For those who don't play paradox games or Hearts of Iron 4, I did a difficult achievement, which is starting as communist china and proclaiming the People's republic of china. You have to fight an uphill battle starting from a single province. I managed to consolidate, drive out the japanese, and turn on the Kuomintang in a few years. This last year has been researching and preparing a naval invasion to fully defeat Japan. Of course, I had to keep Mao as the head, otherwise how could I really claim to have created the PRC?
There are a lot of expansions there for HOI4. Do you need them all? Can it be pirated, or are there regular updates?
Get the ones that apply to the countries you like. I bought “Waking the tiger” for a few bucks for this run, took me a couple tries and maybe 10 odd hours in total, worth the cost. There’s expansions for the Spanish civil war, yugoslavia, etc which are all fun communist play throughs.