Thought experiment: What if the KMT had won and ruled China?
But is just as authoritarian as today’s CCP. Would US policy be different, and why?
I want you to conduct a thought experiment. Alternative histories based on counterfactuals can be fun. But they can also be instructive.
I ask you to imagine China as it is today with all its single-party authoritarian trappings, under the KMT rather than the CCP.
Here’s the reason: the question of whether the United States would treat a from-the-right authoritarian China differently than it treats today’s from-the-left authoritarian Chin can provide perspectives on how the US makes foreign policy.
THE SCENARIO: A KMT-RUN CHINA
In 1949, the Kuomintang (KMT), the Nationalist Party of China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, prevails in the Chinese Civil War over the Communist Party of China (CCP). And from then until the present day, the KMT rules China as a one-party state.[1]
The KMT, just as the CCP today, denies the people of China the ability to enjoy basic human rights, such as the freedoms of speech and assembly. Press freedoms do not exist as the Party controls media outlets. Torture, arbitrary detention, lack of access to justice, digital surveillance are among the tools the Party uses to hold and maintain power. Under KMT rule, the people do not have the right to change their government.
The authoritarianism experienced by the people in China in our scenario is no different than that experienced by the people in China today. The only difference is the name of the party imposing it.
A NOT-SO-ALTERNATE HISTORY
Our alternative history is plausible because it is based in fact. It more or less describes conditions under KMT in the area it controlled, the island of Taiwan, from 1949-1987, an era known as the “White Terror.” This tone was set two years earlier by the February 28 incident (1947), the June 4 of the Republic of China. By the numbers, it was worse than the CCP’s Tiananmen Square massacre. KMT authorities killed some 18,000 Taiwanese civilians in response to a popular uprising, targeting many local political and intellectual elites for elimination.
The entirety of Chiang Kai-shek’s personal rule on Taiwan came under martial law (which outlived him by 12 years). The White Terror was four decades of harsh repression under one-party rule. The KMT killed political opponents and those suspected of sympathies to communists. The KMT cracked down on indigenous ethnic minorities who expressed resistance to ethno-majoritarian rule by the colonial KMT elites. Tools the KMT employed to enforce its one-party rule included mass surveillance, persecution of perceived dissidents and extrajudicial killings.
If the KMT were capable of such brutal behavior on Taiwan, it’s fair to assume it would be on the mainland too.
In the 2024 of our alternate history, the musculature of China that the United States confronts is the same one we see in our reality. It is the same size as the U.S. It has 1.4 billion people. It has the second largest economy and the second biggest military. It has abundant natural resources which, combined with a centralized industrial policy made possible by a one-party government, its government has harnessed to make the country a technological powerhouse.
WOULD KMT DESPOTISM HAVE LASTED?
Every counterfactual invites counter-counterfactuals. Some may argue that a KMT dictatorship on the mainland wouldn’t have lasted, as it didn’t on Taiwan. Maybe, but there are cases of long-running non-communist autocracies today, such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Cameroon. Some may make an essentialist assertion that communist authoritarianism is somehow more durable than rightist authoritarianism. But the demise of communist regimes in Eastern Europe (around the same time that Taiwan emerged from martial law) disproves that.
Some may argue that the KMT, unlike the CCP, lacked an ideology to fix its single-party hold on power,[2] That’s not true. Chiang Kai-shek’s regime employed the neo-nationalist ideas of the New Life Movement, described by some scholars as "Confucian fascism," in which the KMT imported ideas from other fascist regimes to enhance Chiang's control of the citizenry. Moreover, the KMT had its own ideological campaign to impose cultural conformity, the Chinese Cultural Renaissance, a mirror image version of the CCP’s Cultural Revolution, in which the Party used the tools of government to impose its program of cultural, social and political majoritarian norms on the population.
UNITED STATES POSTURE
In our scenario, the United States faces a powerful China with a despotic KMT government. Would its policy be the same as it is toward CCP-run China today? Some questions to ponder:
Would the House of Representatives have named it the Select Committee on Competition between the United States and the Kuomintang?
Would a Secretary of State have given a speech entitled Kuomintang China and the Free World’s Future? Would he have declared that “securing our freedoms from the Kuomintang Party is the mission of our time?”
Would Members of Congress have passed a bill forcing divestment of TikTok because its parent company was controlled by the Kuomintang and was a vehicle for KMT propaganda?
Would a Secretary of State have said, in determining that the Chinese government was committing genocide against the Uyghurs, that “If the Kuomintang Party is allowed to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against its own people, imagine what it will be emboldened to do to the free world?”
Would American politicians insist that the leader of China be called by his party title of Director-General of the Kuomintang rather than by his government title of President of the Republic of China?
Would think tanks testify to Congress on The Kuomintang Party’s Threat to America?
If any of these feel weird, ask yourself why. Remember, in our scenario the KMT is no less autocratic, iron-fisted, aggressive and ambitious than the CCP of our time.
Would U.S. policymakers have been more forgiving of the Tiananmen Square massacre, be less outraged by the genocide against the Uyghurs, look the other way about the erasure of democracy in Hong Kong, or care less about the denial of basic human rights of people in China if they couldn’t append the epithet “communist” to their condemnation?
At the heart of this thought experiment is the question of whether the United States should treat the depredations of people suffering under from-the-left authoritarianism with greater concern than from-the-right authoritarianism.[3] Related is the question: should U.S. policy toward China be guided by the label or by the behavior of its government?
The answers to these questions are dearly relevant to us today. Authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe and at home. Will our response be a principled one designed to counter authoritarian behavior wherever it manifests, or will be limit ourselves to just doing something about the kind we call “communist?”
[1] For this exercise I do not address the mirror factual of the Communists taking over and ruling on Taiwan. But it would be fair to assume that a CCP-led Taiwan would have served as a tool for the mainland KMT to justify one-party rule and repression, just as it has in our own mirrored reality.
[2] Note that this ideology has changed over time, from a universalist communist worldview of perpetual revolution and its spread to what is essentially its opposite today under Xi Jinping, of Sinicization campaigns and invocation of “Chinese characteristics” that puts Chinese nationalism at the heart of the Party’s identity. Politicians who insist on using “Communist” to the primary identifier of politics in the PRC and “ChiComs” to refer to its government as if nothing has changed since the 1950s are inviting challenges to the analytical soundness of their arguments.
[3] To this the 20th century’s answer is an unqualified yes. Right-wing dictatorships were coddled in the service of opposing left-wing dictatorships.