The Dragon And The Tiger
For aeons, the Dynastic Cycle has slowly spun on as surely as the Earth around the Sun. The powers that be in China rose like a phoenix from the ashes of their predecessors, stood tall and mighty, but inevitably declined and, eventually, dissolved into the very embers from which it had been birthed. It was this that was certain, through thick and thin, as empires rose and monarchs fell, as lands were conquered and the oceans explored. And the Cycle kept at it even as the center of power shifted from the dynasties of the East to the kings of the West. But nothing is infallible--nothing human, that is--and in the twilight of the nineteenth century, it seemed as though the Dynastic Cycle could no longer sustain itself. The Great Qing, ruled by invader Manchus since 1636, was a mere shadow of itself, though the people did not merely call for a new emperor to be seated on the Dragon Throne. Many called for the installment of a distinctly
Western form of government: a democracy. Naturally, there was the opposition. No one wanted the mangled corpse of the Qing to be in power any longer, but as in all Chinese revolutions, there was always a wannabe emperor and his court. This role was filled by Sun Yat-Sen and his Band of Thieves, who wanted nothing more than to behead the Xuantong Emperor at the steps of the Forbidden City and crush the European-backed democratic forces, who supported the continued desecration of China's corpse by the British, French, German, and Russian vultures for their own economic benefit. In fact, the Band of Thieves achieved all of this. On December 31, 1912, the Golden Empire of Han China obliterated its resistors and put in power Sun Yat-Sen, the Tàiyáng Emperor.
The West was not happy. They had failed to keep their Eastern trade open, and so they set their sights on the Rising Sun of Asia, Japan, though not with conquest in mind. The West still wanted China, not the polytheistic and resource-barren rocks that made Japan. Money, armaments, and goods pumped in and out of Kobe, Nagoya, Osaka, Tokyo and Yokohama at astronomical speed. When the Great War came and France and Russia were humiliated in the face of the Anglo-German alliance, Japan quickly snapped up the Dutch East Indies and German Pacific holdings while China went to war in India and came out victorious. Decades passed and Europe declined, by 1983 leaving behind in its wake three sleeping giants and one massive cold war: the Golden Empire of Han China; Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; and the United States of America and its Monroe Pact. Each have their own strengths, but all are nuclear. Trouble is, the Japanese and the Chinese might actually press the button.
God save them all.