Standard alternative history question, for better or worse, give me something interesting.
I don't know if any of the mostly western people here would have enough context to hazard a guess. Surely revisionism and IMF loans, something something teetotaling titoists
I don’t know if any of the mostly western people here would have enough context to hazard a guess
I sure as fuck wouldn’t
Korea invades and juche becomes the dominant ideology throughout the continent
Well the cultural revolution would probably be seen out, that’s at least a decent guess :shrug-outta-hecks: it’s a real ‘successful German revolution’ moment, we really don’t know
Best place to start with would probably be to look at the "Maoist" faction and see what their plans and policys were, unfortunately the easy resources mostly seem to focus on just cultural work and the cultural revolution, so not a great help.
They would need to come up with something or face stagnation and unrest. They had a Soviet collectivization of agriculture level task ahead of them and the party was not as strong as the party in the Soviet Union was in the 20s and 30s. The cultural revolution had seriously weakened them.
I don't know enough to say how precarious the situation was exactly. Maybe they could have powered through it, maybe the US would have smelled weakness and blown the whole thing up, idk.
The Dengist reforms worked so well I don't think there was any alternative course of action that would have lead to half as much success.
To get that outcome, you probably need a lot of things to change before Mao's death, which makes it harder to speculate. It's a lot like the "what if Trotsky succeeded Lenin?" as a hypothetical - by the time that decision is made, there can be no other outcome. The Cultural Revolution needs to be decisively won by the left factions in order for a plausibly stable chairmanship that isn't either Deng himself or someone very much like him. Once we get there, we probably have to talk about the tensions that were emerging in the coastal factories over central control vs factory democracy and the other left-dissents that emerge during the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Likely you end up with a messy coalition of students and urban workers who don't really agree on anything.
I'm clueless but my understanding is that the hardcore dengist policies were only really implemented in the coastal provinces for a long time. So you could compare those to the rest of the country.
Covert US agression in South & Central America increases through the eighties and nineties - either until they claim enough territory to prop up a puppet regime for cheap labor or an undeniable war breaks out.
