Hm. Interesting question. I think it would have become an issue when Mao came into power - after he got rid of Sun Yat Tsen, he implemented a LOT of purges, not just of intellectuals, whom he despised, but of anyone who he thought might be going against his own version of Communism. (It's interesting to me, on a sociological level, to see how different each nation that embraces/embraced Communism are in how they implement it. The USSR was different from China and both are far and away from North Korea, while Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, etc were/are completely different again.) So I think taking that into account, China might have gone for longer without problems if there'd been no invasions by the British or the Japanese, but overall, once Mao began the purges, it would have ended up the way it has.

(That's just my personal opinion - I'd be interested to see other people's thoughts on it.)