Zhao Ziyang, a former Communist Party politico, was elected in the 1989 Chinese elections to the office of President of the People's Republic of China. Having broken with the party during the period of Maoist rule, he became a major figure in the
Revolutionary Council of the Kuomintang, a major centre-left party in the
New China. His campaign policies promised primarily the "collaboration of China with the international community", "the upstep of Chinese investments and aid to third world countries in extreme need", and the "defense of Asia's independence from foreign aggression".
After his inauguration into office in February 1990, Zhao went on a tour of many nations with which China had major interests in. The first such nation was the
People's Republic of Korea. President Zhao met with President Park and the two discussed further cooperation, and the possibility of the PRK to enter the Beijing Pact. Zhao pledged a significant Chinese investment into Northern Korea, which was, even a decade later, playing catch-up to the South's prosperity. Park thanked Zhao for the investment proposal, and said that Korea thanked China for the long-term friendship, and affirmation to the principles of freedom and peace.
Behind closed doors, Park and Zhao discussed many issues; particularly relations with the State of Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and the relations between the two nations. Park expressed his happiness that the Chinese people had fostered a new democracy, and promised for closer cooperation with China for years to come. This also marked a close rapproachment between the PRK and the Beijing Pact, with the PRK heavily considering aligning as a partner of Beijing.
After departing Seoul, he traversed to Singapore to meet with Lee Kuan Yew, the leader and founder of the state. Lee Kuan Yew was much like Park; an insanely popular pseudo-authoritarian figure that had enough political legitimacy to choke any Western ideologue to death. Singapore and the People's Republic had significant cultural ties -- Singapore's native population being over three-quarters Chinese. China had significant interest in expanding her political influence into the Sinosphere outside of China proper, particularly now that she was capitalistic enough to appeal to other nations. In early 1991, the Chinese and Singapore agreed to a strong economic partnership; Singapore would benefit immensely from the agreement in the coming years, and China would expand her capitalistic umbrella.
In April 1991, Chairman Zhao flew west and met with the Soviet Union's leader, General Secretary Ryzhkov. The Soviet leader and China affirmed collaborative cooperation in economics. The Soviet Union remained, in all theoretical nature, a despotic communist state; but the powers of the CPSU were not as strong as they appeared; the slow transitition to a semi-democratic state reflected Russia's long history of "not-so-democratic" regimes. After returning to Beijing following the meeting with the Soviet leadership; an early crisis emerged in the Asian continent that would be something worrying in years to come.
On April 30, 1991, the Republic of India's government was overthrown by a populist military coup d'etat after the concurrent leadership was accused of "placating foreign influences". The opportunistic military cadres that seized power in the state immediately pushed to take "hard-line" stances against Chinese, Bangladeshi, American, Soviet and Pakistani influence; and abruptly declared their full isolation from the major power blocs; severing a long-standing influential relationship with Moscow. To compound this concerning development, the Pakistani regime collapsed less than two weeks later, but to a far more significant threat; Islamists. Right-wing Islamists, primarily from the tribal regions near the Afghanistani border, revolted and joined with several divisions of the Pakistani Armed Forces to overthrow the state and establish and Islamist regime. Many Pakistanis who would have been targeted by this Islamist regime, fled into Iran and Afghanistan, who accepted them en masse; hoping to avoid a humanitarian crisis as best as they could.
Relations on the subcontinent rapidly decayed as both India and Pakistan began to threaten each other with war; however, Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons -- India did. After a number of skirmishes along the border and in Kashmir, a tenative peace agreement was reached in November 1991, ending the chaos for now; allowing both the Islamist Caliphate of Pakistan and the Indian junta to consolidate their power. The United States smarted at losing a major ally in the subcontinent, and all of her military hardware that had been in the nation serving as a reinforcement for Pakistan, was withdrawn into Iran, another major US ally in the Middle East. Similarly, any and all Soviet hardware was withdrawn and given off to Afghanistan to "fortify their borders". The leftist regime in Afghanistan accepted the Soviet (and later American) offers of assistance in battling any Islamist terrorists.
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The most notable event of 1992 was the United States presidential election. Alexander Haig sought to pursue a third term; something that was not often done, and hadn't been done since Franklin Roosevelt nearly fifty years prior. Haig's administration had been popular enough to gain grand bipartisan support from many Democrats, but such a move was considered "rather tasteless"; the last President who really had any ambition for a third term was Terry Sanford, who had declined a third term at the 1984 Democratic Convention. In any case, Haig sailed through the Republican nomination process, and came face to face with his Democratic candidate in a number of high-profile debates. The Democratic rival to him was John Conyers, a Representative from Michigan, and the leader of the House Government Oversight Committee. John Conyers marked the first African-American presidential candidate to take the reigns; the ticket was made even more revolutionary by the choice of Vice President -- Bernard Sanders, one of the U.S. Representatives from Vermont. Sanders was an Independent, but aligned with the large leftist Democratic caucus which dominated the party.
The Conyers/Sanders ticket was intensely progressive, and challenged Haig's traditional moderate standpoints. Haig canvassed a new candidate for 1992; dropping his incumbent Vice President, Malcolm Wilson, the former Governor of New York during the 1970s. Vice President Wilson had not supported the third-term for Haig, wanting to run for the office himself, and had thusly refused to participate in the third term wholesale. Haig invited a noted liberal Republican to serve as his Vice President -- Elizabeth Warren became the Republican Party's first female Vice Presidential candidate, and with it, an immense amount of popularity emerged in her favor. This campaign was hard-fought, with the Democrats not conceding a single inch to the Republicans -- many GOP political operatives had suggested targeting the ethnicity and religion of the candidates, but President Haig had refused to "stoop to such awful behavior". American political debates and political discourse had remained much mature through the years, as many people sought to prove that America was *just that much better* at the whole freedom game than the Soviets and Chinese.
In November 1992, the results came in, and it was an air-tight race; aided primarily by "Free Will" party; a party primarily staffed by an odd-combination of left-wing and right-wing people who had a common idea -- the overbearance of government was not to be tolerated. This party had appeared in races before, but hadn't made any electoral votes. In this election, the Party was sufficiently alienated from Haig's third-term, and the Democratic ticket, and gained enough support in a few states to win electoral votes. The party only won in Alaska, Nevada, Oregon and New Hampshire, but it was enough to throw the election into chaos.
United States presidential election, 1992
John Conyers (D-MI) / Bernard Sanders (D-VT) - 260 Electoral Votes
Alexander Haig (R-PA) / Elizabeth Warren (R-MA) - 260 Electoral Votes
Carl Richards (F-AK) / James Devain (F-OR) - 18 Electoral Votes
To compound and make the election worse; Less than twenty minutes after the last polls closed for the election, President Haig collapsed in the Residence and suffered a major heart attack -- President Haig had numerous heart problems, which had come up in both 84 and 88, and had been dismissed as "irrelevant" by many. However, this was no joke, and the President was taken to George Washington Hospital for further checks. The following day's news was dominated by the President's heart attack, and the results of the Presidential election -- Richards/Devain had made it a deadlock, which would therefore be sent over to Congress. The chaotic situation was just not fun for anybody involved. At 9:18AM on November 4th, 1992; Vice President Wilson and the Cabinet invoked the 24th Amendment and formally named Wilson as the "Acting President of the United States" while Haig remained in a coma.
It was confirmed three days later that the United States Congress had chosen a new President -- Conyers and Sanders were to be given the victory of the election, and they were to be sworn in on January 20th, as was standard. President Haig's complicated situation deteriorated, and he remained in a coma through out the "lame duck" period between November 1992 and January 1993. Haig would later be taken off of life support in April 1994, after the last hope for his recovery went beyond the veil. The President offered condolences to the Acting President and the President as well in both his inauguration speech, and in a private letter to Haig's family written after his death.
The United States and Soviet Union had long-since stopped being enemies and more frenemies; however, they remained fiercely alert and prodded each other's defenses constantly. In 1994, a Soviet submarine was seen by the US Navy in United States' waters off the Atlantic coast. While it was kept under wraps and out of the public press on both sides; the President and General Secretary held a terse and brief conversation. Some time later, an American submarine formation narrowly escaped being sunk by Soviets off the Baltic Sea. Both parties acknowledged that this kept each other on their toes, and was more beneficial than not; and was primarily for show and bravado, not for threatening purposes.
China, the Soviet Union, and the United States all became heavily concerned with primary problem zones in the world -- one major issue that China was involved in was the fact that Pakistan and India continued to stare each other down despite the 1992 Peace Accords. In 1994, the Pakistanis tested their first nuclear device, triggering a minor crisis before China's diplomatic corps managed to calm down both sides before they escalated too far. Another concern to all three powers was, well, the continued Apartheid state, and the militant South African-lead community of states. South Africa was ever fiercely continuing it's apartheid policies, and Nelson Mandela, one of the leading anti-apartheid figures, had been found dead in his jailcell in early 1993 without much explanation; which had heavily inflamed the situation in the apartheid state; leading to numerous race riots in Natal and Oranje. South Africa, deteriorating away from democracy and towards dictatorship, violently shutdown the riots and made clear that it would not tolerate foreign nations influencing her affairs. In January 1994, the Chinese, Soviet and American leadership held a public summit with regards to South Africa in Shanghai; and declared the need to "see the end of apartheid by all means necessary."
The Republic of Rhodesia, another state involved in South Africa's bloc of "pro-apartheid nations" broke away from South Africa's influence in March. It had no desire to continue it's current relationship, particularly as it had pushed forward a growing fraternity between it's black and white populations, avoiding a costly and dangerous war. South Africa and her puppet state Botswana launched a military invasion of Rhodesia two weeks after the President of Rhodesia violently decried South Africa's "psuedo-fascist ideology"; and fighting intensified rapidly. This event pushed the three major powers into action.
The Soviet Union, orchestrating influence through the Communist-dominated states of Mozambique and Angola, convinced them to back Rhodesia's bid and finally "shatter the apartheid state". The United States utilized CIA operations to damage the South African war effort, primarily by methods of sabotage and eliminating targets in the South African armed forces. China's role in the conflict was primarily bankrolling the Rhodesians. Chinese money had been trickling into Africa since the start of the Deng administration, and would continue regardless of the situation at hand. Many African states were more inclined to intervene with Chinese money being offered to defend Rhodesia and break South Africa.
To make matters more complicated for the Three Power intervention in Africa. Two months after the start of the South African War, the growing strife in East Africa boiled over. Elements of the Rwandan Army and the Interahamwe assassinated President Juvenal Habyarimana and the President of Burundi by blowing his plane down in Kigali with an anti-aircraft weapon. The death of the President triggered the Interahamwe to take to the streets and start slaughtering members of the Tutsi minority; who were primarily blamed for the partisan war against the Communistic "Rwandan Liberation Front"; bankrolled primarily by the Chinese. Leaders of the new Interahamwe caretaker regime permitted the militia to start slaughtering people indiscriminately.
The Chinese didn't take it very lightly. Having already invested heavily in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda itself, the Chinese deployed peacekeepers to Rwanda and stationed them in places where violence had yet to overwhelm the situation. China's peacekeepers primarily held onto areas in Kigali proper and the countryside. The Milles Collines hotel was one of the many places China stationed troops at to protect the Hutu and Tutsis targeted by the genocide. China doubled the number of peacekeepers (and started referring to them as "peacemakers" in official press releases) after an attack on the hotel by Interahamwe forces. China began to use her ties to Kenya and Uganda to station aircraft, and the PLAF began to run bombing raids on Interahamwe and Rwandan army positions. China's involvement here was far more intense than her involvement in the South African war, which was fought almost entirely as a proxy war.
The Rwandan regime collapsed and the Chinese soon advanced and installed a pro-Chinese government in Rwanda to ensure peace and prosperity. The Rwandan Genocide was far less severe than it could have been, and came to a bloody conclusion after three months, in July 1994. Paul Kagame, the new President of Rwanda, vowed to maintain peace and order in the aftermath. Chinese forces would remain stationed to Rwanda until 2000, when they were withdrawn due to awful circumstances much closer to home.
The South African war did not end as quickly, and lasted a very long time as a general grinding war between the anti-South African armies, and South Africa; it was expected that the war would go on for years to come.
In 1995, Chairman Zhao was elected to a second term; with little fanfare as the majority of China had been relatively happy with the first democratically elected Chairman's governance, particularly where the wars in Africa were concerned.
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China in relation to the growing technological revolutions in the United States and Soviet Union was relatively muted at first. The Americans were always on edge with the latest and greatest technologies. Soviet Union came shortly behind with their own domestic developments, and China with theirs thirdly. During the early 90s, the computer scene in the United States primarily saw a massive competition for users between the two major fronts -- the Apple Macintosh base, and the IBM-Microsoft joint base, of DOS and Operating System/2. IBM withdrew from the OS/2 project in 1993 after feeling that personal computers no longer held benefit to them, and pursued enterprise-level computing hardware.
Microsoft assumed total control of the Operating System/2 (OS/2) project, and piloted it as a competitive piece with Apple. In the first half of the 1990s, Apple maintained a heated majority over the Microsoft operating systems; primarily because of the ease of use, power and speed of the m68k processor, and the general "common sense" design of the Apple line.
In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union was playing a rather strong game of "catch-up". Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple Inc. before his firing in 1985, had gone off to form a business in the Soviet Union building computers. The NeXT Corporation was established in 1987 by Steve Jobs and three dozen engineers from both Soviet enterprises, and Apple itself. Jobs brought with him much of the same ideas he had formulated at Apple, but lacked the particulars of access to the major chipsets from Motorola (68000) and Intel (80386). With cooperation from major Soviet enterprises which were continuing their devolution from state ownership, the NeXT Corporation formed an alliance with the "Silicon Engineering Cooperative" (SEC) in 1988, and produced Russia's first major 16-bit personal computer (minor firms had been working on 8-bit machines since the late 70s). The NeXTStation was demonstrated for the Russian people as a "low-cost step into a revolutionary future", with advertising playing up the use in enterprises, and in education, and even at home to manage many things.
The Soviet public found great interest in this new original design. The machine carried the Baikal-66 processor; a 66MHz processor loosely-based on the m68k processors found in Macintosh computers. The release of the computer and the sudden creation overnight of a Soviet computer industry triggered the flocking of dozens of young Soviets to developing computer software. The operating system of the NeXTStation, NeXT-OS was based loosely on the UNIX operating system, which had been developed in the United States during the late 1960s.
In the first half of the 1990s, NeXT expanded her repetoir and popularity immensely as foreign buyers began to see interest in the NeXT computer; many Apple fans in the United States imported these computers in from the Soviet Union with "English customizations" to see what the great Steve Jobs had done in the backwards Communist East. The results were quite impressive. As well, China was touched as well by it, and sought to jumpstart the computer revolution in their own borders.
They found a great benefit in what would come. In 1988, the computer world was shocked raw when a major Chinese firm, called "Advanced Technologies" purchased the Commodore International corporation; creators of the popular (to Europeans and many Americans) Amiga computer line. Advanced Technologies adopted the Commodore-Amiga brand-name, and brought the entire corporate leadership, engineering staff and development staff from their stations in the United States and Europe, to China.
In the same year, Amiga released the Amiga 2500, a slightly modified version that included signficant upgrades. The Amiga 2500 rapidly took hold in China as the "be all, end all" computer. To piggyback off of this popularity, Apple released a "Macintosh card" for the Amiga 2500, which would run Apple software and operating systems along-side the default AmigaOS. For the next several years, China rapidly entered a new state of modernization at the hands of the personal computer, which delighted China's intellectuals, and the political leadership. The computer revolution was blossoming immensely, and looked to have no end.
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In 1996, President Conyers was elected to a second term as President of the United States -- without much fanfare, very much unlike the previous one. China's leadership witnessed continued blossoming of economic and political strength of China, with many beginning to see China as the "third superpower", particularly after TIME Magazine ran a serious article on the "development of China in the last half-century", going from a wrecked and shattered nation, to one of the most powerful on Earth. The release of the Amiga 5K was hailed as a pinnacle of Chinese cooperation with foreign corporations to better the people's livelihood.
1997 marked the end of the South African war, without the results intended -- South Africa maintained itself, only barely, primarily isolated to the Cape itself and the "Boer-majority" regions. Most of the South African interior was lost to the state as their war-effort collapsed and apartheid with it. KwaZulu-Natal, Oranje, Transvaal were all carved out as independent states, bringing to an end, South Africa's desires for hegemony in the Southern regions of Africa. This conflict marked the beginning of a "rather pointed hope for bettermend of mankind". However, things wouldn't last forever.
While 1998 was mostly silent, 1999 would be a year that no man, woman or child would ever forget...