China is complicated. Much as I'd like to think a China under Chiang would have been a friend of these United States, the more I learn about China and the Chinese, the more skeptical I am. Perhaps it was to our (and Asia ex-China's) benefit that the Chinese imposed on themselves the modern religion of Marxism-Leninism and the mass famines of the 50's and 60's. Beyond the challenge of Islamism is the challenge of traditional cultures with traditional territorial ambitions.
China's have languished only because it has been relatively weak for 200 years. (Even then, it added almost half of China's current territory - Xinjiang and Tibet - right at the boundary of that 200-year point). During this period of weakness, China has lashed out - in border clashes killing thousands - over territorial claims against proudly socialist states like Vietnam, India and the Soviet Union, despite all the claims of international socialist solidarity. I think communist fellow travelers are starting to discover that international socialist solidarity was a nice slogan, but traditional ethnic and historical ambitions have always been the foundation stones of the foreign policies of ostensibly fraternal socialist states.
If Chiang had taken over post-war China, the Chinese would already have overtaken the American economy, severely complicating American security calculations in the Western Pacific, given the Chinese Nationalist (on Taiwan) claim to even bigger chunks of East Asia not currently under Chinese rule than the Chinese Communists. A key Roman strategic precept (mirrored in Sun Tzu's Art of War) was to attempt to set one barbarian against another. From an American perspective, it would be best if we could stand back and watch motley combinations of our adversaries slug it out.
Are there any communists who aren't our friends?