What if the PRC from 1 December, 1949, is ISOT'ed back 30 years to 1 December, 1919?

Good catch stevep

So I just looked this up.  

Mao would still be on the Chinese side of the border on 1 December.  

About 5 or 6 or 7 days later, it would have been different, and he would have vanished from the timeline.  


Per wikipedia, he began his 10-day train ride to Moscow on 6 December.  Probably crossing the international border within no more than 48 hours of that, given comparative distances to cover in the PRC, possibly Mongolia, and the USSR.  The December 16 arrival date tracks with what 575 cites.


Also, I appreciate 575 's detailed order of battle info on the Soviet forces present within the Kwangtung peninsula leased ports of Port Arthur/Lushun and Dalian, however, in the Original Post, I specified that this area, which was a sovereign leasehold zone of Japan back in 1919 (home of the infamous "Kwangtung Army" in fact), does not get ISOT'ed back in time from 1949 to "over-write" the old Japanese possession - so Port Arthur/Ruijin and Dairen as the Japanese called it would still be occupied by 1919 Japanese.  

There would still be Soviet technicians, advisors, and active duty military personnel in other assignments in other parts of Communist-ruled China who *do* get ISOT'ed back however.  A small scale naval training mission with small naval craft, a few destroyers and subs, old Soviet ones and a few defected Nationalist ones, in some of the Communist controlled ports of the Yellow Sea. Soviet staff advisory missions at Beijing and Shanghai. Soviet pilots and aircraft who were flying CAP protecting against Chinese Nationalist bombing raids that were still being launched from Taiwan against the Shanghai area and Southeast China as part of Chiang Kai-shek's attempts to keep up a blockade of all the parts of China he just lost. Soviet pilots and heavy-lift transport aircraft were also in-country and had been lent for the purposes recently of speeding the Chinese Communist takeover of the vast western Xinjiang province, to secure it for the Communists and the Soviet border, and to forestall joint collaborative plotting between the CIA, the local Muslim troops under the Ma family Generals, and possibly British intelligence. The Soviets had also set up armor and artillery schools and and at least small-scale factories for trucks and artillery in longer-occupied Manchuria, assisting with technical experts in the rear, and since the PLA was running the table on the battlefield and risk of capture was minimal, now with some field units on the ground.

From stevep : “The other issue I think relevant is how much information gets out to the rest of the world and how quickly. Basic details about the 'next' 30 years would potentially have a massive influence on public opinion. For instance how does news of the 3rd Reich affecting feeling among its neighbours about Germany? Or how does the US react to news about the depression and then Pearl Harbour and the brutality of the war in the Pacific.”

This is an important point, we have been overlooking so far. Especially your last sentence.

Although I’ve had fun speculating on a Chinese Communist omnidirectional rampage in Asia against all sorts of neighboring Japanese and western imperialists, Communist China, deploying “news from the future” has plenty of tools for more subtle diplomatic approaches and a “divide and conquer” strategy to prevent a strong ant-Chinese global coalition from forming and mobilizing.

I can imagine Mao and his Party deploying smooth talker Zhou Enlai for such diplomatic purposes.

Like you said, talking to Americans, diplomats and journalists alike, about Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, and the overall brutality of the Pacific War.

The obvious aim here would be to incite anti-Japanese feeling and suspicion. And to 1920 American minds, already with misgivings about involvement in the late war, the peace treaty, and wartime allies, news of a second global war in only two decades, with much higher American losses, won’t inspire preparedness and coalition building as much as revulsion and isolationism.

Zhou Enlai could produce from among 1949 American missionaries, businessmen, diplomats in China people who can corroborate his factual outlining of WWII in Europe and the Pacific, Japanese brutality, rampant KMT corruption, Communist success at winning popular and political support to add credibility.

From the other end, Zhou Enlai and other comrades can offer to speak to Japanese Zaibatsu businessmen, diplomats, Diet members, Imperial Privy Council members and military officers and describe future history and show dramatic film footage to demonstrate a couple things. Japan tries a a conquest of China, but it ultimately will fail, just costing both countries lots of lives and treasure. Further, this China war will bring Japan into a war with the white powers, that Japan will lose badly, its commerce blockaded, fleets naval and commercial sunk, cities burned, and two cities obliterated by the most terrible weapon ever, the country occupied by American soldiers raping Japanese women with impunity and Japanese authorities providing brothels for occupation troops, overseas Japanese expelled from the empire, killed or held for slave labor in Siberia, and south Karafuto/Sakhalin and the Kuriles de-Japanized and repopulated with white Soviets.

This could show senior military genro like the esteemed Yamagata Aritomo that an invasion of China, and Japan trying to boss China from a superior position, far from uniting the Orient under Japanese leadership as hoped and planned for under Imperial ideology as articulated by him and others, to stand up to inevitably hostile white powers, instead divided the two great Eastern nations against each other, to their great cost, leading to the ultimate white partition of Asia, and the first defeat, surrender, and foreign occupation of Japan’s history. And then Zhou can offer the alternative of Sino-Japanese cooperation as equals and self strengthening against the white powers, or even common action against them. After all, the 1919 Japanese will already have seen the racial equality clause rejected at Versailles by this time. They can hand Japanese people books, written in Japanese, complaining about the unequal terms of the Washington Naval Treaties imposed on Japan, how the western powers pressed Japan out of Shandong, how Britain ditched its alliance with Japan, and how, in the same year Japan became western style liberal democracy with universal suffrage, 1925, the USA slapped Japan in the face by replacing the old “Gentleman’s Agreement” limiting labor immigration with an outright ban on Japanese immigration, and a refusal to treat Japanese with the same quota system used on even minor Europeans. As an extra spice they can add the 1931 Hays film code, forbidding portrayal of Asian-white romantic relationships, which killed the career of Sessue Hayakawa, still a millionaire Hollywood star and heart-throb, the Japanese Valentino, in 1919.
The Chinese could produce collarating defected Japanese along with film, recorded and printed material to substantiate all this.


For the British Empire, they could provide evidence of the doom of their anti-Bolshevik intervention, America’s complete retreat to isolationism and unreliability in the interwar, its pressure to make Britain drop the Japan alliance, pressure on Irish issues, damage to the whiskey industry through prohibition, stubbornness on loan repayment, and then later bad news of the rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Militarist Japan, humiliating clashes in China over concessions, and then Japan’s rapid invasion and conquest of British colonies up to India and it’s atrocities to PoWs and civil internees, all kicking Britain while it was down fighting Germany for life. And it can point out how while the Americans came to help, but came late, offering nothing for free, and making sure Britain transferred its last financial reserves to to them, nagged them constantly about colonial affairs, strutted around their homeland and Dominions “overpaid, oversexed and over here”, stole their best weapons research, and left Britain having to give up independence to India and Jewish terrorists in Palestine while *still* having rationing at home four years after the end of the war. They could find Brits in the country to substantiate the factual account, along with English language material by British authors, along with sympathetic British observers in China who would also attest to the efficiency, practicality, popularity and lack of corruption in Communist rural administration, like Dr. Michael Lindsay. (The dark corners of Communist rule, like punishment areas for wavering Party members and class enemies, had been carefully hidden from many firsthand western observers’ view before full PRC takeover)