AHC: Six Schools, Six Warlords; or: A Far Stranger Warlord Era?

[Born in the USSA]

Without the Second Revolution and the consolidation of the powers of the Presidency in the ROC, Yuan Shikai is forced to accept the fact that the Nationalist supporters outnumber his own in the National Assembly, which ultimately results in the consolidation of Yuan's Republican Party with the Democratic and Unity Parties. The resulting Constitutional Party existed primarily to serve as a counterbalance to the KMT within the assembly.

Yuan's weakened position would ultimately be exacerbated by the public release of the Twenty-One Demands in 1915. A maneuver by Japan to gain increased influence in Manchuria and over the Chinese economy more generally, the release of the Demands would greatly damage both the Constitutional Party within China and the Empire of Japan on the international stage. This would ultimately lead to later developments in Manchuria, but in the near term the swift erosion of faith in the government would see Yuan's resignation, Sun's ascension to the Presidency, and the formation of a coalition between the Constitutionals and the KMT. It was allegedly a voluntary alliance of equals, but by this point the Nationalists had enough gravity that the Constitutional Party was essentially reduced to a fig leaf.

In order to tamp down on rising wariness among the public of "foreign tampering" in the wake of the Japanese stunt with the Demands, the Front under Sun's leadership would begin a massive push to demonstrate "a new way of organizing the State, based in Chinese principles and made for the modern world." The resulting ideology, Confucian Republicanism, sought to centralize the power of the ROC to better resist foreign interference, and sought to balance contradictory Confucian ideas with Sun's own Three Principles of the People.

• To that end, the Principle of Nationalism was equated with the Confucian ideal of Zhi, "the ability to see what is right and fair". In this understanding, it was considered "fair" that a people be guaranteed freedom from undue foreign influences, and that it was "right" right that they defend themselves from the same. This didn't sit well with Britain and the US, but was seen as preferable to Japanese meddling by both.
• The Principle of Democracy was equated with the ideal of Yi, "the upholding of righteousness and the moral disposition to do good". Confucianism in its traditional form was largely anti-democratic, but Confucian Republicanism took as a core tenet that the best way to "uphold righteousness" was through active political participation and robust civic life.
• The Principle of Livelihood of the People was equated with the ideal of Ren, benevolence, which was meant in the Conrep context as a form of social safety net supported by a land taxation system inspired by Georgism.
• The Confucian ideal of Li, "ritual norms and propriety", would be reformulated into a fourth Principle of the People, something often inaccurately translated into English as "Discipline". This fourth principle, arising due to dysfunction in the early Republican period, would come to encompass what would today be called "traditional family values" and "law and order", intended to strengthen community life and stability at the local level as a means of strengthening China at the national level.

The Confucian Republican ideology also called for large scale investment in education and modernization programs, which would largely bear fruit with the purge of the Communists and the Second Warring States period.

 

[Born in the USSA]

It would be safe to say that the Twenty-One Demands had blown up in Japan's face. Not only had the public outcry severely curtailed efforts by Chinese politicians to work productively with their neighbor nation (most prominently in the unfortunate case of President Yuan), but Western scrutiny was firmly on Japan's actions in the region, particularly from the British and the Americans. Although the rise of Futurism and the lingering threat of the Soviet Union in Europe had drawn the focus of the British in the wake of the Great War, the Japanese were having no such luck that America would similarly turn a blind eye, so more discrete steps to expand into the mainland were necessary. The initial crack to be exploited was the failure of the ROC to faithfully enforce the policy of Five Races Under One Union.

The Xinhai Revolution that ousted the Qing had led to the adoption of the Five Races policy as a means of ensuring all the largest ethnic groups in the nation that they had a stake in the new government. Fortunately for the Japanese, although Confucian Republican policies had seen inroads made (especially among the Hui), the group that faced the greatest hostility just happened to be centered in the area the empire was most interested in. The fall of the Qing had unleashed a wave of anti-Manchu sentiment that coursed through the nation in steady waves, and Japan was prepared to take full advantage.

To avoid American meddling or interference from the National-Constitutional Front, the Japanese government settled on a policy of subterfuge beginning in 1916, discretely backing secessionist groups in Manchuria and producing agitprop to turn the citizenry of the region against the central government. While a concerted effort by Nanjing early on could have likely prevented or at least tamped down on these activities, Japan had a second stroke of luck when the Front began actively purging communists in the early 1920s. The third and greatest advancement of this policy of discretion would come in 1925, however, with the death of Sun Yat-Sen.

It was the perfect time for action. Although the Nanjing forces had successfully driven the surviving Communist forces North, it had taken a severe toll, and with the caretaker government in disarray with Sun's death the networks built up in Manchuria by the Japanese wasted no time in declaring the secession of the Empire of Manchuria, a constitutional monarchy ruled by Emperor Puyi but led in fact by rebel leader Zhang Zuolin. Japan recognized the new nation within half an hour of the public release of the Manchurian Declaration of Secession, feigning surprise at the new developments in the region and fooling absolutely no one. The Second Warring States Period had begun.

It might suggest to suspicion that Manchuria was an outgrowth of the Empire of Japan, and this was the view that was quickly trumpeted by the Chinese and American governments, but "Director" Zhang and the Emperor himself were quick to disabuse the public both within and without their new nation of this notion. Manchuria, they stressed, was a legal successor to the Qing ending a lawless interregnum, and Japanese influence in the area was merely the honoring of Qing treaties with their brother Empire. Although Japan had pledged full support to Manchuria, drastic steps would need to be taken to strengthen the new nation before the Republic could get its feet back under it. The resulting centralization of authority in the Directorate would be blended with Qing restorationist rhetoric to form the basis of Legalist Revivalism.

Under Legalist Revivalism, the power of the new government was to be unquestioned by the people, so as to prevent domestic subversion of the nation and also the creation of inroads for exploitation by the Nanjing government. An intensely militarized society would develop, as the original secret societies and underground political organizations would form the core of a new "ideologically correct" military, armed and trained by Japanese officers. The domestic sphere of the new nation was also under intense scrutiny by a government vested with extensive and robust police powers. Although the stated goal of the military was to act defensively (and had actually successfully kept the Second Warring States Period confined to back and forth border struggles), once the status of the new government was deemed secure (and the newly formed Mongolian People's Republic began their own counteroffensive against the Front) the Manchurian Liberation Army would switch to the offensive, beginning what would ultimately be a long and costly invasion of the Republic with a single symbolic goal in mind: the sacking of Nanjing.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Although this timeline had begun to diverge from our own by the second decade of the twentieth century, initial changes were relatively minor (and significantly far removed) that there wasn't much of an impact on the course of the Great War in Europe, though changes began to quickly accumulate in the aftermath. Sure, a rabble-rouser in exile in Kureika was beaten to death by a young girl's outraged father, and on the eastern front a man who would otherwise have been a nameless corpse in a trench survived, but individuals are a small thing in the game of nations, and a version of the USSR was still successfully forged on schedule. This had the effect of scaring the living daylights out of everyone else, and would directly contribute to the rise of Futurism.

Codified in Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto in 1909, Futurism would achieve it's political expression in 1919 with the establishment of the Italian Regency of Carnaro. Declaring itself an "anarcho-syndicalist corporatist state", Carnaro made big business by disparaging internationalism of every kind, supporting ethnic separatism, anticolonial uprisings and blatant theft of war materials from nations it rightly argued weren't using it anyway, all awash in exotic drugs, mysticism, and jazz music.

Though rampant arms sales would put the Regency at odds with most of the great powers, all the splinter nations they were supporting saw much to admire in the Futurist system, with the ideology's rabid anticommunist attitude winning over many on the right concerned with labor agitation and Soviet subversion. The rise of Carnaro would reach its apex with the 1922 March on Rome, which would install Gabriele D'Annunzio as the Duce of the new Italian Futurist Republic. Under his leadership, the Republic would go on to lay the foundation of the Carnaran League, a network of co-belligerents that would begin preparing for what they saw as an inevitable Second Great War aimed at the USSR and its puppet regimes.

As the Carnaran League began its preparations, the Soviets were having something of a harder time expanding their influence. With the resolute lobbying of Leon Trotsky, the Union under Vladimir Lenin had embarked on a policy of Permanent Revolution, with little to show for it. Futurist militias throughout Europe were openly attacking Marxist organizations with the blessing of conservative leaders, if not from the government at large, and the efforts to fund the Chinese Communist Party had been deemed an abject failure in the wake of the Sun's purges of the group throughout the early 1920s. Had Sun died earlier, a resurgence on that front might have been possible, but it was not to be. It was 1924 and Vladimir Lenin was dead.

In contrast to the alternate history cliche, a USSR without Stalin did not ultimately devolve to Trotsky. The plain fact of the matter was that he wasn't very popular (even ignoring the failures of his Permanent Revolution policy), and with Lenin gone there was no one left to vouch for him. A new leader, destined in OTL to die in a freezing trench, had seized his moment, consolidated power, and would steer his nation (and the world) on a different course.

Advocating a new pragmatic policy he termed National Socialism, the USSR would change tactics. A former soldier, the newly-declared Vozhd would first reach out to the survivors of the White Army in an attempt to bring them into the fold with a shared nationalist goal. With the loss of blood and treasure in the wake of orthodox internationalism met with crippling foreign sanctions beggars couldn't be choosers, of course. The most radical of these remnants remained aligned with the White Khanate, but enough signed on for clemency to create a notable reactionary current in the halls of power in Moscow.

Second, in order to stabilize a nation under siege and in the grips of a transition of power, certain internal policies were changed to bring the public more fully on board. Repression of religion would be relaxed, as long as the government and its policies were actively cheered on from every pulpit. Early reforms to family life and morality legislation would be undone, with the recriminalization of homosexuality and the full might of the state thrown behind a family values campaign designed to create loyal comrade-patriots from womb to tomb.

With the home front secure, the Vozhd would next turn the nation's attention beyond its own borders once more, inspired by an unlikely source: the Empire of Manchuria. It was clear to everyone at the time that Japan had been pulling the strings in Manchuria. They had taken their militarist ideology, put a local spin on it, and let it loose. And it had worked. Sure, Republican forces under General Yan Xishan kept the border bloody, but the Manchurians were holding their own and Japan was reaping the benefits. There was much to learn from this.

The Vozhd would ultimately make the decision that pragmatism would be more prudent than rigidity. New allies fostered by Moscow would be national creatures, with their own particular versions of Marxism. They would win over the public, and the USSR would stick to discrete support until the time for decisive action came. This policy would see the rise of Strasserism in Germany and Populism in Mongolia, among other groups, and when the Second Great War finally began in 1930 with the German invasion of Austria-Hungary, Moscow had built a network of allies it was certain could crush the Carnaran League. If only things had been so simple.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The year 1921 would see two pivotal developments in East Asia, though no one at the time could have imagined how intertwined the two events would become in the end. In China, the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party would sow the seeds for a good deal of bloodshed. In Mongolia, meanwhile, the declaration of the White Khanate would lead to much of the same.

Although the Nanjing government had made serious investments in public education and social welfare in keeping with the tenets of Confucian Republicanism, the urban proletariat was still feeling the squeeze as a result of the new policies. Although Georgist land value taxes were used to subsidize the peasantry, the fact of the matter was that the way they were calculated encouraged business owners to make ruthless use of their workers to maximize profits. The taxes were based on unimproved land value, not what was built on the land, so they weren't pegged to productivity. Literally everything from the ground up would be gratis. In an ideal world (for the capitalist class, at least...) this would have been the end of it. People don't act like you hope, however, and workers were beginning to organize under the yoke.

Led by Chen Duxiu and supported less than subtly by the Soviet Union, the new Communist Party came under intense and immediate pressure from the National-Constitutional Front. On the merits some of the proposed reforms would likely have been quite popular, but the combination of powerful business owners in league with the government and a public intensely wary of foreign interference would see the Communist Party outlawed within a year as a subversive organization. Forced underground, the Party came to rely on more intense methods, with the central government growing more intense in turn, creating an expanding cycle of violence.

Although never quite to the level of a civil war, the Conrep crackdown on the CCP would nonetheless see several police actions, local peasant rebellions, and several bombings and assassinations. The breakdown in civil order would see the flourishing of organized crime throughout China, but if one looked at the campaign as an effort to permanently disband the Party and purge the nation of Soviet catspaws it would have to be considered a resounding success. With the USSR having withdrawn support in 1924 as the Vozhd set about consolidating his authority, many disillusioned former party members would head north to fight for a noble ideological struggle: the liberation of Mongolia.

On paper the survival of the White Khanate this long was a stunningly unlikely event. Originally little more than a remnant of the Russian Whites who had nabbed themselves a country, the birth of the Khanate owed itself entirely to Ungern-Sterberg, the only man mad enough to conceive of such an entity. TTL, Futurist competition in Europe drew away the USSR's attention, so what would have been intolerable OTL was allowed to fester. Under the sway of what could charitably be called Zen Nihilism, Death Buddhism, or Annihilation of the Self, the White Khan set about reforging his new nation into a brutal theocracy. He saw conspiracies around every corner, and there were none he so despised as Communists.

Ironically, by cracking down on the Mongolian people in a hallucinatory hunt for Communists, the Khan would ultimately lead to his own undoing. Disaffected CCP members searching for meaning would see the ongoing horrors to the north as a clarion call from a people suffering under reactionary autocracy. The local rebellion against the Khanate would take on an increasingly Marxist flavor (so Ungern was right in the end, I guess?), and Mongolia would become a testing ground for National Socialism put into practice. A local leader would be important, but the contribution of the Chinese exiles would need to be recognized as well. It was a puzzle. Enter Peljidiin Genden.

Denouncing Chen Duxiu as a Trotskyist, Peljidiin quickly made himself available as someone to be counted on. Inspired by Chinese influences, he styled himself Juzi of the new Mongolian Peoples Republic and began laying the foundations of the ideology he would call Populism, a form of Mozism with Marxist Characteristics. The new government would have a series of interlocking goals and priorities that the Juzi believed would become mutually reinforcing.

• Adopting a form of State Consequentialism, the MPR began taking steps to needed to begin immediately boosting population and national prosperity to make up the ground lost under the Khanate.
• To this end, the Populist approach to family life was based on the original Mohist principle of Ai, usually translated in the West as "universal love" but more accurately read as "impartial caring". Though good Populists would have family lives remain intact, the children of dissidents or enemies of the people would be raised communally by the state in the hopes of fostering an all encompassing love of country. This approach would prove so successful in the short term it would quickly be imported throughout the Soviet sphere.
• In theory the guiding principle of the civil service was Meritocracy, but old habits die hard, and an oligarchy would quickly develop in short order.
• The greatest divergence between the Populists and the National Socialists was on the matter of culture. Futurist efforts to destroy what they saw as outdated relics had ironically made the Soviet sphere (and the US, ironically enough) bastions of high culture. In Mongolia, the Khanate had appropriated much of the indigenous culture and rendered it unsavory in the process, and the Juzi declared state investment in culture a distraction, adopting an official policy of Minimalism.

After driving off the CCP, the Nanjing government had little time to rest on its laurels. Within a year Sun was dead, and the flourishing bandit problem destabilized the regime enough to give the Manchurians a shot in hell at independence. Although loud factions within the People's Government cried out for an intervention, the Juzi knew it was too soon. The new nation had to build up its strength. And so the situation was left alone.

By 1930 the preparations were ready. With the Second Great War underway, there were no European interlopers who could come to China's aid. And so, in coordination with their allies in Manchuria, the March to the South began.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Only in America could a major social movement spring up inspired by a movie. Originally working to adapt a version of Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman, film director D.W. Griffith was beginning to have doubts as to the future of the project. Although he found the material compelling, he began to fear that the works racial content could spark a public backlash. OTL he needn't have worried, outrage in certain circles not having kept the film from incredible popularity. TTL Griffith decides to retool the project in the wake of a particularly strange and harrowing dream. Inspired by the dream, he would set out to adapt a lesser known work by a fairly popular author at the time. Griffith's masterpiece would not be The Birth of a Nation but rather a loose and experimental adaptation of The King In Yellow.

Lifting themes and characters from the novella, Griffith would ultimately meld it with the southern locale and character of The Clansman, producing a genteel world of southern decadence dramatically doomed by what the viewer will realize is the encroaching Civil War. Unlike the script for the original project, The King In Yellow largely downplayed race despite setting the events of the story on an antebellum plantation. Instead, the film focused entirely on the decline of a plantation called Carcosa, culminating in a lavish masquerade ball (featuring the eponymous King in Yellow) as the encroaching Union army begins to ravage the estate.

A blatant lost cause narrative at a time when such things were all the rage, the film was still fairly popular despite the more unusual elements, though not so popular as The Birth of a Nation would have been. Still, just as with that film this one would find an audience, inspire them to say silly words and wear strange costumes and do questionable things. This film would be directly linked to the rebirth of the Knights of the Golden Circle. A smaller organization than the KKK, the KGC catered to a much more elite clientele, serving as something of an extremely classist, somewhat less racist fraternal organization, at least until the onset of the Cultural Revolutions in the Carnaran League.

The Futurists sought to bring every part of society kicking and screaming into the brave new world, and culture was no exception. Crusades against museums and other forms of culture would see concerned art patrons (and no few profiteers), smuggle art and antiquities to wherever they could. Although the Soviet sphere would receive its share, American museums and collections would grow far richer from the slaughter of Europe's history, with several Knights growing even wealthier as a result of the illicit trade. Now flush with spending money, the KGC sought to put it to use.

Having spent years building up their network of political influence, the Circle had little problem advancing their chosen policies into law. Under their influence, military operations throughout Latin America entered a more intense phase to secure concessions for Circle-aligned businesses, and the efforts to "improve" the American economy through deregulation of finance and labor would ultimately reap the whirlwind with the Panic of 1920. Although the Circle's political allies would argue that the Panic was ultimately rooted in the policies of Woodrow Wilson's single term, that wouldn't assuage public outrage, with President Hughes losing his bid for re-election in a landslide. The people were angry, and found an outlet in the form of a new organization decrying corrupt politicians, entrenched wealth, and profiteering foreign interventionism. The Silver Legion had arrived.

Inspired by the works of Edward Bellamy and using his own economic theories as a basis, Thorstein Veblen would found the Silver Legion in 1921 as a mass movement intended to correct the excesses he deemed to be at the heart of the the Panic. Believing that the chief cause of the nation's woes was the overreach of the shortsighted moneyed interest at home and abroad the Legion advocated that the day to day running of the nation be done by a technically literate bureaucracy operating in the public interest, rather than the interests of the the capital class.

The USSR had been watching the tensions in the US for some time, with some in the government even hoping that the formation of the Silver Legion was a sign that America could be coaxed along the path of world revolution. Veblen and the movement he helped to mold were having none of it, denouncing the Soviet government as just another clique using the nation for their own ends. In a letter to Trotsky, Communist Party Executive Secretary C.E. Ruthenberg summed it up best:

"I fear this nation will never answer the call of the international proletariat, that political and social conditions here are made so different from Europe that we may have diverged from our brothers and sisters permanently. If the passions gripping the American people are avowedly not Marxist it can't be said that they are a spearhead for the uncultured Futurists either. Rather, this country is now in the grips of Technocracy, divided into two strains so distinct from one another that they cannot help but look upon the other in disgust. It is my hope that I am wrong, and that my countrymen will come to feel as I do, and stop this madness..."

He would be wrong, of course, but the term stuck. According to his analysis, the two forces gripping American society were divided into two schools he dubbed Liberation (KGC) and Continental (Legion) Technocracy. Despite virulent differences, he argued that the two movements were more similar than they would care to admit. Ideological cross-pollination would ultimately see pragmatic reforms in both movements, ironically making Ruthenberg's pronouncements truer in hindsight than they were when he wrote them.

• Both movements valued autarky, seeking to create sustainable economic and social units that later theorists would call technates. For the Liberators that took the form of an undoubtedly racialist streak of foreign intervention, often backed by military force. The Continentalists decried such a naked profit motive, relying more on soft power to spread influence and and bring neighbor nations into a mutually beneficial alliances.
• Both movements were inherently oligarchic, supporting the leadership of a small governing group of experts, although what that meant in practice depended on who you were talking to. Although neither wished to do away with democracy, it was thought that unchecked mob rule would lead to ruin. The extent of the franchise and the level of public participation would be hotly debated within both movements.
• Both movements valued technological progress and social reform, although in different ways and for different reasons. For example, Liberators pursued automation to improve efficiency and productivity, and supported prohibition (among other things). Continentalists sought to ease the burden of work through technology, and pushed back against what they decried as attempts to pacify the lives of the working class.

Although both parties contained wings of each movement, ideological sorting, accelerated by the American response to the Second Warring States Period and the hellscape unfolding in Europe, would see the American party system diverge as old coalitions cracked under the pressure.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Of all the states that directly played a part in the Second Warring States Period, the role of what would later be termed the "Sinkiang Free State" was the most unusual, partly because it was never called that at the time. Although the Free State spent a large part of the conflict as an independent unit, it never made a legal claim to be a separate entity, acting (at the highest levels, at least) as a loyal province separated from the Republic government by unfortunate circumstances. This suited the inhabitants just fine, as their de facto independence allowed them to push policies they preferred without fear of undue interference from a central government that had grown concerned with ideologically subversive elements in the lead up to the conflict.

The divergence of Sinkiang would ultimately be rooted in the central government's own Confucian Republican reforms. A major policy advocated by Nanjing was the improvement of education and industrial development as a means of making the nation strong enough to stand against the Great Powers as an equal. The United States was an avid supporter of these reforms, with optimists viewing them as steps that would create a robust democracy and civic culture. Many cynics (especially those among the Golden Circle) also supported these reforms as a means of keeping the immensely valuable Chinese market open to their business interests. While Manchuria had a particularly negative experience with these centralized internal improvement measures, Sinkiang took to them remarkably well, doubtless due to the influence of their governor.

Originally appointed to the province by the Qing, Yang Zengxin was an oddity in the Early Republican Period as the only prominent royalist governor, taking the mantle when the previous Qing governor of the province fled in the face of the Xinhai Revolution. Rather than flee to exile, Yang acquired the support of local religious leaders, crushing the revolutionaries with a force of Muslim Hui soldiers before turning over Sinkiang to Yuan Shikai. OTL, he remained a monarchist, supporting Yuan's ill-fated attempt to become emperor. TTL, things play out rather differently. With Yuan forced to retire in disgrace as a result of what came to be called the Ōkuma Affair, Yang came to question his prior beliefs. He saw Japan exerting its influence in Manchuria, and heard the horror stories pouring out of the coalescing White Khanate. In order to safeguard the region and preserve his own base of power he threw himself eagerly into the Nanjing government's modernization plans, separately inviting in American advisors (by the early 1920s of the much more amenable Continental School of Technocracy) to build upon his modernization agenda.

Although Nanjing would have preferred to strip him of his army, he eloquently made the case that, with the Khanate sharing a border and with the constant problem of Communist agents and more pedestrian banditry throughout China as a whole, the only sensible way to prevent the nation from losing Sinkiang would be to garrison it. The region was simply too large, however, and large numbers of ethnically Han troops would outrage the populace. Really, Yang argued, a reformed and restructured indigenous military would be the only possible solution. Yang's focus was not merely on defense, however. His position relied on the careful balancing of different ethnic and religious groups, and he made liberal use of funding for education and internal improvements to get local power brokers on side while fostering a regional culture highly focused on scientific inquiry and industrial development. Religious authorities argued that this was a continuation of a proud Muslim tradition, and so the populace eagerly went along with these plans to transform Sinkiang into a wellspring of modernization. When Manchuria seceded in 1925, he immediately voiced support for Nanjing, transitioning Sinkiang's new factories to armament production to support the Republican government.

The province was a well oiled machine, and while the fall of the Khanate was greeted with much public enthusiasm, dissenting voices driven out of the Mongolian Populist Party convinced Yang that the threat of Mongolian expansionism could not be ignored. He would be proven correct in 1930, with the beginning of the March to the South. The strategy of the belligerent states was a fairly simple one: Backed by what forces the Soviets could spare for the east, Mongolia would drive into the heart of China while Manchuria, supported by the Japanese Army and Navy would focus on the nation's eastern coast. The communist exiles and Qing remnant would both be avenged, and, the thinking went, separating the Nanjing government from Sinkiang's industrial production would shatter the Republic's ability to regain it's footing. The coastal campaign met with phenomenal early success, with the Republican government forced to flee in the face of the Razing of Nanjing. That would remain the most successful front for Manchuria until the arrival of the Bellamy Nationalist Volunteer Brigades, but Mongolia was having a far harder time of it, being effectively met at every turn by the Sinkiang Model Army.

Contrary to Soviet and Japanese predictions, isolating Sinkiang had not destabilized the region enough to make it vulnerable to Mongolian invasion. In point of fact, although the region had always towed the Nanjing party line it had been essentially independent under Yang's leadership for over two decades, and if the populace had accepted the facade of Republican control, there was no way they were going to just roll over and allow the Juzi to raise their children into loyal Populists.

Historians would later dub the period between the Mongolian invasion and the reunification of the Second Republic the Free State Period, and although Yang's government would continue to publicly adhere to the tenets of Confucian Republicanism, it is abundantly clear that he was actually engaged in a far more interesting project, one he simply called "a Great Leap Forward". Though largely informed by Continental Technocracy in the pursuit of regional autarky in the face of Sinkiang's newfound isolation, it also showed distinct influences from those Populists driven out by the Juzi, notably in the focus on state consequentialism and minimalism, although the latter could be excused in the moment as a wartime necessity. As Sinkiang stabilized, in fact, the region would see a surge in Islamic-influenced modern art, which to this day offers a valuable insight into the unique culture that grew up in the Free State during the period.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Although not technically a party to the Second Warring States period, the situation in Tibet during what was referred to at the time as "the Conflagration" is often seen with the benefit of hindsight as a prelude to the events that would shape the region throughout the first half of the century. This is somewhat similar to Bleeding Kansas, which would presage the American Civil War, and the Spanish Civil War, in which the proxy conflict between the League-backed Republicans and the Soviet-sponsored Reactionaries would serve as a miniature of the coming Second Great War. The Conflagration would be an intense and multisided conflict, and, like the later events in the ROC, would result in the coalescence of a new guiding ideology, in this particular instance Maoism.

Originally a Qing protectorate, Tibet would seize on the collapse of the empire in the Xinhai Revolution as an opportunity to achieve long-sought independence. Though opposed in this endeavor by the new Republic, it had taken the new regime too long to mobilize, allowing British "trade agents" to support the Tibetan independence with an influx of "volunteers" from the British mission in India. Operating as a largely feudal theocracy would naturally lead to resentment among sectors of the population, but the Tibetan army during this early period (with support and training by these "volunteers") would prove largely capable of suppressing attempted revolts. As the structure of global alliances began to change, however, the capability of the army to maintain control would begin to steadily erode.

Before he rose to seize control of the Soviet system, the man who would come to call himself the Vozhd had been enduring what amounted to an exile. Too competent to be cast aside, in 1919 he had been sent south to attempt to foment Communist sympathies in India. The thinking went that success would in turn distract the British Empire, and, if they succeeded in killing him, what would be the loss? Celebrating rather than wallowing in his de facto autonomy of action, the Vozhd would use his adventures in India as a testing ground for his theories on National Socialism, ironically allowing him to introduce the ideology almost fully formed by 1924. Although incredibly conservative by the changing standards of the time, this would in turn push the British into an alliance of convenience with the growing Futurist powers, oddly mirroring the later position of Japan relative to the Soviet Union. Sheer proximity would see the introduction of early National Socialism and Futurist currents into the resistance groups seeking to topple the Tibetan theocracy. Not to be outdone, the Nanjing government would also begin sponsoring Confucian Republican elements in what it continued to claim was an illegitimate wayward territory. It was as an advisor to one of these Conrep groups that Mao Zedong would first enter Tibet.

An enthusiastic supporter of the Xinhai Revolution, Mao had furthered his studies in the aftermath, becoming an avid Marxist. Engaged to marry the daughter of his favorite professor, he was badly shaken in 1920 with the death of his fiance in an automobile accident, sending him into a deep depression that would ultimately change him to his core. It is a frequent exercise of contrafactual theorizing what could have happened to him and to the nation had he remained a Marxist, but it was not to be. After what his contemporaries would later describe as "an almost religious episode", Mao would finally emerge from his depression.

Though still concerned with the plight of the proletariat and peasant classes in China, he had grown wary of what he perceived as Soviet authoritarianism, which he believed would have a negative impact on the newly formed Chinese Communist Party. The fact that his concerns would be validated by the later Mongolian Populists was of little comfort at the time, of course, given the draconian measures the Republican government was taking to suppress them. Filled with a newfound but bone-deep anti-authoritarianism, Mao would begin studying Western modes of political thought, along with such Chinese elements as Taoism and the historical Naturalist School, such syncretism being much in fashion in China and its environs at the time. Greatly moved by the brutality of the Conflagration and hoping to strike a victory for the downtrodden, the man later known as Brother Mao would ultimately travel to Tibet in the hopes of making a difference. And not a moment too soon.

The Tibetan army was having a rough go of it. By 1923, there was a fractious web of revolt spreading through the country. If there was any good news to be had, it was this: the opposition was divided enough to make overpowering the government in Lhasa impossible, and with the National-Constitutional Front busy purging the CCP from the country, their support rebels within Tibet had waned. Seeking an opportunity, Mao requested to travel to Tibet to advise what remained of the Republic-backed rebel faction, a request swiftly granted given his public denouncing of the CCP at its inception. He would find a nation torn asunder, split between a half dozen factions all involved just as much in fighting each other as they were in fighting the Lhasa government. It was in this environment that Mao would distinguish himself, with a small string of noticeable victories to his credit and a commitment to living and working in the same conditions as his troops (because only rats grow fat in wars) endearing him to his men early on, making them receptive to his political theories.

Inspired by currents of Futurism, Socialism and Technocracy, Maoism is best explained using a reference to the Naturalist School that Mao had studied, using a principle he called "the Monad and the Pentagram". The Monad or Yin-Yang was used as a metaphor for production and consumption, or for labor and capital, or for public and private enterprise depending on context, and was meant to symbolize the natural equilibrium that would (or ideally should) exist between each pair of forces. His distaste for authoritarianism called for him to endorse a mixed economic system, under the theory that excessive state control would lead to corruption, while the complete absence of the state would lead to exploitation. The ideal state, by his thinking, would give people a broad latitude to live their lives, interfering only when necessary to prevent one side of the social equation from becoming imbalanced. This is especially clear when one looks at the Pentagram, which he used to represent his views on class.

Inspired by the traditional Four Occupations of East Asian thought and filtered through the concept of the Wuxing, the Pentagram was used by Mao to express his belief in syndicalist cooperation between the social classes, all collaborating to contribute to the ideal state and provide balance to one another.

• Wood was used to symbolize the peasant class, as it was their labor that formed the basis of national growth and vitality.
• Fire represented the proletariat, with the energy of this class transforming and refining the raw products of the peasantry to better serve the nation.
• Earth symbolized the petite bourgeoisie of the middle classes whose actions (as an intermediate class between the proletariat and the haute bourgeoisie) made business and government more efficient and theoretically responsive to local needs and opportunities.
• Metal was used to represent the haute bourgeoisie, who acted at scale to collect the fruits of the labor of the other social classes and enabled the distribution of the same. In the ideal state, moderate regulation would prevent this group from overwhelming the others.
• There were several groups that went unincluded by the traditional four occupations, and so Mao would use water to represent one such group, the clergy, meant to encourage contemplation and harmony between factions and with nature and society more generally.

By Mao's estimation, the problem in Tibet was two-fold. First and foremost, the oppressive nature of the state and the class system it enforced was unnatural, stifling human freedom and preventing people from living in equilibrium with themselves and with each other. Second, although he valued the clergy as a necessary institution, the theocratic nature of Tibet during the Conflagration distorted the balance between social classes too far in one direction. Just as a nation ruled by solely by capitalists or by laborers would fail, so too would one ruled by priests.

Having inspired his troops with his leadership skills as well as his ideas, Mao and his renamed Natural Democracy Faction would gather converts as he set about building a broad coalition between fractious rebel groups. Reassuring all parties that he "d[id] not seek to be a warlord, but merely your steadfast brother in this worthy struggle", forming alliances was made easier partially by the syncretic and adoptive nature of his ideology but primarily by the arrival of Death Buddhism to Tibet.

With the fall of the White Khanate in 1925, the survivors of the regime were left with a series of bad options. Remaining in Mongolia to face Populist reprisals was a nonstarter. They had also refused the Vozhd's offer of amnesty and a return home once, and it would not be offered again. That left only one option. With the Nanjing government distracted by the secession of Manchuria and with the interior of the country in a state of disarray, an opportunity had presented itself. It would be this wave of unorthodox converts to Buddhism that would march south to avail themselves of the Lhasa regime, introducing Zen Nihilism into the Tibetan army. A distorted strain of Vajrayana Buddhism developed by Ungern-Sternberg, the White Khan himself, the primary distinction of Zen Nihilism was that the execution of those living outside the bounds of "correct behavior" would prevent them from further accumulating bad karma, and thus "save" them in a roundabout way.

While a stable society would have denounced such madness, the Lhasa regime was growing increasingly desperate as Mao and his Natural Democrats began to unify the remaining rebel elements under their banner. With Soviet-backed unrest expanding in India having drawn away the trade agents and British military advisors, a theological justification for further brutalizing subversives, aided and abetted by zealous Khanate irregulars, began to grow more and more appealing to the overstretched army. As in Mongolia, however, this would backfire by driving more people to Mao's side, until the government could only maintain effective control around Lhasa itself. Even this would falter by 1928 with the death of the Dalai Lama.

Victorious after a long and bloody struggle, the rebels were faced with the most important question for any war: what would happen next? Brother Mao, serving only in an advisory role per his own insistence, devoted himself wholeheartedly to preventing his unlikely coalition from shattering in the aftermath, taking pains to ensure that all the myriad groups could live and work together. Using his natural charisma to his advantage, he was able to convince a critical mass of the population that the only productive way forward was to set aside old animosities, and the Natural Democracy of Tibet would be declared in short order. The light touch would prove to work wonders, keeping the people united in the face of a botched invasion by Mongolia and ultimately going on to inspire the creation of the Second Republic.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Historians in the immediate aftermath of the Second Great War would make repeated note of the unsettling similarities between the two decisive armed conflicts of the early 20th century. For example, both began with the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian, hope for a speedy resolution swiftly faded in the face of a mechanized and bloody stalemate, and the US was widely perceived to have entered the war late and used its relative strength to moralize. The end of both wars would also see major changes to the European colonial empires. This simple analysis is somewhat undone when one looks at the facts, and has since been discarded by serious historians as nothing more than a series of loose coincidences. For example:

1. The assassination of the Prime Minister of Austria-Hungary was a false flag to create a pretense for a joint German/Polish invasion of the country, rather than an organic terrorist attack.
2. Although territorial change could be measured in a few miles for vast stretches of time, this was a simplistic mask overlaying a nebulous meatgrinder of radical ideological groups fighting house to house rather than the more conventional trench lines that characterized the First Great War.
3. Although the US did join the Atlantropan Theater relatively late with its Liberia campaign, this overlooks the Technocratic consolidation in South America and the robust countering of Japan in the Second Warring States Period.
4. The First Great War resulted in colonial transfers between the Great Powers, while the Second Great War led to ideologically-motivated decentralization or decolonization of the European colonial empires.

Quickly escalating from what amounted to a Prussian invasion of Austria-Hungary, the Second Great War would be characterized as an entangled conflict in three military theaters.

• The Atlantropan Theater would see direct military action in Europe between the Carnaran League (with the big three of Italy, France and Spain, plus an assortment of smaller lesser members in the Balkans and British aerial support) against the Soviet juggernaut acting to support its allies Germany and Poland. At the same time, the Soviets were also diverting resources in an attempt to undermine the League's colonies through the arming and sponsoring of National Socialist groups in Africa and most prominently India. The latter front would absorb most of the attention of the British military, and would serve as a critical drain on the Soviet war machine.
• The Pacific Theater (technically the first, having begun in 1925 with the start of the Second Warring States Period) was primarily the province of Soviet ally Japan, which sought to meddle in the SWSP while simultaneously attempting to absorb European colonies into its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Met with notable early success, the tide would turn through a combination of factors. First, Futurist nationalist groups (seeing Japan as a Soviet-aligned colonizer) would erupt throughout Indochina, creating a horrendously costly quagmire for the Empire. Second, having been heavily reinforced before the outbreak of the war (based on both Liberation and Continental principles), the Philippines had been successfully garrisoned to fight off a series of attempted Japanese invasions, serving as a dagger aimed at the Japanese supply lines.
• The unofficial American Theater would not feature military actions from the League or the Soviets, and consisted primarily of the US expanding its influence through the sponsoring of Technocratic movements in Latin America, the creation of the Organization of American States, and the crushing of Futurist and National Socialist groups active in the Americas. This consolidation of control would leave the US the strongest superpower in the immediate postwar period.

Lasting from 1930 to 1936, the largest factor contributing to the end of the war would ultimately boil down to crushing exhaustion. All the major powers had extended themselves too far through the sponsoring of proxy factions and the opening of several extraneous fronts, with the steady diversion of resources to these groups (combined with multiple uses of biological and chemical weaponry throughout) ultimately destabilizing the Great Powers enough to make suing for peace the only pragmatic choice in the face of growing popular discontent and a looming public health nightmare. The US is widely considered to have "won" the war, primarily because it entered the war late enough to strike the killing blow and had no WMDs used on its core territory.

Firmly interventionist in the wake of the conflict, the American people became convinced that the lack of US oversight had contributed to the war. This would give President La Guardia the mandate to finally bring the US into the League of Nations on the heels of victory, ironically over the virulent opposition of Henry Ford and the Democrats. After his 1936 reelection (largely seen to have consolidated the Republicans into a Continental faction and the Democrats into a Liberation one), he was also further able to force through a series of structural changes to the League that would preserve US authority for another thirty years in the face of seething Carnaran and Soviet objections. This hegemony wouldn't ultimately last, but such things never do.

 

[Born in the USSA]

In the grips of a ten year civil war, the Republic of China ultimately owed its survival to the steadfast support of the United States. The participation of the Bellamy Nationalist Volunteer Brigades had reinforced the overstretched Chinese troops at the lowest ebb of the war after the Razing of Nanjing, and the election of President La Guardia in 1932 would see a swift expansion of direct military conflict in the Pacific Theater beyond the Philippines. A naval campaign against the Japanese supply lines into Indochina and the Nusantara would further tax the overstretched Home Islands, while an inability to replace lost personnel would render Japan vulnerable to an American blockade.

Following an invasion of Taiwan, the US would make landfall in southern China and would immediately begin a surge to topple the Manchurian regime. With the Empire's Japanese advisors pulled back to maintain a hold on Korea, the nation would fall to the joint ROC-American invasion after flight of Emperor Puyi and the execution of the Director in an attempted coup. With the heart of secession under occupation all eyes turned to Mongolia.

The critical problem facing the Mongolian People's Republic could ultimately be traced directly to the Vozhd. Having had his earliest successes in India before seizing control of the Soviet apparatus of state, the Vozhd was irrationally focused on ensuring the success of National Socialism in the subcontinent, ultimately to the neglect of the struggling Populists. Having been repulsed at the border of Tibet, the expeditionary force waging the March to the South became vulnerable to an attack by the Sinkiang Free State on one side and the Chinese army under celebrated general Yan Xishan on the other. Being forced north for the second time would be an unrecoverable blow to the Juzi's regime, and he would take his own life as new Allied Army reached the outskirts of his capital at Urga.

Having snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, the Republic of China was in a position very similar to the Great Powers, overstretched and beset with crippling internal problems. Although the Nationalists had remained the dominant faction in the National-Constitutional Front throughout the Second Warring States period, cracks were beginning to show in this facade as a result of corruption and repression in the domestic arena and what was broadly considered poor prosecution of the war. At American insistence the wartime suspension of civil liberties under President Chiang Kai-Shek would be lifted, to be followed by the nation's first free election since before the death of Sun Yat-Sen.

Seeing an opportunity to tip the balance back in their favor the Constitutional Party would draft Yan as its presidential candidate. He would ultimately use the anemic platform of the party to his advantage, molding it in his image in the wake of his resounding victory at the polls. With a robust popular mandate Yan would hold the Beijing Summit in August of 1936, inviting not only the elderly Yang Zengxin and the still officially advisory Mao Zedong but also the leaders of the Populist and Legalist remnants forced underground by the occupation. Acknowledging the role of the Chinese government in marginalizing the Manchurians and persecuting the CCP in the lead up to the start of the conflict but also refusing to sacrifice hard-fought gains, Yan professed his hope to build an equitable future for all the ethnic and ideological groups in the Republic.

The month long conference would conclude with the creation of the Second Republic and the adoption of a new constitution intended to balance the fractionalizing forces unleashed by the Second Warring States period and based on the newly developed ideology of National Syncretism, also erroneously called Yan Xishan Thought. Combining the Four Principles of the Confucian Republican ideology, the Maoist conception of the Monad and the Pentagram, and a firm commitment to the early republican Five Races Under One Union ideal to serve as a foundation, the constitution of the Second Republic reversed the massive centralization that had occurred under President Chiang. Although the central government would weild authority from the rebuilt capital of New Nanjing (also called the District of Tian), considerable administrative power would be devolved to the five newly created Confederations, inspired by the model established in Sinkiang.

Based on the Tibetan model the new government would guarantee civil liberties, most prominently the freedom of political expression. Meanwhile, the cronyism and corruption that had motivated much of the initial Communist Party critiques of the system and allowed for a spectacular breakdown in the rule of law during the conflict would be remedied by the new government through reforms to the civil service and the elimination of the frequently abused patronage system, combined with serious reforms to the nation's social safety net and system of taxation.

With specific boons directly intended to secure buy in from the various factions and ethnic groups involved in the Second Warring States period the new constitution would be ratified on October 10, 1936, twenty-five years to the day from the start of the Xinhai Revolution. After over a decade of civil war that had left much of the nation in ruins and millions dead, the Second Republic allowed itself to once again hope for the future. The road back from the conflict would not be an easy one, particularly in the tense early decades of the Great Game, but by the waning days of the century China would recover, standing proudly among the Great Powers a free and prosperous nation, the promise of the First Republic finally fulfilled.

 

[Born in the USSA]

(OOC: I actually meant to write this one the other day but it slipped my mind, so I'm counting it. Who doesn't love alternate pop culture?)

In the Second Warring States timeline, as in our own, the division between literary genres as we would understand them was not yet fully developed for the first couple of decades. For example, although Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom stories were populated with aliens and set on another planet, John Carter first arrived on Mars through astral projection, a common mechanism in early science fantasy as seen in 1835's A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation, in the Year of Our Lord, 19-- or 1930's Last and First Men.

A perfect example of this blurring of modern genre lines would be A Voyage to Arcturus, published (both TTL and OTL) by David Lindsay in 1920. A strange gnostic odyssey on an alien planet combining space travel, bodily transfiguration and an exploration of philosophical themes, Arcturus would become wildly popular TTL, inspiring several sequels (collected into The Tormance Cycle) and eventually the creation of a new genre that was commonly seen to have restarted the Victorian wave of utopian/dystopian fiction that had faded with the advent of the Great War.

With a name inspired by the 1678 novel The Pilgrim's Progress and fueled by the extremely radical and ideological nature of governments relative to our timeline, the genre of Pilgrimage Fiction would consist of a wide range of allegories of varying quality published throughout the twentieth century and beyond intended to explore various ideologies either through rationalizing them through utopias or viciously attacking their antecedents as dystopias. In a way, this would mark a return of utopian/dystopian fiction to its roots. For example, Sojourn was little more than an incredibly racist attack on abolitionism and was considered one of the earliest of the modern dystopias*.

Although astral projection was not a widespread feature, the works most commonly attributed to the pilgrimage fiction genre would generally feature a blend of science fiction and fantasy tropes for a variety of reasons. In the Futurist sphere, a general focus on the future (duh) was tempered by an almost pathological mysticism that coursed through the movement. National Socialism, meanwhile, had done away with the strict atheism of the early Soviet Union and embrace religion and other "immaterial concerns" in order to win the support of more traditional elements. The US and other members of the OAS would obliterate the genre line entirely, treating all unexplainable elements of a pilgrimage story as merely a form of science that was sufficiently alien to the reader.

Pilgrimage fiction would become an incredibly influential genre, more often than not backed by enormous piles of government money. Even though the eventual collapse of the Berlin Pact and the Carnaran League would ultimately render the political impact of Futurist and National Socialist pilgrimage fiction promoted by those alliance structures irrelevant, it would still form a valuable source of insight into the hopes and fears of regimes and ideologies around the world.

*It also gave me serious BioShock vibes, as an aside. An ideological city falling apart because of its own contradictions, weird refined chemicals that alter human biology, a protagonist diametrically opposed to the regime that seeks to topple the social order, the works.

(OOC- To my mind, pilgrimage fiction is basically "What if all the popular books and movies were made like Atlas Shrugged, ie: polemics and jeremiads meant to beat you over the head with ideology?")