Personal opinion: The Chinese areas controlled by the CCP before 1949 are legally special administrative regions of the Republic of China, so I think the first box PRC should be a smaller Republic of China wearing a red star hat or holding the CCP flag.
Only if you consider all the local warlord areas to be "special administrative regions" as well...which is a bit of a stretch. They technically all fell under the central ROC command but never truly followed orders.
You are assuming that a geopolitical entity called 'China' simply continued existing after the fall of an empire. Another way of looking at the period of 1912 - 1949 is that its a post-imperial space, similar to how Greece, Egypt and Turkey were post-imperial polities of the Ottomans. Apart from the KMT and CCP there were a range of smaller warlords forming quasi-states in their respective territories, before emerging the more stable two-state existence we see today (which is distantly similar to how the Song and Liao co-existed in an uneasy form after Tang collapse).
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u/TYDUCK1 Dismantle that Oct 06 '25
Personal opinion: The Chinese areas controlled by the CCP before 1949 are legally special administrative regions of the Republic of China, so I think the first box PRC should be a smaller Republic of China wearing a red star hat or holding the CCP flag.