKMT permanently shattered the big-tent coalition of the Kuomintang. The RKMT, outnumbered in Wuhan, relocated to Nanjing, while the LKMT remained, still insistent that they were the legitimate Kuomintang. Chiang’s betrayal was condemned by numerous members in the center of the party, and many who had previously toed the line between one side or the other found themselves forced to choose.
The most important of these figures who found themselves caught in the middle was a thirty-four year old woman. Soong Qingling, also known by her baptismal name Rosamond, or Rosie, for her English-speaking friends, was the a member of the extremely prominent Soong family of Shanghai, and the widow of the late Sun Yat-sen. Their marriage had been a political one, but one which was well-suited to the extremely political Qingling.
Soon Qingling
Soong Qingling, and her sisters Mei-ling and Ai-ling, were all Methodist daughters of Shanghai businessman Charlie Soong, and they, along with their brothers Tse-vung, Tse-liang, and Tse-an, were educated in the United States. The three sisters, all fairly close in age, studied at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. Consummate English-speakers, the Soong sisters were all famous for the southern drawl that accompanied their speech, a linguistic idiosyncrasy which would one day serve them well.
For Rosie, the middle of the sisters, she had always had the strongest affinity for the LKMT. She voiced that her late husband, the founder of the Republic of China, possessed strong socialist sympathies which were reflected in his Three Principles of the People, particularly in the principle of Minsheng, roughly translated as ‘Welfare Rights,’ which were a critique of unregulated capitalism and called for land and wealth redistribution.
All of this was made much more complicated by the interpersonal relationships at play here. Just as Qingling was married to Sun, Mei-ling was engaged to Chiang. The two sisters now found themselves on opposite sides of a gulf forged by Mei-ling’s intended. With a final, furious denunciation of Chiang as a butcher and traitor to Sun’s ideals, Soong Qingling fled Shanghai for Moscow, and that December, Chiang and Mei-ling married. The Soong sisters would not reconcile for almost a decade.
Wedding photos of Sun Yat-sen and Soong Qingling and Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling
The Chinese Communist Party did not simply take the Shanghai Massacre and their expulsion from the Kuomintang sitting down. In August of 1927, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, two of the CCP’s most famous generals, led the Nanchang Uprising, moving down from Wuhan to seize Nanchang, with intent of moving on Guangzhou and establishing control over southern China as Chiang moved northward. This ultimately ended disastrously, with Zhou and Zhu joining the communist guerrilla Mao Zedong in the southern province of Jiangxi, establishing the first all-communist claimant government to China, the Jiangxi Soviet.
Meanwhile, in the north, the Beiyang Government found itself handed defeat and defeat by Chiang. Zhang Zuolin, the longtime leader of the Fengtian Clique, was killed when the Kwantung Army, Japan’s armed forces stationed on its leased territory in Manchuria, planted a bomb on his train as he fled Beijing for his base of power in Manchuria. Zuolin’s son, Xueliang, assumed leadership over the clique and formally surrendered to Chiang on December 29, 1928, nominally reuniting China under the Kuomintang.
Zhang Zuolin
This victory was not to last. Japan, with its imperial ambitious, staged a false flag attack in its leased territory in Manchuria in September of 1931. The Mukden Incident, as it is now known, resulted in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of the puppet State of Manchuria, known today as Manchukuo, in early 1932. To add insult to injury, the former Xuantong Emperor of the Great Qing, Aisin-Gioro Puyi, was first declared Head of State of Manchuria, and then crowned as its emperor in 1934.
A second Japanese puppet state, Mengjiang, formed out of the parts of the Inner Mongolia region that bordered Manchukuo. The ceasefire deal between Japan and China also gave the Japanese control of the city of Tianjin, which was Beijing’s primary means of seaborne economic activity. Given its proximity to Japanese-controlled territory, Beijing was no longer a suitable capital for the KMT government, which elected to remain in Nanjing.
The fortunes of Chiang Kai-shek and China at large would soon turn, though. Japan, heavily dependent on American oil and steel to fuel its war machine, was suddenly out in the cold as the Second American Civil War broke out. In particular, the nationalization of the Texas and Gulf oil fields by Huey Long dealt a crippling blow to Japan’s ambitions. When the Japanese Imperial Navy attempted to move on the American island of Guam, it found itself repulsed by the military detachment there, despite controlling its sister islands to the north and south.
Emperor Puyi and Empress Wanrong
With Japan now reeling from the loss of its primary source of oil and iron, Chiang decided that the time was ripe to finish off the warlords who still controlled western China, including the Ma family in the center of the country, along with the separatists in the Xinjiang region. Two regions would frustrate him, however. The first, Tibet, had been independent since the initial chaos with the failure of Yuan Shikai’s attempt at imperial restoration. Dirt poor and sparsely populated, it was the sheer lack of passable roads and the brutal climate of the Tibetan Plateau that prevented the KMT from moving in on Tibet.
Meanwhile, in the north, Outer Mongolia had become the Mongolian People’s Republic, ruled as a Soviet proxy state. To strike at the communist-ruled nation would mean all-out war with the Soviet Union, and Chiang knew that, regardless of their shortcomings in materiel, the Japanese would not pass up an opportunity to attack if China found itself in combat against the Russians.
Leaving Tibet and Mongolia to their own devices for the time being, Chiang focused first on rooting out the Xiebei San Ma, as the Hui Muslim warlords of central China were known. The nominal leader of the family, Ma Bufang, was cooperative with Chiang’s demands, while his relatives were often not. Most notably, Bufang’s cousin, Zhongying, was known as a particularly brutal man who had slaughtered his was across western China.
Ma Bufang, head of the Xibei San Ma and his unstable younger cousin Ma Zhongying
Ma Zhongying had been loyal to the Kuomintang, but soon found himself consumed with delusions of grandeur, that he would found a Hui state which would go on to eclipse Central Asia. It was alleged that he had even begun to compare himself to the old Khans of the Mongol Empire. For many, they were confused how this young man who, only months earlier, had seized the city of Kashgar and fought off the Soviet invasion of the region in the name of Nanjing, had now believed himself to be a future ruler of all Muslim Asia.
When Chiang came to seize direct control of the region, Ma Zhongying rose in rebellion, moving quickly to meet the coming Kuomintang armies in the Hexi Corridor. Badly outgunned and outnumbered, what little terrain advantage Zhongying had evaporated as his cousin Bufang had assumed command of the KMT forces, and was just as familiar with the area as Zhongying was.
Ultimately, Zhongying was defeated in the Battle of Hexi. His fate is something of a mystery, but it is generally accepted that he was dead by no later than 1936. Subsequent uprisings in Xinjiang by both loyalists to their former leader and the remaining communists in the northern portion were put down with prejudice. At last, Chiang was ready to move on the Jiangxi Soviet.
The overwhelming attack came in mid-1934, and was a total rout for the communists, who fled Jiangxi in October of that year. With this flight began a journey that is legend even today–the Long March. For a year and a half, hundreds of thousands of communists were chased across China to a stronghold in the north, suffering horribly along the way. They eventually reached the city of Yan’an, which was both defensible from a terrain perspective and due to continued instability in the region despite the KMT’s better efforts.
(L-R) Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and Zhu De during the Long March
By 1936, the Yan’an Soviet had become the CCP’s stronghold in China, and Chiang would have none of it. In August of that year, the KMT struck hard on the communist enclave, bringing with it a terrible air campaign heretofore unseen in China’s history ahead of the most intense shelling barrage that either side had ever witnessed.
At some point during the Bombing of Yan’an, the leader of the communists, Mao Zedong, a former teacher, of all things, who had demonstrated astounding leadership skills during the Long March, was killed. His death reportedly broke many, who threw down their weapons and streamed out of the ruined city on foot. Many of these defectors would be slaughtered by the Kuomintang, one of the most heinous war crimes of Chiang’s Pacification Campaigns.
Zhou Enlai, a hero of the Nanchang Uprising, managed to smuggle thousands of Chinese communists northward, seeking shelter in Mongolia and generally acting as a nuisance on the Sino-Mongolian border for years afterwards. Meanwhile, his counterpart, Zhu De, held composure and continued to resist in Yan’an to the last. Finally, after more than four months of assault, the city fell in December, and Zhu De surrendered alongside the last of his troops. The single greatest surprise awaiting Chiang Kai-shek in the fallen city, however, was none other than Soong Qingling.
She was bloodied, half-starved, and had the partially crazed look of someone who’d spent half a year under constant artillery fire, but the woman hauled into Chiang’s command tent was undeniably his erstwhile sister-in-law. They had only seen each other twice since her defection from the party in response to his purge of the left. The first time, in 1929, had been when Sun Yat-sen’s remains were moved to a newly-built grand mausoleum in Nanjing, and the reunion had been extremely tense. At the time, Qingling did not deign to speak to either of her sisters nor any of her brothers, and reported only hissed curses at Chiang.
The second time had been only marginally better, in 1931, when the Soong sisters’ mother Ni Kwei-Tseng died. At that time, Qingling was much more civil to her brother-in-law and did speak to her siblings. She had decided to remain in Shanghai, ostensibly removed from politics, and Chiang had been content to assume she remained there, little more than a local celebrity. That she had been in Yan’an at all proved to be an incredible shock for him, and it left him holding a terrible political grenade.
Executing Qingling was off the table. As the wife of Sun Yat-sen, who Chiang’s government continued to revere and honor, she could not be killed. The people would riot, and worse, it would shatter his relationship with Mei-ling. Not to mention, Qingling’s death would drive the very powerful Soong family out of his government altogether, a loss it absolutely could not bear. No, dead, his sister-in-law would be a martyr and her ghost would topple him from power, Chiang was sure of that.
Total clemency would also make him look weak, not to mention leaving Qingling, whose eyes blazed at him in defiance, free to cause even more headaches for the Kuomintang. Instead, Chiang took the middle road, sensing opportunity. His sister-in-law would undergo an extensive sequestration in Nanjing, and, after a period of time, she would rejoin the Kuomintang, and she would bring the surviving military talent of the vanquished communists with her.
This agreement was made in secret at nearby Xi’an. What exactly was said remains a mystery even today, but Zhu De and Soong Qingling, alongside dozens of other communist officers, agreed. They would remain hidden until tempers had cooled after the defeat of the CCP, and then, ever magnanimous, Chiang, now styling himself as the Generalissimo and acting ever more like a dictator, would welcome them back as prodigal children with one goal–the liberation of all of China.
The Xi’an Agreement was not the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning for Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. All of China that was not under foreign boots had come into the fold by hook or by crook, and his greatest rivals were either dead, fled, or bound now to him. For the first time in twenty-five years, perhaps for the first time since the Century of Humiliation began, China could look to the world beyond, and look it did.
China looked with hateful eyes across the sea to Japan, and vowed to drive it and its puppet states from Chinese shores forever.
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Yep! I’m proud of this one, but I will be the first to admit it: The Warlord Era and the Chinese Civil War constitute arguably the most complex series of conflicts ever fought. They were a landscape of shifting loyalties and a cast of players so wide that it is nearly impossible to cover them all in equal measure.
This write-up, while key to where this TL is going, simplifies or outright eschews a lot of stuff about the Chinese Civil War, and I strongly encourage everybody to do their own digging into this fascinating part of history!
And little of value was lost with both of these deaths.
Now there's some major butterflies right there. Can only imagine what a world with a Nationalist China and a US too weakened by civil war to become a superpower will end up looking like.
One hopes that Chiang's dictatorial tendencies don't carry over into the post-war era, but I somehow doubt he'd be keen to ease any kind of control over China, especially if he wins it by the sword.
Especially as avoiding the Great Leap Backward and the Cultural Revolution is always a plus.
There could always be a GLF equivalent in Chiang's China caused by corruption.
Not really. The reason something like the Great Leap Forwards was even attempted was due to Mao wishing to industrialize as quickly as possible in accordance to Marxist ideas at the time.
Not being revolutionaries, something as stupid as that would never even occur to the KMT.
Pride, a desperate desire to modernize that would still exist and cronyism over competence.
I think Ma Bufang could lead China well, but not CKS.
Just wondering but will J Edgar Hoover be compared to Lavrenti Beria and Heinrich Himmler, given how the three filled similar roles in their respective governments?