>The thought of Chinese unification under COMMUNISM in the year 194x was absolutely unthinkable, IMPOSSIBLE, it's fucking crazy what Mao Zedong accomplished.
>COMMUNISM, an ideology originated from Western Europe, travelled all the way to China, the Chinese Communist Party was created with only 50-60 members, they recruited millions of men and won a civil war, and now they rule one of the greatest countries in the world, what are the odds?
>and of course it was made possible by A SINGLE MAN, Mao Zedong, without him nothing of this would be possible, he's even more admirable than Bismarck in my opinion, the concept of German unification was there, people expected it, but the concept of Chinese unification UNDER COMMUNISM? literally nobody back then could've predicted it, the chance was less than 1%, that's how crazy communist China is.
>Maybe we're living in an anomaly timeline, who knows?
Been reading on this topic, so it's quite fun to debate. In simple terms, the CCP won because the Kuomintang governed so poorly, the Japanese invaded at an inopportune time, and then the Americans did not counter Stalin's military aid following the second world war. There were multiple moments when the CCP was finished in china. 1st- when they rose to prominence on the coattails of the KMT through a merger and then were brutally purged by Chiang. 2nd - when the Jiangxi and other soviets were encircled and burned out. Probably more, I'm not finished with the history yet.
But at each moment, fate intervened for the CCP. The KMT had to finish their northern campaign and so allowed the various southern communist soviets to consolidate. The corruption and warlordism of the old Chinese regime were internalized rather than rejected during their conquest of china, so the old social forces chafing for liberation were not resolved (EX: the peasantry, corruption of the elites, secret societies and gangsterism ruling the government, corruption of the opium traffic). And then there is the Japanese invasion, which again forced the KMT and CCP into a breathing room alliance. Following this Stalin's gift of military aid using surplus of the world war allowed them to fight and win.
So the CCP primarily won, because the KMT did not generate enough upheaval in their political structure to unseat the relics of the Qing dynasty still governing. Thus they were damned to repeat the Qing experience and experience chronic inflammation from uprisings among the peasantry which became communism. The military details permit the corridor by which the CCP gained china, but these are transient things.