What if…

What if the Taiping Rebellion hadn't been put down? What if the Kuomintang had succeeded in developing a modern nation? Jonathan Fenby, author of the new Penguin History of Modern China, looks at key points in China's history and wonders how it might have all turned out differently

If the anti-Manchu rebels had overthrown the Qing dynasty in 1850…

The rebellions that started with the Taiping in 1850 very nearly spread across China and might have led to a united front of anti-Manchu rebels powerful enough to overthrow the Qing. But the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan (pictured) almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to form a new dynasty. The leader of another big revolt, the Nien in eastern China, had designs on the throne himself, and the Muslim chiefs in Xinjiang and Yunnan would not have bowed to Han rule in any form. In any case, Hong showed himself a poor ruler once his rebel forces had installed him in his capital in Nanjing. So the result would probably have been the fragmentation of China and a long period of disunity while the encroaching foreign powers played politics to advance their trading interests.

 

 

If the Hundred Days Reform had succeeded in 1898…

In 1898, following China’s disastrous defeat by Japan in the war of 1894-5, the young emperor Guangxu launched the Hundred Days of Reform to bring China into the modern world. If his aunt, the Dowager Empress Cixi, had not sided with the Manchu reactionaries and stopped the process, it might have been the start of a modern China along a model similar to that used by the Japanese. Instead, Guangxu tried too much too fast, depending on a small group of advisers and steadily alienating the power-holders in Chinese society. The most important was Cixi, who confined her nephew to imprisonment in the Summer Palace until they both died in 1908.

 

 

If Song Jiaoren had not been assassinated in 1913…

Thirteen years after the Hundred Days of Reform, the army revolt that broke out in Wuhan in 1911 and led to the fall of the empire the following February was another unplanned affair that, this time, gained a momentum of its own. Could it have given China new lease of life? Well, there was an attempt with the quasi-democratic general election of 1912, in which the savvy young Kuomintang Party leader, Song Jiaroen, fashioned a skillful election platform and came out the clear winner. But, as he boarded the train to travel from Shanghai to Beijing to claim the premiership in March 1913, Song was shot by an assassin working for the militarist Yuan Shikai, who then assumed power. After Yuan’s death in 1916, the descent into warlordism went unchecked.

 

 

If the Kuomintang had succeeded in developing a modern nation…

What then if, after the Kuomintang’s extraordinary military victory in the Northern Expedition of 1926-8, its leader Chiang Kai-shek had been able to develop a modern state from his capital in Nanjing? It was a moment hailed by many progressive Chinese as the dawning of a new age. But Chiang and those around him were suspicious of democracy and modernity, except on their own terms. Nanjing’s authority stretched over only a few provinces. There were recurrent regional rebellions, economic problems and, after the seizure of Manchuria in 1931, the intervention of Japan, which turned into a full-scale war from 1937-45.

 

 

If the Communists hadn’t repeatedly escaped disaster…

Through all this, the Communists escaped disaster several times. First with their survival from Chiang’s "White Terror" against them in 1927; then with their escapes from attacks on rural bases, most famously in the Long March from Jiangxi to Shaanxi. Finally, in 1936, Chiang was ready to deal the final blow to Mao and his companions in their base in Yanan. But Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal who had been chased from Manchuria by the Japanese and who was meant to head the attack on Yanan, changed his mind and kidnapped Chiang to try to force him to unite with other Chinese, whatever their politics, in fighting the Japanese. The Xian Incident, as it became known worldwide, was not a great success. But it did forge a sense of national unity in which the assault on Yanan had to be called off. If Zhang had not acted, would the Communists of the Yanan base have been forced to move to an even more remote haven? Quite probably.

 

Finally, what if the American envoy, George Marshal, had not forced Chiang in 1946 to agree to stop his civil war offensive against the Communists in Manchuria where he had the upper hand through firepower, command of the skies and US help? Chiang certainly thought he would have finished off the Communists if Marshal had not intervened. That’s possible but, given the record of his army and his own tactical weaknesses, still not proven.

Jonathan Fenby’s Penguin History of Modern China (Allen Lane) is available online, priced around 300RMB.