Soviet or Japanese conventional invasion of China without external interference
May 24, 2019 21:03:13 GMT
Post by eurofed on May 24, 2019 21:03:13 GMT
Judging from the OTL experience of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, the AH community often seems to assume even in ATL circumstances modern China would have been the quintessential guerrilla quagmire for a foreign invader, being too vast, popolous, and nationalist to be conquered. However, third-party intervention eventually escalating to the Pacific War played a critical role at influencing the OTL event sequence, so that evidence is not necessarily conclusive nor compelling. I can think of different interwar/WWII scenarios where such external interference is kept to a minimum (quite possibly including foreign powers sending support to the Chinese, but absolutely nothing more than that).
I prefer to keep such ATL scenarios limited to the 1930s-1940s, for various reasons, including familiarity and avoiding the can of worms created by availability and possible use of WMD (so no escalation of the Korean War or 1960s Sino-Soviet War). For simplicity's sake, I'd give the preferential highlight to a couple different scenarios, including an ATL version of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, and a 1930s-1940s Soviet intervention in the Chinese Civil War, since both the Soviets and the Japanese seem good candidates to be would-be conquerors of interwar China, for various reasons (expansionist ambitions, strategic proximity, sufficient military power, authoritarian political regime, willingness to use brutal repression). More in detail:
Case A, Western-Axis Cold War:
ITTL Germany and its European allies won WWII, making Barbarossa a complete success and forcing Britain to surrender by a mix of economic collapse and decisive defeat in the North Africa/Middle East theater, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the air war. The USA was deep into isolationist mood and avoided granting any Lend-Lease economic support to Britain or the USSR, or provoking Japan to a fight by imposing an embargo on it. They eventually cast off such mindset after they realized the full consequences of an Axis victory but at that point Germany's timely development of a WMD deterrent and intercontinental delivery shackled the aborning Western-Axis confrontation into Cold War constraints. Canada, Australia, and NZ cut their ties with defeated Britain and successfully pursued a political union with the USA to seek protection. In these circumstances, Japan annexed the Rusisan Far East and took over the European colonies in Southeast Asia with the blessing of Germany. It was free to keep pursuing its efforts to subdue China w/o any external interference, apart from the Americans smuggling as many weapons as they could to the Chinese (but not daring to do anything more).
Case B, Interwar Cold War:
I wrote a TL about this scenario here. To sum it up, ITTL the Soviets were rather more successful than OTL with their efforts to export their revolution during and in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Civil War. They overrun and took Finland, the Baltic states, most/half of Poland, Slovakia, most/half of Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, and mainland Greece with the help of local communists and pro-Soviet Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Turkish nationalists. They annexed the conquered lands north of the Danube, merged Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece into a Communist Balkan federation, and turned Turkey into a client state. Their bid to take over Western Europe by invasion and Comintern insurrection failed due to Soviet overextension and exhaustion, and the resistance of British, French, German, and Italian governments, armies, and right-winger forces. The Communist threat drove the Entente powers and Germany into hasty reconciliation and the forging of a WWI peace deal that was acceptable to everyone. Much the same way, postwar exhaustion led the European powers and the USSR into a compromise peace that acknowledged the facts on the ground and established the Iron Curtain on the Vistula-Danube line. France got Alsace-Lorraine, Wallonia, Luxemburg, and a reasonable amount of reparations. Germany got West Prussia, Upper Silesia, Austria, the Sudetenland, manageable terms to pay reparations, and permission to rearm. Italy got South Tyrol, the Kustenland, central Dalmatia, and a protectorate on Carniola and Albania. The border areas that the European armies seized in their counteroffensive (western Poland, Czechia, western Hungary, Croatia) became the frontline states of the Western bloc.
Early reconciliation between the European powers, establishment of a sustainable compromise peace, and the looming Soviet threat enabled relatively quick development of a Western European equivalent of the EU and NATO and the survival of liberal democracy across half of Europe. Fascism was snuffed in the cradle but Western democracy took a definite Red Scare character, with far-leftist movements being subject to severe repression. The ruling elites pacified the masses with socio-economic reforms that laid the groundwork of a welfare state. Intra-Western economic cooperation and European integration toned down the Great Depression into a really bad recession. Britain joined a military alliance with Europe but stood apart from the European integration process. It made some serious progress at forming an Imperial Federation with the Dominions and granting a measure of self-rule to India. America avoided alliance entanglements with the European powers but supported their anti-Soviet stance. The Communist threat persuaded the Americans to end the Banana Wars by annexing vast chunks of the Caribbean and Central America. Postwar instability also led to an early version of the Spanish Civil War which spread to Portugal and the collapse of Belgium, causing the creation of an Iberian Federation that joined the EU/NATO system and the partition of Belgium. These events ensued in a general reshuffling of colonial lands (Mozambique and Cameroon to France; Gabon, Congo, and Angola to Germany; Tunisia and Ethiopia to Italy; Hashemite Kingdom of Levant-Mesopotamia-Arabia as an Anglo-French client) that left all the European powers content. Japan took over all of Sakhalin and Outer-Inner Manchuria from Soviet Russia and China with the blessing of the Western powers that were eager to use it as an anti-Soviet proxy. China's warlord chaos gradually got simplified into a three-way civil war between the Nationalists, the Communists, and opportunist warlords, with the Soviets and the Japanese supporting their respective proxies.
The Soviets turned inward for industrialization, rearmament, state-building, and bloody pacification of their empire for a while, but expansion of their bloc by force and subversion was never far from their minds. When they felt sufficiently strong, they attacked Japan and intervened in the Chinese Civil War. They took over Manchuria but the Japanese were able to stalemate them on the Yalu, eventually leading to a compromise peace that left Manchuria to the USSR and Korea and Sakhalin to Japan. Invasion of China enabled the Soviets to annex Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria, and impose Communist rule across North China. Soviet invasion gave the CCP a big shortcut to power but ruined their standing in the eyes of the Chinese who rose up against the invaders and their stooges, making the PRC regime dependent on Soviet bayonets to survive. Resistance to the Soviets redeemed the KMT's flaws in the eyes of the Chinese, making them champions of the national cause. Anti-Communist resistance flared up across occupied China, which the Red Army tried hard to suppress by its usual means of brutal repression. These events drove Britain, the European powers, and Japan to form an anti-Communist alliance. All of them sent generous amount of support to the Chinese but were unwilling to fight the Soviets for their sake short of other acts of Communist aggression elsewhere. This enboldened the Soviets into deploying the bulk of their military power into the Far East for an all-out effort to crush Nationalist resistance and conquer China.
In these two scenarios, do you think the Soviet or Japanese invaders would eventually be able to crush Chinese resistance and subdue China to their rule, or would such efforts fail and the strain of the attempt drive the would-be conquerors to implode? I am eager to read some reasoned advice on the issue, but please try not to romanticize guerilla war and the Vietnam/Iraq special cases too much. Insurgency requires certain favorable circumstances to succeed and modern history is full of cases when it failed because they did not apply.
I prefer to keep such ATL scenarios limited to the 1930s-1940s, for various reasons, including familiarity and avoiding the can of worms created by availability and possible use of WMD (so no escalation of the Korean War or 1960s Sino-Soviet War). For simplicity's sake, I'd give the preferential highlight to a couple different scenarios, including an ATL version of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, and a 1930s-1940s Soviet intervention in the Chinese Civil War, since both the Soviets and the Japanese seem good candidates to be would-be conquerors of interwar China, for various reasons (expansionist ambitions, strategic proximity, sufficient military power, authoritarian political regime, willingness to use brutal repression). More in detail:
Case A, Western-Axis Cold War:
ITTL Germany and its European allies won WWII, making Barbarossa a complete success and forcing Britain to surrender by a mix of economic collapse and decisive defeat in the North Africa/Middle East theater, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the air war. The USA was deep into isolationist mood and avoided granting any Lend-Lease economic support to Britain or the USSR, or provoking Japan to a fight by imposing an embargo on it. They eventually cast off such mindset after they realized the full consequences of an Axis victory but at that point Germany's timely development of a WMD deterrent and intercontinental delivery shackled the aborning Western-Axis confrontation into Cold War constraints. Canada, Australia, and NZ cut their ties with defeated Britain and successfully pursued a political union with the USA to seek protection. In these circumstances, Japan annexed the Rusisan Far East and took over the European colonies in Southeast Asia with the blessing of Germany. It was free to keep pursuing its efforts to subdue China w/o any external interference, apart from the Americans smuggling as many weapons as they could to the Chinese (but not daring to do anything more).
Case B, Interwar Cold War:
I wrote a TL about this scenario here. To sum it up, ITTL the Soviets were rather more successful than OTL with their efforts to export their revolution during and in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Civil War. They overrun and took Finland, the Baltic states, most/half of Poland, Slovakia, most/half of Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, and mainland Greece with the help of local communists and pro-Soviet Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Turkish nationalists. They annexed the conquered lands north of the Danube, merged Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece into a Communist Balkan federation, and turned Turkey into a client state. Their bid to take over Western Europe by invasion and Comintern insurrection failed due to Soviet overextension and exhaustion, and the resistance of British, French, German, and Italian governments, armies, and right-winger forces. The Communist threat drove the Entente powers and Germany into hasty reconciliation and the forging of a WWI peace deal that was acceptable to everyone. Much the same way, postwar exhaustion led the European powers and the USSR into a compromise peace that acknowledged the facts on the ground and established the Iron Curtain on the Vistula-Danube line. France got Alsace-Lorraine, Wallonia, Luxemburg, and a reasonable amount of reparations. Germany got West Prussia, Upper Silesia, Austria, the Sudetenland, manageable terms to pay reparations, and permission to rearm. Italy got South Tyrol, the Kustenland, central Dalmatia, and a protectorate on Carniola and Albania. The border areas that the European armies seized in their counteroffensive (western Poland, Czechia, western Hungary, Croatia) became the frontline states of the Western bloc.
Early reconciliation between the European powers, establishment of a sustainable compromise peace, and the looming Soviet threat enabled relatively quick development of a Western European equivalent of the EU and NATO and the survival of liberal democracy across half of Europe. Fascism was snuffed in the cradle but Western democracy took a definite Red Scare character, with far-leftist movements being subject to severe repression. The ruling elites pacified the masses with socio-economic reforms that laid the groundwork of a welfare state. Intra-Western economic cooperation and European integration toned down the Great Depression into a really bad recession. Britain joined a military alliance with Europe but stood apart from the European integration process. It made some serious progress at forming an Imperial Federation with the Dominions and granting a measure of self-rule to India. America avoided alliance entanglements with the European powers but supported their anti-Soviet stance. The Communist threat persuaded the Americans to end the Banana Wars by annexing vast chunks of the Caribbean and Central America. Postwar instability also led to an early version of the Spanish Civil War which spread to Portugal and the collapse of Belgium, causing the creation of an Iberian Federation that joined the EU/NATO system and the partition of Belgium. These events ensued in a general reshuffling of colonial lands (Mozambique and Cameroon to France; Gabon, Congo, and Angola to Germany; Tunisia and Ethiopia to Italy; Hashemite Kingdom of Levant-Mesopotamia-Arabia as an Anglo-French client) that left all the European powers content. Japan took over all of Sakhalin and Outer-Inner Manchuria from Soviet Russia and China with the blessing of the Western powers that were eager to use it as an anti-Soviet proxy. China's warlord chaos gradually got simplified into a three-way civil war between the Nationalists, the Communists, and opportunist warlords, with the Soviets and the Japanese supporting their respective proxies.
The Soviets turned inward for industrialization, rearmament, state-building, and bloody pacification of their empire for a while, but expansion of their bloc by force and subversion was never far from their minds. When they felt sufficiently strong, they attacked Japan and intervened in the Chinese Civil War. They took over Manchuria but the Japanese were able to stalemate them on the Yalu, eventually leading to a compromise peace that left Manchuria to the USSR and Korea and Sakhalin to Japan. Invasion of China enabled the Soviets to annex Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria, and impose Communist rule across North China. Soviet invasion gave the CCP a big shortcut to power but ruined their standing in the eyes of the Chinese who rose up against the invaders and their stooges, making the PRC regime dependent on Soviet bayonets to survive. Resistance to the Soviets redeemed the KMT's flaws in the eyes of the Chinese, making them champions of the national cause. Anti-Communist resistance flared up across occupied China, which the Red Army tried hard to suppress by its usual means of brutal repression. These events drove Britain, the European powers, and Japan to form an anti-Communist alliance. All of them sent generous amount of support to the Chinese but were unwilling to fight the Soviets for their sake short of other acts of Communist aggression elsewhere. This enboldened the Soviets into deploying the bulk of their military power into the Far East for an all-out effort to crush Nationalist resistance and conquer China.
In these two scenarios, do you think the Soviet or Japanese invaders would eventually be able to crush Chinese resistance and subdue China to their rule, or would such efforts fail and the strain of the attempt drive the would-be conquerors to implode? I am eager to read some reasoned advice on the issue, but please try not to romanticize guerilla war and the Vietnam/Iraq special cases too much. Insurgency requires certain favorable circumstances to succeed and modern history is full of cases when it failed because they did not apply.