Recent content by LeX

I think the issue is that the utility of slow-moving armored vehicles (basically a very heavy train without the need for rails) is not obvious. Kind of like how the effectiveness of drones and glide bombs was only widely recognized a year or so into the Ukraine war.

There was and still is this perception in China that the Japanese, love them or hate them, got something right. A good deal of China's path to modernity was people studying in Japan and bringing back ideas from that country to implement at home. Wang's thinking was simply "if you can't beat...

I quite enjoyed EBR's TL on a realistic Drakia in 2020-2021. When re-reading a part of it earlier this year I noticed he had been banned and it took me some time to find the reason. Quite frankly it made me sad and angry as I reflected on the loss for AH.com in an age where big social media...

Yes, it seems that if CKS had died in 1936 Wang would've already been turned pro-Japan enough and be in the right place (Nanjing) to serve in the puppet KMT.

Tough. About the best you might manage is to get the Red Army to commit fewer atrocities against liberated areas, but once they get to German territory itself then it will be hard to restrain the revenge-seeking Soviet soldiers. More atrocities are committed in desperate or existential...

Not sure whether this is feasible, but I for one think it would be kind of cool if Germany became a constitutional federal monarchy where all the local royalties keep their positions with varying (though minor) degrees of actual power. Naturally this would include Prussia. Alternatively, have...

My impression is that Wang Jingwei joined the Japanese out of a combination of desperation and bad blood with Chiang Kai-shek. I've always thought that in a TL where Chiang is dead or removed, he would easily become the leader of a left-wing KMT or at least serve as a senior cadre. EDIT: In...

Yeah but what I'm saying is there isn't a definite need or even benefit to stay communist. Like in the 1920s the KMT itself was socialist-leaning and had the post-Sun leadership been different it may have even ended up not so different from the OTL CCP. In fact you could say that by turning...

Hence the rationale for a rebranding, especially if the Vietminh is having trouble dealing with the French. If there isn't a Communist China to help and the USSR is far away, better to do some PR with the KMT and Americans, especially if Marxism isn't core to the Vietnamese nationalist movement...

I think it would be a close fight but the Soviets are overall stronger IMO. They have the biggest army, better knowledge of how to use it, and better land-based weapons. Like ObsessedNuker mentioned they will suffer from food supply issues but that just means a new Holodomor on the territory of...

Is it possible that without the CCP in charge of China the Viet Minh changes its own ideology to be less communist and more nationalist? The KMT might support them in that case.

Maybe not full-on communist, but a socialist movement is probably viable if something like the New Deal is not implemented and crony capitalism gets worse during and after the 1930s. A widening gap between rich and poor and scandals involving blatant corruption of the monied elite could cause...

It stopped being majority Manchu in around 1900. In the late 1800s the Qing dynasty opened it up to Han Chinese immigration to counter Russian attempts to take it over, and they came gushing in from the heavily overpopulated Yellow River valley. By 1930 most of its 30 million people were already...

It's definitely possible for "Manchuria" to be independent in the sense that it's run by the Chinese Communists while the rest of China is under Nationalist control. But its formal name would likely just be the "People's Republic of China" and it wouldn't be Manchurian at all except for the...

I'm not as familiar with the warlord dynamics of the ROC as I would like to be, but that seems more or less plausible. Definitely the southern warlords would probably choose to split off rather than follow the Nanjing/Central Army clique of "traitors to the Chinese nation." Whether they would...