“Imagine how much safer and prosperous the world would be if the Nationalists hadn’t ended up in exile, if China hadn’t ended up under the control of insecure Commies.”
The Chinese have suffered the most. Mao murdered tens of millions of Chinese citizens. One estimate, about 75M.
China has moved somewhat away from communism. Moving towards capitalism has taken millions of Chinese out of poverty. I wish the best for mainland Chinese people, but never at the expense of Taiwan.
As a separate matter, I read once that Nationalists were on the cusp of victory before being influenced by communist sympathizers inside an American Administration. I don’t recall whether the President was FDR or Truman.
“As a separate matter, I read once that Nationalists were on the cusp of victory before being influenced by communist sympathizers inside an American Administration. I don’t recall whether the President was FDR or Truman.”
The book showed the Nationalist Chinese as worse than the Communists, which is one of the reasons the Communists came out on top in the end. FDR favored the Nationalists, big time, to a fault. He just kept pumping in aid, and the Nationalists just kept wasting/misusing it.
The Nationalists generals ground through conscripts at the rate of replacing entire units every two years because of death and desertion. The generals got paid based on the numbers on the books, so starved and dead from disease conscripts meant nothing but money in the bank to them.
Enormous numbers of China’s young men were simply wasted with starvation and disease by the Nationalists, who mostly refused to fight the Japanese.
The Communists were not quite as bad, at least not at the start.