Nazi Space Spy
Banned
This timeline is probably the best 1970s focused project I've read since Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo. The new format is working really well, too!
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Programming Update:
so I have a bit of the rest of 1979 sketched out as we head towards 1980, but are there any requests of things anybody wants updates on?
so I have a bit of the rest of 1979 sketched out as we head towards 1980, but are there any requests of things anybody wants updates on?
Sports and other cultural stuff? Not saying you gotta go in great detail but maybe a look at how things are different and similar to OTL?
Culturall stuff like food (a mcdonald or kfc or somethinh about the fast food industry would be great),fashion,car models (both succesfull anf failed one) and also accident and incident like plane crashes,train wrecks,sunken ship etc
Certainly! I’ve tried to sprinkle a few things like that in here and there in the narrative but I can do end-of-year culture roundups a la Blue Skies in Camelot perhaps
We’ll have some more Africa/Castro content shortly!
I imagine africa is quite the chaos (btw since you mention rhodesia is heading in a peacefull direction will this butterfly the gukurahundi?)
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Perhaps Congressman Crane can play a larger role. A Cabinet post, a Limbaugh style media career, or a high profile ambassadorship. Perhaps this is the forth of a childhood playing We the People, election video games, but he always struck me as worth a larger role.
Hua Hangs On
Hua Hangs On
"...I weep for comrade Deng, taken from us too early..."
- Hua Guofeng's eulogy for Deng Xiaoping
For Deng to pass away in his sleep at the age of 75 in his modest Beijing home was perhaps no surprise; his health had not been rumored to be poor, but the People's Republic of China in the late 1970s was not known for its life expectancy. That it happened just within a year of his triumph at the 1978 Plenary was the true shock, and started a furious whisper campaign within Communist Party ranks. Hua, after all, had carefully steered the Gang of Four out of power and was tight with intelligence and security service chiefs such as Luo Qingchang and Wang Dongxing, and the functionaries were well aware of how it was that Andropov had just maneuvered his way into power in Moscow mere months earlier. The conspiracy theories would persist in China long after the PRC itself was but a memory; [1] no definitive evidence other than conjecture, rumor and hearsay have ever emerged to prove wrongful causes. And besides, the spooks of the PRC were Hua's right-hand men since he purged the Gang of Four; even if the autopsy report had been doctored, who would ever prove it?
The Party settled into an uncomfortable position after Deng's funeral; Hua held formal control and title, but the now-"Seven Elders" (eight when Deng had been around) had clearly tried to start moving against him the previous year. The Elders, all septuagenarian original footsoldiers of Mao's movement, were fairly divided on how best to handle Hua. Some, most critically chief economic planner Li Xiannan, had helped him remove the Gang of Four and despite being amenable to Deng remained committed to a leftist doctrine; others, like Chen Yun (arguably the most powerful in the group after Deng himself and the most damaged by the latter's death) were fierce critics within the party of dictatorial Maoism and considered the policies a failure.
In the end, pragmatism was the order of the day. Fears and rumors that Luo and Wang may have engineered Deng's death were not just the thing of whispers within the bureaucracies (the average Chinese citizen would never have had that level of knowledge of internal party feuds until years later); even senior officials in the Politburo like the Elders debated quietly amongst themselves whether Hua was worth crossing. The Seven Elders, who exercised much control within the Party and its junior ranks as mentors to rising officials, decided to make the most of the situation and try to steer Hua in favorable directions; after their attempt to remove him as Paramount Leader having ended with the untimely (and mysterious) death of one of their own, it was determined that it was best for the collegial and consensus-based system to make do and exercise informal influence instead...
[1] Whoooooops spoilers!
(Purely as an aside it's kind of wild that Chiang and Mao died so close together)
Oh yeah, Hua in charge vs Deng is one of those history-shattering butterflies