The "guide" I "followed" was this reddit comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/hoi4/comments/15bvcj9/tips_on_how_to_play_communist_china/jtstcri/
alt history: If Hitler hadn't sieged Leningrad but taken it and allied the slavs against communism, he could have won!
alt history: If Mao had declared war on Albania, Italy would have been forced to respond. Thus the western allies would have recognized Mao as an equal military ally when world war 2 started and would help him defeat the illegitimate government led by Chiang Kai Shek. Then Japan wouldn't take any territory in the peace deal but give it all to Mao because it's his cores! Then you just defeat Japan when they declare war again because you don't have a corrupt government.
I wonder how useful Victoria 3 would be if you gave it to somebody in world war 2 for real
Stalin did have HOI4, that's why he knew to purge the officer corp and
Trotsky, because otherwise Trotsky would have lead all the former tsarist and white officers in a coup.If you gave them HOI it would probably help because you have decision trees at least kinda based on reality.
Like Japan seen America's "Nuke" option, or the Soviets see that Germany is preparing to invade Poland.
Nice! I used to enjoy desperate attempts at good china
when I used to play HoI3, but always got stuck after making an alliance with bad china and getting dragged into war with 
I just crush the smaller warlord states from Shanxi to Xinjiang, Tibet if there's time, not join with the KMT when Japan declares war and let the two duke it out while both mass training infantry groups for holding the borders while building up industry and properly equipped divisions to punch through whatever forces I'll fight when one side capitulate. I'll even have some motorized and horsey lads on stand-by to rapidly advance the front lines as rapidly as possible should the KMT (majority of the time I've seen them get thrashed by the imperialists) lose and all their divisions get deleted by their capitulation. After that it just turns into a slugging fest of grinding the Japanese imperialists down in equipment and bleeding them white in manpower. If I get enough industry going, I'll go through modernizing the army (converting the all-infantry divisions made to block and hold the front lines into proper divisions with arty and AA brigades, engi, logi, AT, medi, and recon. Motorized if possible), building towards air supremacy, building tactical bombers for CAS and whatever, and lastly building roflstomping medium tanks with mechanized infantry divisions for punching through soft areas to perform encirclement maneuvers. After liberating China I spend time building enough navy to invade Japan with airborne divisions dropped in to support the naval landings, with the time spent waiting for the navy to build bring used productively in bombing Japan's industries, shredding their airforce, and naval bombing their fleets to the bottom of the ocean.
That's my long and slow version though, with a 100% independent Communist China campaign with no cheeses.
So who does america drop the bombs on if Japan gets crushed by unified China?
I managed to defeat japan pretty on, but could never conquer nationalist China for some reason lol
