Would Chiang like to see such a large build-up of American might at his border though? He was never the one to fully trust the Westerners and his relations with the US were not always warm.
That might depend on whether Chiang views the Vietnamese Communists or the Americans as the greater evil.
Such mass starvation was the outcome of failed economic policies and economic fantasies of the communist leader. A "great" communist revolutionary can't be a great economists. Everyone was asked by Mao to stop farming and start producing cheap quality steel to overtake Great Britain.
Interestingly enough, one would think that China would have had enough people to both farm the land and produce a lot of steel.
At best, only during the GLF. Outside of it, Chiang's Nationalist regime starved millions to death as well and was in a state of civil war, which the Communists ended. You're more likely to die under Chiang than under Mao. You're also far more likely going to lead a better life in the 60 and 70s, when there was no war and Communist social welfare policies gave you education and health care, than under a Nazi sympathiser who most likely would have been like Suharto and commit intentional genocide like him to stop Communism.
India never had a Capitalistic democracy it was rather a Socialist democracy. India lags behind China because India is far more socialist compared to China despite India has democracy and China is communist. You can't blame democracy for that. The period of 1947-1991 is often referred as "License Raj" period in India, in this period the growth of private own industries was curtailed and foreign investment was completely curtailed as per true Marxist/Socialist ideology.
Already since the 1960s we see India being described the Western press as drifting from socialism to "pragmatism". The INC always implemented a mixed economy at best with a fanatical anti-Communism and, except for a brief alliance with the Soviet Union, closeness to the West especially by offensively remaining part of the British Commonwealth. Moreover, India was partly devastated by its war with Pakistan over Bangladesh, which resulted in one of the bloodiest carnages of the Cold War. Finally, you seemingly call India today more socialist than China but this is ridiculous seeing how the INC no longer has any monopoly in power and the INC in any case has implemented neoliberal policies that surrendered India to foreign capital and native private companies. As if that wasn't enough, India's neoliberalism started just a few years after Deng Xiaoping's liberal reforms, and yet it still looks far more closely to Guatemala or Haiti than to Japan or South Korea, like China does.
Anti-INC Indian right-wingers (almost invariably Hindutva) should stop presenting themselves as nationalist when they are what in Latin America we call vendepatrias, or nation sellers.
