Re: Guest Post - Sand in the pipeline

1

In China, they have tiger mothers and defective grandmothers.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 7:15 AM
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Even allowing for defective grandmothers, that's an awful lot of intestinal worms.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 7:18 AM
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I had no idea China had such large pockets of crushing poverty still. With that kind of societal divide, they're inviting a communist revolution.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 8:27 AM
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Hukou is now a minor watchword on Bay Area housing Twitter when unmindful people suggest the solution is to prevent or reverse migration.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 8:47 AM
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If people keep pooping on the streets, intestinal worms are going to be next.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 8:57 AM
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Anyway, they maybe shouldn't have shoved the KMT off the mainland.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 9:24 AM
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Bay Area hobos did that?


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 9:29 AM
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Maybe it was the local communists.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 9:37 AM
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But really KMT winning in 1949 would have been awful. Differently awful and maybe less awful, but still awful. You wouldn't wind up with Enlightened Topless Mainland 1987.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 9:46 AM
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Alternate history Chinese Civil War Unfogged is one of my favorite Unfoggeds, so I'm tempted to argue with 9 not because I really disagree but because it's fun to talk about.

Okay, so: The KMT winning would have been awful, but probably not Great Leap awful. Is there any reason it couldn't have been like, a super-South Korea/Taiwan? That is, awful and repressive for a few decades, supported by the US as a bulwark against communism (this time just the USSR), eventually become middle-income then maybe slowly democratize. Or would it just be too big and destined to splinter due to batshit corrupt leadership, leading to a repeat of the 20s but with slightly less malicious outside actors?


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 10:46 AM
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having a 7 month old around the house over thanksgiving provides a vivid context for the article re: infant-child development. the pace of cognitive development in little ones, and how much of that is rooted inextricably with intimate interactions with primary caregivers, is astonishing.


Posted by: dairy queen | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 10:49 AM
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I gave an event-specific donation to Oxfam HK a number of years ago, and got colorful mailers from them for a long time after. Quoting from a 2015 email I sent:

Oh good, this letter from Oxfam Hong Kong about the millions of children left behind by parents who went to work in Chinese cities is going to make me lose my goddamned mind. "Ten year old Song Yindi is a fourth grader studying at Guan Xia Primary School in Huining, Gansu. Both her elder sister and younger brother moved to the city with their parents. However, Yindi chose to stay behind with her grandparents, who she loves dearly. Yindi misses her parents very much and calls them every two or three days. Besides the usual 'When are you coming back?' and 'Come home soon' though, there is little to talk about. In living arrangements like this, not only does the parent-child relationship grow estranged over time, children like Yindi often have no one with whom they can share their feelings." Other than making this fallen world crash into the fucking sun, what can Oxfam do to help? "Work with partner organisations to recruit volunteer assistant teachers for 11 remote schools in Huining, Gansu. Set up mailboxes at schools to encourage children to express their feelings by writing to volunteer assistant teachers." Well, this will teach me ever to open the mail.

Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 10:54 AM
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10:agreed. I mean, we know what KMT rule gets you in this timeline - it gets you Taiwan. Which is.. quite nice actually. And that is despite the pressure of having a huge Communist empire just over the strait constantly shelling you, firing missiles over you, threatening to invade etc. I would think that KMT-China would be nicer than KMT Taiwan because it wouldn't have had to be such a garrison state.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 10:55 AM
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Maybe it's "because", not "despite." You can't have a Fifth Column developing among the poor when your enemy is close and powerful. And you don't want children too weak to grow up and be soldiers.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 11:01 AM
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Oh, "close and powerful enemy" would still have been a thing in KMT China, no worries there.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 11:03 AM
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I don't think it would have splintered. KMT with intermittent Soviet and German support had suppressed almost all warlords by 1937; CCP with Soviet support did the same more thoroughly by 1950; if the KMT had been capable of beating the CCP in 1949 it would have held the whole country.
Super ROK/TW isn't plausible. Those countries are tiny, essentially islands, built on a foundation of Open Door/Japanese industrialization (and education), and had no real option but manufacturing export economies under US rules.
For a unified mainland all those factors would have been diluted to nonexistence; the ROK/TW model wouldn't have scaled. To this one can say the post-Deng PRC did actually pursue a very ROK/TW strategy, and it worked. True, but. (A) it isn't clear the ROK/TW/PRC model can scale to cover the mainland at all; the deficiencies described in the OP, and the structural slowdown and looming debt implosion are testament to that. (B) PRC development happened only from the 1980s, after that of JP, ROK, ROC, HK, SG, and the PRC rode exports to and investments from those countries; IIRC ROC and HK account for ~50% of FDI in PRC. In short, the PRC 1980+ development path wasn't possible in 1950 (and may have been foreclosed by KMT victory, especially if that resulted in earlier handover of HK).
I'm guessing Chiang would have tried for a much more Soviet-style commanding-heights industrialization, just like every other 3rd-world country at the time, with similarly poor results. I also doubt seriously KMT mainland would have been a US ally, any more than the PRC was a Soviet one; it would have been transactional relationships and efforts at Third Power status (with similarly poor results).
I think 13 is wrong and 14 and 15 right. In addition to 14 and 15, the economic and geopolitical reasons above; that the PRC to the ROC, unlike the USSR to the PRC, was not a credible threat; and that a population of a billion with infinite land borders makes for much more paranoid chekists than 20 million on an island.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 11:30 AM
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"diluted to nonexistence" is an overstatement. But massively diluted. Also PRC 1980+ has been exporting to the whole world, not just rich Asia, which is dramatically richer than it was in 1950.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 11:41 AM
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The American right, including the business community, had had a weird and special relationship with China in since at least World II (and well before, if you want to make some sort of continuity argument with American Protestant missionaries and China traders). So I could imagine a KMT China getting a lot of US investment. FDI to Taiwan peaked, as a share of the economy, in the 60s but without the recognition issue, and a trust in property rights for foreigners, perhaps that could continue with KMT-China indefinitely. And that isn't to say that the country as a whole would become rich, but perhaps just certain areas close to trading ports and other traditional manufacturing centers. Which wouldn't be too different from today.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 11:54 AM
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The KMT did relatively pretty well economically with the parts of mainland China that it ran even pre-1937, roughly as well as Japan or its colonies, suggesting that they would prob have done OK to good if they'd survived in a much better international climate after 1949.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40056379


Posted by: Opinionated Hong Xiuquan’s Brother | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 12:02 PM
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10. & 18. Interestingly, The Man in the High Castle (the book, of course) had an alternate reality (in a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy) where the Allies won WW2 but (among other differences) the ROC didn't get thrown out of the mainland. Anyway, in that world the US and ROC were super-tight allies and widely distributed free US technology (TVs, radios, and satellite broadcasting, etc.) helped China advance.

OP. When Korea and Taiwan began to move to mid and high income status, did the grandmothers raise the kids? Is China's problem just that the kids couldn't come along with their parents to the cities? Can we imagine a China where these restrictions weren't in place? Even as we were cheering China's development, they were clinging to remnants of totalitarian social control.

(Obviously ROK and ROC are smaller than China, and that might have something to do with it.)


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 12:08 PM
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19: Thank you, I'll need to read that.
18: AFAIK that special relationship existed almost entirely in the heads of the Americans. In light of 19 maybe that growth story is realistic, but I suspect still optimistic. Mostly I think that alt-KMT-Mainland, secure in its territory and with an UNSC seat (that wasn't a joke) would have behaved very differently than KMT-interwar, fighting for its life, even more so KMT-TW, beholden to the US. A huge amount would depend on the political detail, but the most likely history I see is KMT-Mainland indulging the worse impulses of the Third Way - autarky, nationalizations, the normal trip.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 12:24 PM
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"Of course it's all happening in your head, America, but why on earth should that mean it's not real?"


Posted by: Opinionated Dumbledore, Sinologist | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 12:30 PM
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BUT WE LOST IT!


Posted by: OPINIONATED HENRY LUCE | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 12:35 PM
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I always knew he was pro-Voldemort.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 12:37 PM
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And the basic nastiness of the KMT. I've seen the art Chiang ordered for himself and it's straight Stalinist. The UHI democide project makes him responsible for ~10m deaths*; the genocide in Xinjiang flows in part from ethno-racial theories from the 1920s very similar to those held by the KMT.
*Which I take with many many grains of salt considering the amount of chaos at the time. But really, lots of corpses.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 1:16 PM
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26

19: Jesus Christ!

21: maybe. I guess it depends on how much they can profit from stronger western ties.

I'd also wonder how succession would go down. Would the Chiang family be able to control a much larger organization to the same degree?


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 1:17 PM
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In the KMT China timeline, what president would Spock jokingly compare Kirk to in Star Trek 6?


Posted by: Todd | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 1:32 PM
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In the KMT China timeline, the Cold War probably doesn't end at exactly the same time as in our timeline. So The Undiscovered Country becomes either Star Trek 5 or Star Trek 7, and therefore isn't any good.


Posted by: Micah | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 3:21 PM
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Particularly in re: 25: wow, what a depressing topic. Maybe we should just do the "Alternate History China: Absolute Best-Case Scenario Imaginable" edition.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 3:24 PM
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How about no.


Posted by: Opinionated Tibet | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 4:44 PM
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31

No Korean War, no Eiisenhower, no Nixon.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 5:30 PM
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It helps to remember that the KMT was massively corrupt. If it had not been kicked out of China, it would have continued something very much like the republic it replaced. Foreigners would have controlled the business and finance and suppressed industrial development and the development of anything like a real middle class. It would have taken a revolution for China to seriously develop internally.


Posted by: Kaleberg | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 7:13 PM
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We could talk about India instead. My coworker from India (not a Hindu) described Modi as "the Hitler of India" the one time someone brought him up last year.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 8:35 PM
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34

This is probably not the best time for "Well actually, the Aryans were originally from what is now India," is it?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 8:54 PM
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35

They can come from anywhere, as long as they aren't Muslim.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-17-19 9:45 PM
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34 partly because they weren't


Posted by: NW | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 2:01 AM
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37

32 neatly explains why Taiwan remains an impoverished agricultural state.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 2:50 AM
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37. The fact that Chiang Kai Shek is long dead and his successors (inside and outside the KMT) were much better at organising a modern state is mostly what explains the success of Taiwan.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 2:58 AM
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38: Not that I disagree, but that's a lot too simple. It was a dictatorship and Chiang was on top, 1945-76; the KMT was in charge until 2000, and didn't lose presidency and legislature simultaneously until 2016.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 3:19 AM
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massively corrupt. If it had not been kicked out of China, it would have continued something very much like the republic it replaced. Foreigners would have controlled the business and finance and suppressed industrial development and the development of anything like a real middle class.
This is the definition of Hong Kong, right? Which of course is no utopia, but does have an HDI of 0.939. Like Germany.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 4:59 AM
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Having skimmed the paper in 19:
tl;dr I can sign up to 18: And that isn't to say that the country as a whole would become rich, but perhaps just certain areas close to trading ports and other traditional manufacturing centers.
Macro: the paper isn't actually about China, it's about the lower Yangtze.

If the Jiang-Zhe per capita income could be assumed to be 1 .44 times of that of China, as im- plied in the tax records, this would equal 72 percent, 85 percent, and about 100 percent of the per capita income of Britain, Western Europe, and Europe overall, respectively [in 1700]. It would also be slightly higher than Maddison's guess-estimated level for early-nineteenth-century Japan
[...]
annual per capita NDP growth in both Jiang-Zhe provinces, at 1 percent, were roughly double that of China and almost matched those of Japan and her colonies during this period. [1914-36]
Which tells us what all of us (except possibly Kaleberg) already knew: parts of China have been wealthy for many centuries, those same parts are today wealthy again, and the deep poverty of Mao's China resulted mostly from Mao.
Micro: the paper doesn't show much of anything about KMT governance. The KMT only takes the lower Yangtze in 1927; the stats are for 1914-18 and 1931-36. The author actually attributes the successes of the region to the governance of the International Settlement.
In the 1930s Shanghai alone produced 41 percent of national manufacturing output (48 percent if excluding Japanese-controlled Manchuria); housed 50 to 60 percent of cotton spindles throughout the 1910s and 1930s; and generated about 50 percent of national electricity in the 1920s, almost twice that of the major British industrial cities of Man- chester and Glasgow.
[...]
How did and could industrialization take root in an era of widespread abuse of property rights and pervasive political uncertainty during the Republican era? For that, we turn to a new political entity in the Lower Yangzi: the treaty port of Shanghai ruled by Western business elites.
[...]
1911 revolution, the International Settlement took over the Mixed Court and began to appoint its own Chinese personnel. By then, the Settlement became a de-facto city-state with full territorial jurisdiction over its residents, Western and Chinese
[...]
Chinese ownership share of modern industry was consistently higher than that of the foreigners in major sectors in Shanghai throughout the 1910s-1930s. This compares favorably with the share of in- digenous entrepreneurship in Taiwan and Korea, or Manchuria under Japanese colonialism.
[...]
The Lower Yangzi became the least war-torn region in China - avoiding major battles at least before 1924 - partly thanks to the political mobilization of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce, the majority of the members of which were Jiang-Zhe natives
And says policy flowed from Shanghai to KMT as much as vice versa.
The city, especially its Chinese financial elites, helped shape the new empire - the Nationalist regime - in the formulation of a comprehensive national economic policy which included the restoration of tariff autonomy, modernization of China's public finance and monetary regime.
And notes:
Shanghai capitalists' massive exodus to colonial Hong Kong, brought that city capital, industrial skills, entrepreneurial vision, and (as recog- nized by the Hong Kong government) a 10-15 year head-start in indus- trialization over many other Asian countries.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 6:44 AM
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41: Thanks for the reader's digest, that's really interesting. I could imagine Shanghai/Zhejiang business elites doing a lot to shape policy in KMT-China. (I suppose I could see if the most recent Hearts of Iron goes on sale for the holidays, and test it myself...)

And whoops, 26 was me.

As for this being a depressing topic: absolutely, but at least it's segregated in its own mostly on-topic thread. I suspect that for men of a certain age who lurk on Unfogged, this is our equivalent of getting obsessed over World War II.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 7:35 AM
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I thought we did that too?


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 7:39 AM
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I've been reading about the air war over Germany all morning.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 7:45 AM
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Of course, I'm old.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 7:58 AM
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When my dad was my son's age, the war was still happening.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 8:04 AM
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31. Eisenhower as the GOP candidate in 1952 is over-determined, and his election as President also, Korean War or not. You have a better case about Nixon, though. He was nominated as VP as a more genteel version of Joe McCarthy, in spite of everyone hating him, including Ike. No Korean War, less McCarthyism (maybe), no Nixon.

42. I think it's "obsessed about the Cold War," more generally. See above. Most "obsessing about WW2" is (outside alt-right circles) mostly about how it might have come out better, and "KMT China" is one aspect of that. In the real world it's hard to see how Mao doesn't win, unless (as in Dick-as-Abendsen's "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy") the Russians somehow "take a big prat-fall." (Dick wisely did not have his characters explain exactly what that was.)


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 8:25 AM
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43/47: Maybe, but less so. A lot of obsessing about WWII is pride over how we (for some values of "we") were the clear and obvious good guys, and caring about tactical minutiae of the golden age of combined arms. I don't think we've got into questions about whether this plane could beat that plane in a fight. (Actually, maybe we have. Maybe we are all just depressed boomer dads at heart.)

As for whether this "could" happen, either the Russians need to not give support (including Japanese arms) in Manchuria, or there needs to be some corresponding advantage given to the KMT. Looking around for one, what if the US had moved some of the troops it had intended for Operation Downfall to the Mainland?


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 8:50 AM
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Anyway, for Lurid, my "Alternate History China: Absolute Best-Case Scenario Imaginable" is: everything exactly the same except no WWII in Asia.* Chiang keeps putting down bandits and laying track, the compradors keep industrializing, East Asia makes a killing in WWII (Atlantic Edition), the CCP dies as cannon fodder on the Eastern Front, Korea and Taiwan get independent and get rich anyway when decolonization rolls around in the 1960s. Everyone gets rich. Yay.
*This will depend on some fine balance of forces in Tokyo turning out differently in 1931 or so. I leave the details to the writers' room.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 8:59 AM
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Protip: Reading Wikipedia entries that culminate in pictures of Nazis being hung is very cheering in these times of right-wing immunity from prosecution.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:06 AM
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Hanged. Pictures of Nazis being hung are in an entirely different area of the Internet.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:09 AM
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Hanged. From the neck. Until dead.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:09 AM
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Damnit.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:10 AM
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54

Great. Grammar Nazis.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:10 AM
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50: That doesn't work for me. I see those and I think about what took place between the Nazis' ascent and the noose.


Posted by: politicalfootball | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:10 AM
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They weren't on the scaffold long.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:12 AM
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Sometimes they just got stools.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:15 AM
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It's probably hard not to shit yourself when being hanged.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:21 AM
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Ahhh. Teamwork.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:22 AM
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A really important point in how the Science piece fits with whatever else you know about Chinese education is that the PRC managed to hoodwink a whole lot of international organizations into accepting *just* educational statistics from the four richest provinces in China. You now see charts with a funny acronym attached to the "PR China" label to take note of this.

But yeah, all the stuff about tiger mothers and grit and legions of mathletes took off outside China because the PRC spent two decades systematically covering this up.


Posted by: Alex | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:25 AM
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60: To wit. Not in the OP because that's six years old and I'm too lazy to find an update.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:29 AM
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50. Pretty hard to posit no WW2 in Asia unless you also posit no Japanese attempt to conquer China in the 30s. The former was indeed a near thing, the latter not as easily preventable, so even if the Japanese had not bombed Pearl Harbor and not taken SE Asia from the French/British/Dutch, (avoiding angering the US) the Japanese would still have been in China.

I suppose a "best" scenario can easily swallow such problems, though, because "best."


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:36 AM
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48.2: I don't know enough about the details of the Civil War. In Jung and Halliday's account there were several cases where sleepers very obviously walked big ROCA formations into envelopments. IDK how true that is, but if so quite minor changes in CI, or just Chiang's attitude, could have swung things.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:40 AM
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62: You will notice that I assigned junior writers to clean up way back in 1931.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:42 AM
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But yeah, all the stuff about tiger mothers and grit and legions of mathletes took off outside China because the PRC spent two decades systematically covering this up.

Also because everyone already believed that Chinese immigrant students in the US do extremely well because of their strict parents.


Posted by: Cryptic ned | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:44 AM
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60. The "tiger mothers" stuff is, IMHO, more about incenting UMC Americans to apply those methods (which presumably are rife in rich Shanghai) to UMC American children. I doubt that knowing rural Chinese children are educationally disadvantaged would make any difference.


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:46 AM
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66 no doubt is true. But the broader point is that the upcoming cohorts of Red Gene Warriors aren't all tiger cubs. Two thirds of them are HS dropouts with anemia.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:52 AM
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64. As a junior writer, my suggestion is that one way to clean it up takes us back to 1928. It is possible that hanging a few of the Army plotters who had a Manchurian warlord assassinated, but got away with it, would have made a difference. Some of them were involved in the 1931 Mukden Incident as well, where some adult supervision (i.e., hangings) might have worked. Let's just go with "no assassinations, no Mukden Incident."

I see at least a four season Amazon Prime show here...


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 9:59 AM
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Actually, an AU set modern-day with basic continuity of polities from the 1920's (Weimar Germany, Taishō Japan, Republic of China) would be pretty interesting.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 10:20 AM
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You could do the GoT S1 bait-and-switch where the viewer reluctantly comes to identify with the brave patriotic young officers who totally fuck up and get themselves hanged.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 11:01 AM
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For a proper GoT-style show, you'd want the protagonists to be hung.


Posted by: snarkout | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 11:24 AM
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You speak as if these objectives are contradictory. Racist.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 11:26 AM
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70. You'd want to do three different endings, where Mao wins in one, the KMT wins in another, and Japan wins in a third. Something for everyone!


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 11:41 AM
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And one where Curtis B. LeMay arbitrarily nukes everybody and gets murdered by W. L. Mackenzie King.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 11:46 AM
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I just learned that the last Imperial Japanese soldier to surrender after WW2 was actually Taiwanese. He was not a favorite of the KMT.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-18-19 12:30 PM
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I'd watch 74. Especially the second arc.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 12-19-19 3:02 AM
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