As a source of easily exploited cheap labor, sure. But as a modern industrial powerhouse, it has - if anything - breathed continued life into a financialized consumerism that should have choked to death 40 years ago. China as the manufacturing hub of the world guarantees a steady supply of nearly-at-cost textiles, electronics, plastics, and steel that financialized exporters can then mark up 100-1000%. And its industrial exports are central to the further expansion of manufacturing in surrounding Pacific Rim / Indian Ocean nations, such as Indonesia and Malaysia and Pakistan and Australia.

None of this works without China's industrial growth. Which is why NATO states simply can't quit The Middle Kingdom. Their economists know just as well as the folks in Beijing that the West needs Chinese high efficiency manufacturing and logistics far more than China needs Western credit exchanges and information hubs.

If the KMT had won the war like the west really wanted, the China would be a neo-colony today.

If the KMT had survived in Shanghai, we'd likely still see an "Eastern China" divorced from the coast in a state of revolutionary resistance not unlike Communists in Northern India and Kashmir or the post-Cold War "rogue states" of Vietnam and Korea and Nicaragua and Cuba and Iran and Syria and Afghanistan and now Niger and Mali and Burkina Fasao.

But the KMT wasn't a stable sovereign entity. They couldn't even keep control in Taiwan, ffs. They'd have had to keep putting out popular revolts resulting from their deplorable economic policies. Maybe they could have kept Hong Kong or Shanghai in a semi-permanent Singapore-esque state. But they'd never have achieved the kind of industrial renaissance and productivity boom of the Deng reform government. They certainly wouldn't have the kind of broad social mandate enjoyed by Xi Jinping.