Alternate History of Southeast Asia (1940)

An imaginary alternate history visualized and narrated by Anonymous Kabataan

In the year 1934, Filipinos were happily united that the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth and the landslide victories of President Manuel Quezon and Vice President Sergio Osmeña Sr. However despite of this happiness, the world peace is in danger once again as the militaristic regimes of Germany, Italy, and Imperial Japan that would become the Axis Powers invaded their neighbors vying to expand their political influence on the world stage. Germany invaded Poland together with the Soviet Union and invaded Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Yugoslavia under its boot. Japan on the other hand invaded huge swaths of China in northern and eastern regions while smaller in its mountainous southern regions. While Italians successfully invaded Greece and Ethiopia which solidified Italian control in East Africa. When France was successfully invaded by Germany through the Ardennes, Japan took advantage of declaring war on France to successfully take French Indochina for its rich resources and installed three puppet regimes of the Empire of Vietnam, the Kingdom of Luang Prabang, and the Kingdom of Kampuchea in the year 1940. In these dark times with continental Europe under the Axis control, Britain was the only Western Allied power standing against Hitler and Mussolini.

With the Second World War raging throughout the world, the U.S. under the presidency of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt declared neutrality while supplying lend-lease to its allies Great Britain and China against warring Germans and the Japanese. At the same moment in the Philippines, elected president of the Nacionalista Party Manuel L. Quezon of the Philippine Commonwealth recommended preparing the nation for the possible war with the Empire of Japan.

We focused on the Philippines too much, what happened to China in this timeline? During the 1930s, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek after Sun Yat-sen's death purged the communists in the political movement which caused Mao Zedong to form his own army known as the Chinese Red Army which sparked the Chinese Civil War between Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party in Southern China while at the same time, the Imperial Japanese Army took advantage of invading their lands, therefore, there was no unity among the Chinese people. Meanwhile, in Northern China, Beiyang Government is experiencing struggles defending its lands against a more modernized Japanese Army.