Nation Building Precipice of War

AaronMk · Aug 11, 2024

“This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time.”

Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel

“The German bourgeoisie heads one group of belligerent nations. It is deluding the working class and the laboring masses by asserting that it is waging war in defense of the fatherland, freedom, and civilization, for the liberation of the peoples oppressed by tsardom, for the destruction of reactionary tsardom. In reality, whatever the outcome of the war may be, this bourgeoisie will, together with the Junkers, exert every effort to support the tsarist monarchy against a revolution in Russia.”

Vladimir Lenin, The War and Russian Social Democracy

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Europe woke in 1920 from its delirium.Thrown into the dramatic fits of war over the course of six years. It had bled the flower of its youth. Gun smoke evaporating into the skies, they came out of their opium haze of violence. But bad dreams do not leave explosive seeds. Bad dreams do not leave an emptiness in the heart as does war. The men of Europe and the world had eaten the fruit of a more violent lotus than the crew of Ulysses'. Men, aged in generations by years in the trench stirred out from propaganda dreams to undertake the calamitous reality of postwar. Generations passed in a space of a year. Fresh boys turned into hard cynical men. Once proud nationalists turned into anarchs. Within trenches, misery created jealous and bitter classes of soldier who denounced the war of another as a simple fairy tale vs the war they had fought the last season. They turned against state and government where men in cloakrooms and boardrooms dictated orders to take a ounce of flesh there, a pound of grist there, a loan against futures and a mortgaging of a Belle Epoch. An entire romance turned to salt to spread across Europe.

In the year 1914 a Serbian of then no great reputation, and now of tremendous consequence killed a son of the House of Hapsburg launching a cascade of events that one after another dragged Europe into an inescapable coarse towards war. A German offensive meant to sweep Paris and end the war before summer was turned aside, only for the Germans again to parry the counter thrust. Some years afterwards, in terror or nostalgic admiration many would describe the German offensive into Normandy in autumn 1914 as“The greatest display of Cavalry since Napoleon and Murat”. Almost by accident the Germans entrapped and destroyed a combined French and British force gaining them access to the North of France,riding down from the north towards Paris. By December, the generals hoped the war would be over. But coming upon the Seine and Oise at the doorstep of Paris, with the government of France retreating to safer quarters, the Germans would be prevented from reenacting 1871.

And there on those banks, though the line would crawl about but never reach Paris: war would stand.Churning the countryside under the deliberate wail of artillery.Carving the landscape into something not seen since Virgil took Dante on a tour of Hell.

Under the stagnation of war, unscrupulous and shifty men wrote conspiracies in dark backrooms. The colonies, following suit had joined in the war would play a bigger front in the coming years. With the stagnation in France, provocateurs and spies conspired that would be exported; in Somalia to the Belgian Congo, Terra del Fuego to Barbados, and Tsingtao to Tehran agents of either powers would seek the end of the war from some back door. With the best of efforts possible, the hands fed mouths that would bite them.

Surprise would strike the gut of the Entente in May 1916. A feint at sea by the Germans drew in sequence elements of the British North Sea fleet into battle, where it was devoured in detail. Though the whole of the British navy would not be destroyed, in the North Sea the Germans gained a decisive advantage which they sought to greedily exploit against the British coast and the Channel. All the more better to reinforce the vulnerable underbelly of its army in Northern France. What better armor is provided by a screen of battleships and wolf packs. The sudden freight in Spring of that year and the violent turning of the war would strike inspirations elsewhere in Europe. As all war does. Considering its leverage as neutral, the schemes of the Spanish court drew to Spain the shipping of Europe, offering in a naval treaty agreed by everyone to defend the neutrality of all shipping into Spain. They, already manufacturing for both parties would soon come to manage the export of supplies to the war through Cadiz and Galicia. Spanish masters, clever and taxing quietly taking a pound of ham for the pleasure.

For the Entente, a horrifying turn would occur further with the sudden departure of the Russians from the War. Total failure by the Russian army in an ill-fated offensive by Brusilov in 1916 ended in absolute failure. The scale of defeat forced the Tzarists to acknowledge their desperate position in the field and at home and by the end of the year signed a hasty and debilitating peace with the Germans. But such a peace also struck the twilight hour of the Russian Empire who, compounded with debilitating crises at home and a failure to cow the people into place began its dissolution. The Empire of Russia would not see the thirties as a going concern, carved between its marshals and revolutionary cells of all stripes. In the later decades, feisty Finns took Nicholas II straddling a new Emperor Alexei with the winter darkness of a thrashing Empire.

And while the victory in the East was a profound boost to the cause of the Germans, giving them the manpower to pour into the West, the war in the Channel, and the North Sea, the very extreme circumstances brought upon the war was coming for them. A nation can not long live with its men and boys pulled away from farm or factory in such great numbers, chewed beneath mud. Rendered blind or breathless by gas. No one could run the farm. Factories choked. Food scarcity became more and more an inescapable reality. The years of 1916-1918 were brutal for the Germans. The armies of Germany, as much as all of Europe were beaten leather, who marched through their trenches like Lazarus from the tomb, desperately shielding themselves from the winter snow and summer rains under thread bare blankets. Eating rats and spoiling rations. Turnip was the plats prinic paux of all meals, for civilian and army.

Revolution erupted finally in Germany on Christmas Day 1918 with a mutiny of sailors. The war had been long unpopular. The Kaiser's police had repressed the sentiment, sending the most unpatriotic advocates against the war to the front themselves. But this had become their own undoing. Now the conditions of life were unbearable. Soldiers and sailors ceased their habit of isolated and spontaneous mutiny and threw in with the workers in the streets. By the end of the year the Imperial government was deposed and the Kaiser sent into exile. A new government was formed around the SPD as a Republic. While preaching peace however, they sought to continue the war for an advantageous peace, looking to Russia as an example of a non-advantageous peace. Through spring and summer 1919 they could hold a strong hand against the still radicalized and mobilized Left, who brawled openly with state security and rightist groups by decamping the German Army under ceasefire to the Line of early November 1914. But by 1920 with no peace, the revolution kicked into a second phase and a formal peace was signed in summer 1920 among all parties.

It was a pitiable deal. No blame would be assigned, so it went to everyone. Territories changed, but always to the wrong person. The status quo was destitute. The financial instruments destroyed, banks in London were foreclosing and instead of any gains, there were only loses. Men awoke in 1920 from their delirium. But the echoes of their nightmare persisted for some years to come. From their bad dreams they awoke with only hate and paranoia in their hearts. Simmering wars between former belligerents continued in a last breath of action to fulfill unresolved goals. The organs of the Concert were fell silent. Revolutions across the continent, and across the world even broke out. For a generation Europe went to heal with the succor provided by Spanish Dons. Millions had died. Eastern Europe was a endless ocean of mud. Northern France was a bent burnt over moonscape. It would take a generation to recover, and more to heal the wounds of faith.

It is now 1955

Precipice of War is an alternative history RP, set some years after a longer and more disastrous World War 1. But opposed to any side claiming an assured victory, the attrition suffered from the conflict and the weakening of the political structure that upheld its participants forced them decades ago to simply quit the war. In the meantime, history as always continues and the world moves on. But the threat of another war to finish the job looms on. In that time, the Russian Empire collapsed into new polities ruled by marshals and self-proclaimed generalissimos and who engaged, and continue to engage in the long competition for political unity in Russia.

The concept of the roleplay dates back a little more that a decade and has been variously rebooted and retooled to fit the changing dispositions and growth of its core participants, as well to bring on new people. The RP follows a narrative format, there are no or minimal game play elements to moderate it. Merely that a convention of good faith is followed: what is written is fun, cool, not insanely improbable, and agreeable to the people directly involved. No action is taken instantly either. In this setting you will take up the mantle of a nation-state and its peoples and the component of its State and simply tell its story as it buffets and is buffeted by the interests of everyone else and finally break through the Precipice of War.

To that end, the following Nation States are on hold for traditional core of PoW players:

China
The United States
Poland
Mexico
Canada

These people will also serve as mods, as the story cops in effect.

World Map

This will be filled in as people join up and marking your borders will be important in the CS. A blank will be provided towards that part.

Before continuing it may be sufficient to do a recap. To lay it out in bullet points:

The Great War began is it did, July 28 1914
The Germans invade France according to the Schlieffen Plan, but the advance of the German army was not held and in what would in our world the Race To The Sea, the German Army instead breaks out, outmaneuvering the Entente Armies in France to invade Northern France – Normandy – and to sweep south towards Paris, held back just north of the city. They would never enter Paris.
A decisive series of naval engagements off of Jutland between the British and German navies ends in German victory. While the Germans are not able to press the advantage, the British are defeated enough that the nature of the war at sea is dramatically altered.
The Madrid Naval Treaty, drafted and signed after Jutland is made with the intent of curtailing excess civilian casualties at sea to otherwise unrestrained U-Boat commerce raiding. Ships from neutral nations, or even belligerent nations are invited to dock in Spain, ships bound for Spain are thus protected with the assumed threat that Spain would join any side of the war opposite to whomever attacked a Spanish bound ship. This gives the Spanish an upper hand geopolitical in Europe through an increased involvement in supply of both sides as a neutral party.
The Russians are defeated during the Brusilov Offensive so soundly, they are forced to leave the war earlier under a “peace for bread” arrangement, where the Central Powers alleviate the Empire's growing food scarcity because of the war to keep them out of the war
The Russian peace sets up a sequence of events which ends in the breakup of the Russian Empire over time. Separatist movements first come to light in the Caucuses and labor and civil unrest strains the legitimacy of the imperial government and its too-late reforms of the Russian Empire. Instead of transforming into the Soviet Union, it entirely breaks down.
Under their own strains of food shortages and massive discontent within their borders, the German people stage an uprising under the SDP and form the Weimar Republic. The otherwise conservative SDP regime attempts to continue the war for a better peace before itself is overthrown in a Communist uprising, entering into peace with the allies as it falls into civil war and national instability. All the same: it's the Communists who succeed where their Russian counterparts had failed.
While the main thrust of the Great War is concluded, the following inconclusive war, tensions persist as world-war revolution and wars spun off in continuation in other parts of Europe and the world broadly, ending the Great War period broadly in the mid-20s.
There was of course an economic crash roughly coinciding with our Great Depression, which given the scale of destruction and disruption the Great War Period brought on the world would have been variously as-bad or worse depending on where in the world you are; consult with how your nation got along during the depression as a reference point before you write about it.

Technical details

Nuclear power and weapons are only theoretical. The general physics exists despite it being the 1950s, but the technology is far from any practical application
Jet technology, while technically very old is very new as the industrial materials development would have by now caught up. But the ability for nations to construct jet-propelled aircraft is not universal for that reason. Only countries with a significant degree in industrial development are able to produce jets: France, Germany, the UK, US, Japan China. But this generation of aircraft are, like helicopters still experimental and not in their “first generation” phase are approaching it
The over all technological aesthetic and weapons/commodities available are roughly within the scope of the 1940s; bolt-action/semi-automatic, submachine guns, early intermediary cartridges, light/medium/heavy tanks and half-tracks
Doctrinally, many of the armies of the world are at a base assumption formed through their experience in World War 1; mass mobility, trenches, counter-trenching, massed artillery, chemical weapons attack/defensive doctrine, stockpiling of strategic resources
Black and white television, personal radios, and early cathode-ray computers are a thing
The dominant medium of exchange in Europe is still most likely gold, which the Spanish probably control a much larger share of than OTL. The massive Russian gold shares are indisputably in the hands of warlords, America probably still has roughly its same share if diminished

Rules and Guidelines

Before I set anyone on their way to the app, I think I should lay out some general guidelines and rules based on what I've seen on this board. This is not to say that anything ya'll are doing is bad. But perhaps the practice is different compared to what you often do. So:

Guidelines (Informal Rules)

Precipice of War isn't a necessarily competitive setting or story. While the premise is that at some time “soon” there will be a Second Great War, and necessarily there'll be winners and losers, it is not written for anyone to “one up” someone else. In all instances you should give someone time to respond, or measure out the time it might take to do something with how many posts you will need to in essence tell a complete story on that process. If for no other reason then to keep things “lined up” actions shouldn't all be finished in one post. But not always. It's a “it depends” situation.
Because it's not a competitive, game format; all interactions with players are on an at-will basis. Establish an end goal, and at least generally figure out how to get there and to finish what episode you are doing. While you're free to do this as a series of on-offs, for the sake of cleanliness I personally prefer that posts with direct interactions between players in a moment are done so in DMs or elsewhere, and compiled into a collaborative post one or the other releases with credit to their peer.
Legible, ready-to-read posts, please. BBCode can be excited but I would rather not have every other post break a consistent formatting so keep a post as standard to the RPNation style-sheet as possible
History has changed until from the fall of 1914 onward, all events before the fall of 1914 canon. Though between the 1914 Offensive and the 1916 Battle of Jutland may be thought of as the “period of divergence”. If needed however, you can make adjustments as early as 1912 but nothing too major

Rules (Formal)

No images in posts larger than 200px tall
Original artwork and writing only; unless quotations from historical texts that would exist in this timeline or “documentary” wikimedia images of a “time or place”
The aforementioned “story cops”/assistants and I – the DM – have final say before site admin if a dispute arises.

The Standard Character Sheet

Fill this out for review. The blank world map for your use:

Nation:

[Add here the "name" of your country, eg the Third French Republic, People's Council Republic of Germany, Republic of China, United States of America, etc.]

Flag:

[The flag that represents your country]

Map:

[Using the world map, use whatever image editing software you have to mark the territorial boundaries of your country, I'll worry about the rest to include it in the world map]

History:

[Write out the history of your country from the beginning of The Great War or just after until the present year, 1950]

AaronMk · Aug 11, 2024

Use this thread to dump nation-sheets to be approved. I'll open the IC thread and character sheet thread when I finish my (China's) sheet. Otherwise until then, and even after use this thread to shitpost and make fine adjustments to nation-sheets when/as needed, because nothing is truly set in stone until the CS thread is up.

I will not provide you with a Discord; if you know, you're already there. If you're already there; I encourage you to shitpost and argue here. I really want any pertinent OOC stuff to be readily referenced back to if it must

Mao Mao · Aug 11, 2024

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
"It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

HISTORY

In the autumn of 1920, an armistice was declared after eight years of a barbaric war between the European nations. The United States of America, having remained neutral throughout the conflict, was chosen to lead the peace negotiations. President Woodrow Wilson set forth several crucial points for enduring peace, including the creation of a "general association of nations," the abolition of secret diplomacy, and the decrease of armaments. But, before having the chance to finish composing his speech to Congress, President Wilson suffered a severe stroke that left him comatose and then passed away in the White House. With a lackluster Thomas Marshall assuming the presidency while the nation was mourning and yearning for normality, the Republican Party claimed a landslide victory in the 1920 election. This led to the United States withdrawing their delegates from the peace talks, signaling an end to their involvement in "European matters."

On the domestic front, the "return to normalcy" many people expected from President Warren Harding was far from ordinary. The post-war recession hit the country hard, and labor unions staged strikes to defend their wartime gains. President Harding sought compromises that only favored the companies rather than the workers. But with the collapse of the 1922 Great Railroad Strike, the labor movement reached its turning point. Labor groups set aside their differences and united in a widespread general strike across major industries. President Harding, seeing the revitalized organized labor movement as a threat to business, began efforts to combat it. However, it didn't deter union memberships from seeing record highs throughout the twenties despite encountering fierce opposition from local authorities and the state and federal government, regardless of political affiliation.

By the 1924 election, the United States was now riding high on economic prosperity, solidifying its position as the world's wealthiest nation per capita. So it came as no surprise when Republicans clinched another victory, having Vice President Calvin Coolidge step up after President Harding died of a heart attack in the days before his re-election campaign. President Coolidge took a hands-off approach to the labor problem, preferring to leave the matter to local and state governments. He even scaled back federal regulatory agencies during his time in office, upsetting much of his fellow Republicans. However, his refusal to support farm subsidies and military bonuses through veto power caused fierce frustration among farmers and soldiers. Despite the controversy, the public still held President Coolidge in high esteem, thanks to the thriving economy and a whopping $300 million surplus. It made his refusal to seek re-election evermore surprising to the nation.

The White House still remained in Republican hands after a decisive victory with Herbert Hoover taking the reins in 1928. His vision of a prosperous future free of poverty was shattered by the Stock Market Crash of 1929, followed by a global economic depression. President Hoover chose to prioritize strengthening businesses and initiating public works projects rather than direct federal interventions, a decision that ultimately failed to revive the economy. The situation was further exacerbated by the passage of the Tariff Act of 1930, which implemented protectionist trade policies, and President Hoover's refusal to enact relief measures. This led to significant losses for the Republican Party in the midterm, as control of the House shifted over to Democrats. The country witnessed the emergence of shanty towns and homeless encampments; all the while, the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 24%. It all reached a critical point when the "Bonus March" set up camp in the nation's capital during the early summer, soldiers demanding better wages.

In a dramatic turn of events, two months later, on July 28th, federal troops stormed the camp following riots caused by the death of two soldiers at the hands of the District police. Under orders of President Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur began advancing upon the campground, intending to evict only the marchers and their followers from the area. However, chaos erupted as gunshots rang out and fires engulfed the shacks, leaving hundreds injured and dozens dead. Eyewitness accounts revealed that MacArthur ordered troops to open fire on the crowd without warning. During a committee hearing, MacArthur testified he witnessed individuals leaving a shack with weapons in hand, believing them to be part of a syndicalist conspiracy poised to attack the federal troops. Regardless, the harrowing event, known as the Anacostia Massacre, sealed the fate of the Hoover administration, extinguishing any ambitions of a second term in the 1932 election.

Pressure from the labor unions and military personnel, the Democratic Party nominated former mayor Jacob Coxey for president, with Henry Wallace as the vice presidential nominee, a move made to appeal to moderates within the party. Coxey championed the restoration of labor rights, financial reforms, and new programs, while Wallace worked to win over conservative Democrats and centrists. Their efforts paid off, leading to a landslide victory, with the party triumphing in all but five states. However, behind the scenes, the Democratic victory sparked concern among conservative businessmen, who feared significant changes to the status quo, including the potential end of the gold standard. In response, a desperate Republican Party was approached with a bold conspiracy—The Business Plot—in a bid to reseize power with military support from the "radical socialists in the White House."

As Inauguration Day arrived, the world was stunned to witness General Douglas MacArthur being sworn in as a temporary president. He announced in front of the U.S. Capitol building that the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect had been arrested for allegedly "orchestrating communist activities against the United States." The accusation sparked widespread protests organized by left-wing third parties, with some House and Senate Democrats vocal against the MacArthur administration. Despite the initial uproar, most politicians from both sides chose to remain silent on the matter. And amidst the turmoil, a committee was formed to find a replacement for the presidency, which only heightened the country's divide. After two weeks of intense closed-door negotiations, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana emerged as the surprising candidate, sparking even more unrest.

The Democratic Party immediately denounced the nomination and called for a general strike nationwide, while the Republican Party backed the committee's choice. Naturally, the House would have opposed such a controversial choice if it hadn't been for the nomination of William Lemke as Vice President. Lemke championed the causes of farmers at the onset of the Great Depression, with family-owned farmlands being subjected to foreclosures. That balance of power was enough to secure a narrow victory in the House, paving the way for the Republican-backed Senate to vote for the choices. Predictably, the left-wing third parties mobilized for an immediate protest in the nation's capital against the vote. Police and National Guard troops used force against the protesters, leading to a full-scale riot. It had gotten to the point that President-appoint Long had to enlist the help of William Pelley and his Silver Shirts to quell the unrest.

The Silver Legion sought to suppress the protests through aggressive tactics, leading to the detention of thousands and the injury of hundreds. But despite criticism from the National Guard and military personnel, Pelley found favor with the White House and solidified their friendly relations in the newly refurbished East Room. With support from radio evangelist Herbert Armstrong, his pro-segregationist, antisemitic rhetoric gained traction across the country, attracting numerous new followers. As tensions further rose, an exodus was beginning to take shape in fear of further violence. Their fears materialized when the headquarters of the Socialist Party of America was engulfed in flames, resulting in the tragic deaths of several party leaders and members. The surviving leadership, fearing arrest, fled to Chicago before going into hiding following the outlawing of leftist third parties.

Pelley's Silver Shirts gradually incorporated into the United States Military for their efforts in restoring order in the nation's capital. Many of the active duty officers were caught completely off-guard by the unexpected development. Then, a shocking revelation came to light—plans were leaked for the Long administration to grant pardons to high-ranking members of the Black Legion, who were serving life sentences for murder. This was the final straw for Major General Smedley Butler and Rear Admiral William D. Leahy, who hatched a daring plan to liberate Henry Wallace and Jacob Coxey from prison and flee to Europe aboard the battleship USS New Mexico. Unfortunately for them, Brigadier General Hugh S. Johnson, who was initially part of the conspiracy, tipped off the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the plot. So when the day of the escape attempt arrived, a task force ambushed Butler's militia at the prison, sparking an intense week-long siege at Barney Circle.

In the end, the escape attempt was a catastrophic failure that claimed the lives of Butler and Coxey and left Wallace severely injured. Meanwhile, Leahy and the crew had already been captured onboard the New Mexico prior to the ambush. This attempt led to a military purge known as The Grand Cleansing, which lasted until 1937, allowing the Silver Legion to consolidate significant power across the country. While the Ku Klux Klan experienced rapid growth, establishing chapters throughout the Midwest, and securing political influence at both state and federal levels. It fundamentally resulted in Huey Long winning a second term in the 1936 election, despite widespread allegations of voter intimidation in several states from the Democratic Party. During his second term in office, Long initiated the dismantling of antitrust laws and embraced pro-business policies while collaborating with Henry Ford and several businessmen to combat the Great Depression.

But during a week-long rally held in Savannah in 1939, a resistance group using the name "Sons of Liberty" launched a blazing attack on President Long. The fiery assault left President Long with minor injuries, while Vice President Lemke succumbed to smoke inhalation, and Pelley was gravely wounded. Even though the National Guard eventually overpowered the rebels, the assassination attempt was a devastating blow to the nation's security. Remarkably, the country did not spiral into total anarchy as President Long continued to fulfill his duties from his hospital bed. The Secretary of State served as a transient vice president before being swiftly replaced by Earl Long, Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, in anticipation of the 1940 election. Concerns about a potential third term for President Long were raised from both sides of the political spectrum but were ultimately mitigated when the Republican Party gained control of the Senate for the first time in 1932.

This marked the beginning of the Long family's foray into politics. Although medical complications prevented Huey from seeking a fourth term, he passed the torch to his brother and aimed to reclaim his Senate seat in Louisiana. In the 1944 election, Earl Long clinched the presidency, and Republicans seized control of the House for the first time since 1928. Renowned as "Uncle Earl," he was a brilliant campaigner with an erratic political behavior, often demanding unwavering loyalty to him. Consequently, his administration ushered in a wave of new appointments and dismissals within the federal government, with loyalists assuming key roles at the expense of established civil servants. While Republicans savored their newfound power, the Democratic Party's feeble response allowed the country to descend into an autocracy as they sought to safeguard their dwindling political influence.

But after Earl secured a third term in office, his behavior grew increasingly erratic, causing his inner circle to start getting concerned. The administration was plagued with resignations and firings of political appointees, leading to instability. The Republican Party was willing to put up with the embarrassment until the 1954 midterm election. To their surprise, Republicans almost lost all the gains made in the House, while the Senate losses were modest. This close call prompted several members to call for Earl's resignation, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives and a handful of cabinet members. Although Earl initially refused to listen, he was eventually convinced by his brother Huey to resign and rerun for lieutenant governor of Louisiana instead. While it was a solemn moment in the history to many, others breathed a sigh of relief at his replacement.

In 1955, with the presidential election looming, the Republican Party was already plotting its comeback after the midterm losses. While some party members are pushing for a shift towards social and environmental justice policies, the majority are rallying behind the powerful Long family and their conservative politics, backing the potential candidacy of Russell B. Long. On the other side, the Democratic Party, taken by surprise by their recent gains, is resorting to a bold last-ditch effort to reclaim the presidency. However, they're facing stiff opposition from their rivals, including the formidable Federal Bureau of Investigation led by the unyielding J. Edgar Hoover, determined to quash any remnants of leftist ideals. And some Democrats are getting a little too cozy with the Long family, and it's stirring up talks of a potential party split. Meanwhile, whispers of underground resistance groups biding their time to restore democracy still persist, adding an air of intrigue to the rocky political landscape of the United States.

Bittertwist · Aug 12, 2024

First draft, dates aren't meant to be final, some things like the fate of the king may still need to be decided, things ironed out, etc. With Romania gobbling up the Austrians at around the same time that may also need to be addressed. I also consider this app unfinished, though I also feel like I want to figure things out as I go. The flag is also probably a placeholder, or maybe not.

The map is the best I could draw. It may have mistakes, like missing land that should be Italy, or including land that shouldn't. For reference, the map should include all of de facto Italy and all of Dalmatia, including all its Adriatic islands; Sardinia is striped because it is claimed but not de facto a part of Italy due to Spanish-French intervention, or whatever we decide.

@Pagemaster : we should probably decide the state of the Balkans. I figure the South Slavs that aren't under Italian or Romanian control probably still formed Yugoslavia. What the state and nature of Yugoslavia is, though, Idk.

Italy

When the great powers of Europe made war and clashed like titans across the continent Italy too became besieged but by the pressures of the belligerent nations, who sought to bring Italia to their side with urgings incessant, and promises of gains that like the machine-gun fire from trenches across Europa roared with a heavy persistence from the mouths of diplomats who were likewise dealers of death. This mass suicide of nations beckoned the Kingdom of Italy with an intrusive thought in the public consciousness: Italia Irredenta. The idea that Italy had yet to be fully redeemed, and that it would remain so until all Italian lands were incorporated haunted all public discourse and pushed the nation ever closer to that putrid pit to which all the nations of Europe had gone to die in search of glory and redemption.

While the great powers of Europe fought across the trench-scarred countryside, Italy too pushed its territorial boundaries across spans of paper in secret negotiations with both alliances, finding itself in the crossfire of a war waged with pen, paper, and promises, where the frontlines were marked not by a great network of earthen ditches but the delineating lines of ink drawn on maps stamped not by craters but the approving signatures of foreign dignitaries promising ever more for the blood of Italy's sons.

The envoys of the Entente had by 1915 gained the upper hand in this parallel battlefield of negotiation. In April of that year, Antonio Salandra's government signed the Treaty of London in secret, committing Italy to the Allied cause in exchange for much of the Adriatic at the War's end. The Risorgimento was at hand, and with it Redemption. In early May, Italia renounced its membership of the Triple Alliance. Its withdrawal opened a new front in the Italian parliament with an offensive by the neutralist majority, over which the former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti held sway like a rear-leading general. Fearing Salandra would take the country to war, Giolitti returned to Rome to persuade King Victor Emmanuel into calling for a vote of confidence to show parliament did not support Italy's entry into the War. The counteroffensive succeeded, and Salandra resigned on 13 May.

The political battle to determine Italy's role in the War spilled out over the parapets of civil discourse and into the streets as pro-war advocates agitated for national redemption. Fearing Giolitti's return to power would extinguish the flames of the Risorgimento, pro-war militants decried neutralists as traitors to be assaulted, and made attempts to burn the government chambers they occupied when Salandra's resignation was made public. The Radiosomaggismo - the Radiant Days of May - brought home a taste of war as demonstrators took to the streets in support and opposition to the European conflict and the reinstatement of Giolitti as Prime Minister.

What had been a series of skirmishes and street brawls erupted into all-out battle as pro-war nationalists stormed the centers of government calling for the removal and reinstatement of Salandro, entry into the War and, in the most extreme cases, the complete overthrowal of the liberal democratic establishment led by Giolitti. A state of crisis was declared, but Giolitti maneuvered to not deploy troops for fear of an escalation into civil war. Instead, heavily armed - and well-paid - police were deployed to disperse nationalist manifestations that were quickly becoming blocs of organized resistance led by charismatic leaders intent on seizing power. Giolitti, who had been a master of transformismo - the practice of isolating the political extremes through the use of a flexible centrist coalition - was forced to court the leftward extreme, bringing them into his fold with promises and concessions. Soon, the social democratic Italian Socialist Party had organized a counteroffensive led by workers and paramilitaries armed not just with the state's weapons but with its consent.

When the crashing tides of nationalist discontent were met by a sea-wall of armed labor the streets ran red with blood. The Radiant Days of May became Red May as Giolitto navigated the center by characterizing the struggle against the War as the only truly patriotic action, taken to save the Italian nation and its working class from a mass suicide in the trenches that doubled as graves. When the bloody tides of pro-war nationalism began to recede beneath a hail of rocks and rifle butts, armed workers continued their struggle by occupying factories against the wishes and instructions of the Italian Socialist Party leadership. Fearing he had overshot to the left, Giolitti maneuvered to negotiate with the nationalists, offering amnesties, pardons, and positions in government to some of its most prominent members, while mobilizing the state's police and military forces that until then had remained on stand-by to disperse the workers and dismantle their factory councils. Maggiorosso had come to an end.

By the end of May, Giolitti had averted disaster at the cost of nearly a hundred dead and many more wounded. He granted concessions to the Left and appointed some of its moderate figures to positions of government. The nationalists were granted their own concessions and amnesties, and its most prominent members were elevated to positions of government viewed as more valuable than those of the left; Giolitti had successfully maneuvered to form a new government that toed the line between the two emerging anti-liberal powers. By 1918, the right occupied a more powerful position in the coalition than that of the socialist left, which had been gradually pushed aside in favor of Giolitti's liberals, who became vindicated in their opposition to the War as the years and bodies piled across Europe. When the Russian and German revolutions came to head, Giolitti's coalition was ready to prevent the same in Italy, bringing to bear the political and paramilitary power of the liberals and their emerging fascist allies, and aided by the Italian Socialist Party's social programs established soon after the Maggiorosso with the aim of reigning in the radicalism of the workers by providing them with all manner of Party-run institutions, from schools to sports centers, and ultimately helping create a sort of parallel society that acted as a pressure release valve and prepped future democratic socialists while isolating its more radical elements.

Between 1919 and 1921, inspired by and in solidarity with the German and Russian revolutions, Italian communists launched a series of strikes across Italy and once again occupied factories; the Italian Socialist Party provided only words to condemn violence and encourage civility. Millions of workers across Italy took to the streets across hundreds of strikes. Giolitti's government responded with force, supported by fascist paramilitaries. The Triennium Rosso - or Three Red Years - were characterized by militant labor and the suppression thereof, as well as the increasingly weak will of the Italian Socialist Party, which in 1921 suffered a split led by Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga that gave rise to the anti-parliamentarian and pro-revolution Communist Party of Italy when the communist faction marched out of the 17th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party singing the Internationale in protest of the Italian Socialist Party's complicity and inaction during the Three Red Years and the struggle of 1915.

The Three Red Years and the withdrawal of the Communist faction spelled an era of increased political strife as the democratic socialists became isolated in government and the more radical elements of the left took their program to the streets to further encourage and lead the workers into action. In 1921, amid another uptick in violence and social upheaval, and fearing a fascist over-empowerment as the Italian Socialist Party collapsed, Giolitti viewed the dissolution of the Austrian Empire as an opportunity to release the revolutionary tension of both extremes, and harvested the very notion he had fought against to the benefit of the liberals by calling for the sons of Italy to march on the dying Habsburg demesne. To the nationalists of the right wing, it was the conclusion of the Risorgimento for the national redemption of Italy, and thousands of young fascists enlisted eagerly to claim what belonged to Italia; for the communists, it was an opportunity to liberate the Italian proletariat still beneath that ancient yoke, and to strike down once and for all the tyrant of Europe with a coup de grâce.

By 1924, the Italian Army had swept over much of the Adriatic on a mission that took the character of a peace-keeping endeavor or victory parade without much resistance, and which energized the nation with an air of pride and accomplishment in spite of international condemnation, for the Risorgimento was complete and Italia was whole at last. This maneuver deflated much of the political strife back home and realigned the nation's interests toward the reclamation and resettlement of these new, old territories. The men who partook in the War, dubbed the Fourth War of Independence by some, were often radicals of the left and the right, who took on their roles like political commissars, often at odds with one another as they raced to secure parts of the crumbling empire for the glory of their creed, helping to organize these territories along communist or fascist lines like colonies of thought.

With the near complete collapse of the Italian Socialist Party, its institutions became increasingly subject to communist influence as faith in the democratic socialists waned and more workers - especially in the urban centers of the north - turned to the Communist Party. As the two shared a constituency, these institutions were host to a growing number of communist sympathizers, who took to these community centers to agitate and organize the working class. The schools and sports centers that had once been centers for deradicalization became strongholds of the Communist Party during this time.

The period between 1922 and 1929 saw a time of economic prosperity and Italy benefited greatly from the reconstruction of Europe and its newly-acquired lands in the Adriatic. The political strife of the previous years receded for a time amid these economic fortunes.

In 1929, the Great Depression struck the world and sent Italy into a sudden downward economic spiral. Under the direction of the revolutionary Communist Party of Italy, the country's urban workers took to the streets again to strike and occupy factories across the north. The Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome was seized by Red Guards and its liberal parliament was relieved, to be replaced wholly by the worker's Party, who declared a dictatorship of the proletariat. The fascists responded with ruthless repression of strikes in the south - where their hold was firmest - through the use of well-equipped paramilitaries the liberal state had fostered for fear German communism. The Communist Party mobilized its brigades on a violent southward march striking down its opponents without mercy and seizing whatever proved useful to the revolution. In the Adriatic, communist strongholds were bolstered by weapons coming through German Austria, sending the local fascist resistance into the sea and opening a corridor between the two nations that allowed for the distribution of arms and volunteers. By 1933, the Communist Party of Italy had seized control of the country despite Spanish and French support for the fascist opposition, which gradually dissipated into a clandestine resistance headed by exiles who had managed to escape the closing jaws of militant labor.

Between 1933 and 1955, Italy underwent a period of development, and cooperation with Communist Germany, on whom it relied during its early years. The Italian Communist Party made attempts to spread its revolution abroad with limited success, but when the tide of communism was slowed to a near halt by the failures of the Russian Revolution, the Party found itself increasingly isolated, leading to a degradation of communist orthodoxy by theoreticians who argued for the defense of the Italian revolution from mounting external pressures by turning inwards, while others attempt to steer the ship to orthodoxy and world revolution.

Bittertwist · Aug 13, 2024

I would think Yugoslavia united under a kingdom shortly after the Great War. With the political turmoil following the dissolution of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, Italy marching into Dalmatia, Romania marching into Transylvania, etc, and the lack of a post-war legal order, the Yugoslavs had a messier unification than IRL but managed to unite most of the Balkans.

As opposed to IRL where the real bad stuff came later during WWII, their strife probably began sooner because, with Europe becoming an ideological battlefield, Italy taking Dalmatia, and Romania probably wanting to fight back against any possible communist spread, the Balkans may have become a battlefield for proxy wars, with communists agitating for revolution, Romania supporting nationalists (or whoever), the Turks and Greeks probably doing their own thing, etc. By 1955, Yugoslavia might be a mini-Russia in the sense of being largely a battleground, maybe even disunited, or in the process of falling apart, with the king long-gone or about to be, replaced by warlords, foreign-backed rebels, and those trying to maintain Balkan independence against all outsiders. Our very own exclave of Slavic anarchy.

Idk tho

AaronMk · Aug 14, 2024

Update: I'm going to be adding everyone to the map and clearing you all for the IC when it drops when I finish the China app. Which me being an absolute sicko: us fucking huge. But I'm also going to defend myself with "the 10s and 20s were tumultuous okay"

To that end I'm in the mid-20s now which means I'm not far off from brushing aside an entire decade as fast as possible

Bittertwist · Aug 14, 2024

Opera post app incoming

AaronMk · Sep 2, 2024

Marzan · Sep 5, 2024

Hey so I talked to you Aaron and you told me to post here, im down to join and would like to do so as Japan.

AaronMk · Sep 5, 2024

The Federal Republic of China

Flag:

History:

Coming into the 1950s the people of China have had five years of relative peace. While political life had not be easy for the masses of the Chinese, after a near half-century of constant warfare it has been certainly prosperous. Through the vexing trials, a youthful political scene has developed, markets have stabilized, and the technical progress of the wider world is reaching further inland. For the first time in a very long time the people are feeling a sense of pride and accomplishment not known since the early 19th century. While little doubt it will be easy going forward there is a feeling glowing from the heart that it will absolutely be Chinese in its nature.

The story of the Chinese Republic can be traced nearly two centuries. With the slogan, “Down with the Qing; up with the Ming!” the Chinese revolutionaries of the first decade of the 1900s associated their cause with the nascent and patchwork anti-Qing resistance which began with the complete assertion of the Manchurian Qing dynasty over mainland China. However, the hand of the Qing dynasty only became heavier in its first century, delegating the resistance – such as it was – to that of the idle daydreaming of a Han aristocracy, the activities of a criminal underground or monastic cults. The last substantial threat to the Qing in service to the memory of the Ming was crushed on the island of Liuqiu, or Formosa leading to its eventual annexation by a disinterested imperial court. After all: there were new Southern Barbarians abound, the least any responsible Emperor could do was to deny the island to “The Dutch”.

But as history advanced, the buffeting of European exploration and markets washed up on Chinese shores with the inevitability of Winter. European explorers and merchants began their process of exploitation and exploration in search on consumer markets for manufactured goods and white gods. While starting out friendly enough, the disinterest of the Chinese vs the voracious appetites of the Europeans created an antagonism in the relationship. An antagonism which became an imbalance which became a fissure. European finance in the 19th century was losing considerable silver to the Chinese Market. In a search to bridge the gap, to find a commodity the Chinese could not live without: Opium was introduced. It would not be sufficient to say the Imperial government simply disapproved of this move. War immediately erupted on several occasions with the Europeans who sought narcotic stupification of the Chinese and force of arms to violate imperial integrity to churn a profit against the Qing. In all cases: The Qing lost. The Century of Humiliation had begun.

The Qing desperately resisted. But the intrigues of its own court rendered the central government more often than not helpless against more organized and more disciplined European armies. The antagonisms and forceful intrusions of European and American merchants to carve the country into spheres of influence pried open fissures in Chinese society. The peasants suffered. The subsequent Taiping and Boxer rebellions were a profound pox against the the imperial court, inflicting them with the terminal illness of decline. Made all the more worse by the court's then institutionalized inability to grapple with reality. Within this time the generation of Chinese revolution which would bring the Great Qing down, and to replace it a modern republic was born.

Revolution in China would break out almost by accident in the city of Wuhan. Since the 1890s revolutionary forces within China had sought to remold China from within and without. A reform movement at the court in Beijing brought about the Hundred Days Reform to build a modern Constitutional Monarchy in China, ended forcefully by Cixi. The Reformers, gave way to revolutionary societies that would form the Tongmenhui movement, then being constructed by Dr Sun Yat-Sen and fellow Chinese expatriates in Tokyo. In Wuhan, two independent revolutionary societies were operating. They had entered into talks with the Tongmenhui to perform a combined uprising during the Autumn Festival. On October 9th Sun Wu, leader of the Progressive Society was on working on home made explosives when he accidentally set off a bomb. He survived the explosion, and was rushed to the hospital where his identity was made known. The subsequent police crackdown forced the revolutionary societies to spring into action. Following suit, the local army garrison launched into a mutiny against central government forces, and after doing battle with forces sent to repress the rebellion seized control of Hubei and declared an independent military government.

The events which followed would have been farcical had they not worked in favor of the Revolution. None of the leaders were in position to assume leadership in Hubei. Dr Sun Yat-Sen was then on his way to America and only learned of the revolt in the newspapers. But as the rebellion stood more unimposed, more mutinies followed. Soon all of the South and Central China were in open revolt. Seeking to mitigate the crisis, the Qing government released political prisoners. Sun Yat-Sen hurried back to China in time to be elected president of the Provisional Republican government in the South.

The revolution expanded when in the following year Yuan Shikai, commander of the Imperial forces in the north defected and lead a coup against the imperial government, deposing them and accepting from Sun Yat-Sen the gift of the provisional presidency of the Republic, on the understanding he would travel to the south and join in the drafting of a new constitution for China. However, with his power base in the north, Yuan Shikai remained in Beijing obliging the supporters of the Revolution to travel north to assume their roles in the provisional parliament. Sun Yat-Sen retreated to Guangzhou where he and his followers would deliberate on how to navigate the future.

Born in 1859, Yuan Shikai was the most prominent commander in the Beiyang Army, one of the several military reform measures undertaken by the Qing government during the crises of the 19th century. Born out of the Huai Army, raised by Li Hongzhang to fight the Taiping Rebellion. Li Hongzhang used the privileges allocated to him as the Viceroy of Zhili to raise customs and excise duties in his area to raise and equip his army. After the Taiping Rebellion, the imperial government had abandoned much of his prerogatives of force that would have been useful in disbanding the militia units raised by men like Li, and the Huai Army remained for decades to come, transforming into the Beiyang Army, named after the fleet Li began constructing in the 1880s and 1890s.

During the First Sino-Japanese War, the Beiyang Army fought against the Japanese. However, the more professionally trained and better equipped Japanese army was able to swiftly defeat the Beiyang Army, forcing the Qing government to surrender only after several months. Within the army the defeat sparked a campaign of modernization so that the Chinese could someday fight and compete with the Chinese. Feelers stretched out to the German Empire to find promising officers to train their army.

Yuan Shikai replaced Li on his death in 1901, the decision was natural, being a close ally to Li as well as a commander of one of the post-war reformation units; the Newly Celebrated Army. Yuan had, since the War made himself indispensable to the Imperial Court due to the proximity of his armies to Beijing and being the teacher of China's top commanders in the period; a reputation he would use to found the Baoding Military Academy in Baoding, Hebei consolidating the power of the tight personal clique he was building in the north. With his star in ascent, he was given viceroyalty of Zhili. The first of several political promotions in the years to come.

Because of the importance of the Beiyang Army, being both politically and geographically close to the Qing Court made him a prominent player in the drama of the Xinhai Revolution. But his strength and ambition had also strained his relationship with the regent Prince Chun, who held a long animosity against him since the end of the Hundred Day Reforms in 1898. But during the Xinhai Revolution, Prince Chun and the court began courting his return to lead the army. All knew that he had the power to effectively suppress the rebellion. But his poor relationship with the regent made him a high value personality to court by the military rebels in the south; and likewise by the imperial court. Citing illness, Yuan Shikai delayed. He understood that doing so could only play into his hand, receiving court promotions to buy his loyalty. Finally he responded in November, taking the position of Prime Minister of the Imperial Cabinet. His armies meanwhile had won a score of victories against the southern rebels and were about to take the city of Wuchang, which would end his usefulness to the Imperial Court and his certain forced retirement. So turning on the Qing, he entered into direct negotiations with the rebels and agreed to coup the Imperial Court on their behalf.

Entering the Forbidden City, Yuan Shikai and his men forced the abdication of the child emperor Puyi, and closed the book on the Qing Empire, settling into his roll as the president of the Provisional Republic of China at the Zhongnanhai. The decision to stay in Beijing was controversial among the Republicans, who had assumed that the capital would be Nanjing as selected by Sun Yat-Sen and the Tongmenhui leadership. But in spite of their petitions, Yuan remained in Beijing close to his circle of followers and where the weight of his influence was strongest. As if to emphasize the point, an coup was attempted against Yuan, theorized to have been launched by his right-hand man Cao Kun. Yuan claimed the pretext that he was the safest in the north as his men efficiently suppressed the attempted uprising, and that leaving would put his life in danger from radicals. The southern Republicans were forced to oblige and sent men north to Beijing to confer at the first Congress of the Provisional Parliament's sessions with the goal of carrying out China's first all-democratic elections and assemble a mature government to write a constitution.

In the South, Sun Yet-Sen, his lieutenants – Song Jiaoren and Chen Qimei – and supporters went north to Beijing, to at least keep the dream of China's Republican project as they had envisioned it alive. From Beijing, they met with a collection of minor nationalist parties to construct what would become the Kuomintang. And while Song Jiaoren did not have the most personal respect among his contemporaries in Beijing, he proved an avid campaigner and at the conclusion of the 1912 elections had drummed up a large majority for Sun's party that would threaten the executive power of the Yuan Shikai-dominated executive cabinet. Yuan, sensitive to other's ambitions felt a major threat against him.

The parliament met on February 1913 with the young Kuomintang Party having taken a clear lead in the polls, having just shy of 50% of both the Upper House – Senate – and Lower House – The House. Built off of the framework installed by the Qing in 1909 during the rule of Regent-Prince Chun in a failed step towards Constitutionalism, the goal of the parliament was to build towards a formalized constitutional system. But immediately in response to losing his legislative influence Yuan Shikai began to ignore the legislature. The major opposition parties merging into the Progressive Party aligned themselves along the line of supporting a presidential dictatorship of some form, or at the least a highly centralized national government.

Arriving in Shanghai to meet with supporters on March 20, 1913 Song Jiaoren, as well as Chen Qimei walked into one of Yuan's conspiracies. After meeting with the head of the Methodist mission in China - who were an important non-Chinese sponsor of Sun as well as Sun and his civilian supporter's denominational church - they returned to the train-station where a lone gunman had posted himself to shoot Song Jiaoren. Using a Browning pistol, the assassin ran up to him and pulled the trigger. However, the pistol misfired and the round failed to discharge. A melee ensued as Song was pulled away by a small security detail and Chen Qimei began wrestling with the assassin. In the course of the fight, the pistol ejected through the jam and fired through the lower jaw of Chen, sending him collapsing onto his back, dying. Several more shots were fired, doing little more to frustrate the attempts by security to catch the assassin and Song Jiaoren was hurriedly packed onto the train.

Tensions were high in Beijing as Song returned and for his safety he was packed off away from the Zhongnanhai. In Shanghai itself, the police searched for the killer, tracking him down to the French Concession. But international complications arose and their attempts to go further stopped dead in their tracks. In Beijing a paltry shroud of reconciliation was pulled over the proceedings to draft China's republican constitution and the proceedings went on in an air of cold terror during which Song Jiaoren was only ever half present.

By June the investigation in Shanghai had found legs again and the Constitutional convention was rocky. Yuan used what influence he could to limit the influence of Sun's party. News leaked that several prominent southern office holders were “suspect” obliging many of them to leave Beijing. If they did not they were rapidly arrested on charges of sponsoring the assassination attempt on Song Jiaoren, even as official announcements from the police in Shanghai announced the discovery of telegrams sent from persons within or associated with the executive cabinet. The worsening news sparked discontent from within the cabinet even.

Over the summer, the national legislature was plagued with incidents of violent intimidation, bribery scandals, and assassinations against the Kuomintang and even flagging Progressive representatives. The drama of summer peaked in October, when the news broke the police had “firm evidence” that responsibility for the assassination attempt in Shanghai set off a sudden presidential election. The Kuomintang – who could not decide on either Sun Yat-Sen or Song Jiaoren – were defeated, and the legislature elected Yuan Shikai and Li Yuanhong as the first formal president and vice-president of the Republic of China without a formal constitution. Immediately after, Sun and his associates were banned from politics and dismissed from Beijing. This move crippled the legislature as a ruling body, and unable to function left all the powers of state effectively in the hands of Yuan Shikai.

Returning to Guangzhou, Sun and his supporters were in disarray and despondent. For a time however, they could collect themselves as politics under Yuan carried on as usual in the north. The exiled republicans were greeted in the south by other exiles from the Yuan government, notable General Cai-E of Yunnan who had returned to his home province to rebuild his political and military networks there. The efforts of Song Jiaoren to save the movement paid off with the rallying of the Yunnan Clique and Chen Jiongmen of Guangdong to assist Sun.

In Beijing, Yuan Shekai continued efforts to build his regime. He disbanded the legislature in the beginning of 1914, replacing it with a small body of men called the Council of State which rapidly wrote a constitution giving the office of president immense powers. He reached out to foreign powers, accepting large “loans” from the French, Germans, British, Russians, and Japanese in exchange for sweeping concessions of commercial rights in China and even territorial concessions. Together these proved to be highly volatile decisions and stirred popular discontent among China's urban middle class; a feeling that Sun Yat-Sen was willing to court. The constitutional changes of Yuan, coupled with the lack of even minimal compensation for the Revolution of 1911 kicked off a series of military mutinies through China. The southern warlords surrounding Sun Yat-Sen issued proclamations of protest against Yuan as they worked behind the scenes to organize themselves.

In 1915, Japan conquered Qingdao from Germany. The popular response of the Chinese intelligentsia was that the city should be returned to China, but their protests were ignored. The Japanese issued a list of demands to expand their influence in China. Yuan Shikai accepted. A second wave of uprisings and protests broke out in China creating a crisis of legitemacy. Yuan reacted violently. Popular discontent deepened further when he declared himself Emperor in December, 1915. By this time, to save their local power, provincial assemblies urged their military governors to declare independence. The Kuomintang warlords in the south did the same.

Between their expulsion in 1913 until Yuan's self-coronation in 1915 Sun's Kuomintang movement worked to re-consolidate their influence. Courting provincial military commanders, they sought a coalition that could protect the party from the influence of Yuan. By the announcement of Japan's demands in 1915 and then Yuan's crowning as the Huangdi emperor no solid coalition government had emerged. But the emergent state of China forced the hand of the Republican leadership to rally against the Beiyang, declaring to “protect the Constitution”, which naturally became a dusting off of the 1911 provisional constitution. The ensuing war rapidly evolved into a second revolution which vastly over-whelmed the Beiyang clique in the south.

The crisis forced Yuan to step down three months into his reign in 1916, due to complications in his health set upon him by the devolving crisis across the country. Rebel armies had seized the territory south of the Yangtze River, and while there was a military crisis for the Republicans in Guangxi that saw Guangdong nearly taken from them, Sun's coalition of Republican and Democratic-leaning commanders largely held sway over southern China. Yuan abdicated the government with almost no plan of succession. While nominally it passed to his vice president Li Yuanhong, he was entirely incapable of managing the reigns of the large and unwieldy Beiyang Army left to him by Yuan. Yuan himself died shortly after in his home in Tianjin.

Li entered negotiations with the southern rebels with the promise of re-inviting Sun's nascent-Kuomintang back into government. But as a weak president, he was unable to make it happen; in reality co-Beiyang officer Duan Qirui held power. There was a brief flowering of Qing restoration and Li was deposed in July 1917. After several months he was reimposed in a counter-coup, ending Qing restoration. This tendency for political coups in the north would weaken the actual prominence of the presidency, and power would rotate between which northern warlord held Beijing for the better part of two decades.

The situation in Beijing also afflicted the south. With the internationally received legitemate government in the north being hardly stable, and the politically stable Kuomintang in the south being unrecognized internationally many provincial commanders took the opportunity in the insurgent chaos to declare independence from even Sun Yat-Sen's independence faction and declare war. The conflicts and factional shifts coming to threaten Sun himself. Relatives of the slain Chen Qimei in Shanghai sent from the Green Gang arrived an ambitious shooter and street enforcer Chiang Kai-Shek to try and secure Sun's position from “untrustworthy” southern generals.

Chiang Kai-Shek was born in 1887, in a small town west of Ningbo. Born to a poor family, the violence and intrusion of poverty left an imprint on the young Chiang. As he grew into early adult hood he joined the military, traveling to study as a cadet at the Baoding Military Academy, run by the Beiyang Army in 1906. Then in the following year, in Japan. While there, he drifted among the Chinese political milieu meeting Chen Qimei. Impressing Qimei, he was inducted into the Tongmenhui secret society where he came to devote himself to Chinese national revolution, inspired by his anger over the decline of his homeland under the Qing.

Chiang returned to China in the aftermath of the Wuchang uprising and joined a militant cell run by his benefactor, Chen Qimei in Shanghai, where he battled the Qing and also fellow members of the Tongmenhui who had responded to the 1911 uprising by declaring their support for reformation. In this brutal environment, he made a name for himself as a murderer, being associated with the murder of Tao Chengzhang, a conservative reformist member of the Tongmenhui in a Shanghai area hospital. While he was successful in avoiding direct legal repercussions for the act, the fact of the murder signaled his close operational association with the Green Grang.

The Green Gang was born out of the early anti-Qing insurrectionist milieu following the defeat of the Ming centuries ago. Like the Blue Gang, which was another operating underground Shanghai anti-Qing secret society they recruited men to combat the Qing. But most unlike the Blue Gang, their activities were more firmly nestled in the bosom of criminality, heavily involved in prostitution, heroin smuggling, extortion, and general violent crime. They ruled river shipping along the Yangtze River, and amassed a vast pool of resources and influence in Shanghai society. But they and their members were always suspected even outside China. British, French, and sometimes American authorities held the organization in suspicion, even if they often housed high-ranking members of the gang in the international concessions. Chen Qimei was a known Green Gang figure, the would-be assassin of Song Jiaoren was a member of the Green Gang, and Chiang Kai-Shek emerged from the same mire into the stage of Revolutionary politics even as he was observed by the British.

But while Chiang was joining swords with the Kuomintang warlords of the south to consolidate their position, the world moved on. The War in Europe created an enormous demand for laborers to replace those sent to the field to fight. Depending on conditions and allegiances, the government that controlled the north waffled between neutrality and sending men to work in the factories or in the construction of trenches and the running of mules for the Central Powers. And while Sun Yat-Sen himself advocated for neutrality in Europe, a faction of intellectuals among the Chinese Revolution supported the Entente and even directly involved themselves with providing factory labor for the French.

Wang Jingwei, who had met Sun Yat-Sen in Japan in 1905 was one of these men. Born of Zhejiang province in 1883, he traveled to study in 1903. In 1905 he discovered radical revolutionary politics and Sun Yat-Sen. He became a student of Russian and French Anarchism, and convinced himself after the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War that nationalist principles were a powerful force in popular self-determination, following the school of Japanese Anarchism.

He returned to China and became immediately active in revolutionary terrorism in the lead up to the Xinhai Revolution. An attempted bombing of the Prince-Regent Chun ended in failure and his arrest. At trial, Wang made a point to turn his deposition into a show, making a speech that convinced the courts to show leniency to him, as it may cool tensions in the Empire and held streamline the transition to constitutional monarchy. Instead of execution, he was sentenced to life in prison. A year later, in response to the Xinhai Revolution he was released as a measure of goodwill to bring the revolutionary movement into alliance. However, the Empire was dissolved all the same and a republic proclaimed. The radical adventures of Jingwei continued and he left Asia entirely to study Anarchism in France and Belgium alongside other Chinese radicals.

In France, he and the radical milieu formed a work-study program for Chinese students. Partnering with French political progressives, they established a fund where-by the poorest youths in China, possessing at least a middle school education may qualify for and acquire a pass to study in China, so long as they kept sobriety and worked in their off-time in local factories to learn “progressive ideas” at the university, and a “progressive life” in the factories.

The rate of student-worker acceptance accelerated during the Great War in Europe as men were removed from the factories to fight in the trenches north of Paris. While the program accepted many more student-workers from China, it also became a means by which thousands of migrant labor was exported from mostly northern China to work in French factories.

The program however came to its fated end towards the last days of the war. Under the harsh economic and civil distress of the late war racially motivated discontent boiled over, triggering a sequence of incidents in un-occupied France over the presence of too many Chinese. For their safety, many of the student-workers were sent home under a barrage of abuse and the program, which had lasted since 1912 was wound down in 1920 and canceled entirely in 1927. Ideologically, the program failed to create a universal ideal of what a progressive and modern state would be, especially as the later generations of student-workers suffered extreme racial scrutiny before the political situation Europe made it dangerous.

Even as the programs were closing, Wang Jingwei stayed on in Europe to observe the end of the war and the revolutions in Germany. He hoped that in the wind down of the war, the Chinese would have an opportunity to negotiate a settlement with his people. No such peace process emerged, and he left Europe feeling disheartened and saddened by the lack of a diplomatic solution to China's ills. He returned along with his radicals over the next several years, some moved on into Germany where they could observe their progress into communism. But Wang returned to China to reignite his revolutionary career. The best the Chinese delegation could return home with was a promulgated announcement from the German Kaiser was that, having not surrendered the territories formally to the Japanese: the Chinese should own claim to the German colonial sphere in Asia and the Pacific, pending further developments. This was late into the Kaisserreich, he would be deposed by Christmas.

Jingwei landed in Guangzhou to a different China than the one he had left. While he kept up a heavy correspondence with Sun Yat-Sen and his colleagues across the country, he had not fully braced himself for the changes he would step into. As the war in Europe was drawing to a close, Sun Yat-Sen's revolutionary project in the South of China was winding up. The Kuomintang had found itself atop a revolutionary project in federation with the civil and military leadership of the south. Political refugees from Russia, following the disaster of the Russian Revolution created an intellectual and political landscape that connected East and West that Wang could all too easily slide into. And while Wang could not join Sun Yat-Sen immediately at the head as he had wished, he could take up a position next to him and often accompanied him on trips to the less secure regions of the revolutionary territory.

The progress of reforming the Kuomintang government in the south had taken considerable time and patience between Sun Yat-Sen and Song Jiaoren. The stress itself was badly affected Song, who was suffering more bouts of traumatic anxiety following his assassination attempt. He was only just able to refrain the idealistic stumbling-forth of Sun Yat-Sen, who encouraged or discouraged at any opportunity could have up-ended their position in the south. But as the war was winding down in Europe in 1920 they had a revolutionary government pulled from the blood of intermittent wars with local war chiefs.

They had settled that the presidency, per the wishes of Sun would by president, head of the Executive Committee (cabinet) and command the army. But in this capacity he must be made subservient to the legislature, which was composed of two houses: a dominant Senate over a lower House. The military powers of the president would be likewise delegated out to a Chief of Staff, appointed by the president and conferred by the Senate. By the time of Wang's return, the Chief of Staff had undergone several change-overs since their formation due to deaths and revolt. But the sole constant so-far was that of Cai E of Yunnan with Li Zongren and Cen Chunxuan filling the rest.

By the 1920s plans were being made to build a Kuomintang-run military capital, somewhere within the vicinity of the revolutionary capital. Modeled off of the Kunming Military Academy. The arrival of the Russian Radicals were picked up as a possible pool to recruit foreign political and academic talent, but in the landscape of China's politics there were few officers readily available for military training.

The end of the war in Europe would become a gift to the aspirational Kuomintang government. The official end of the war saw a sharp cut to the armies on the continent as enlistedmen and officers were demobilized and sent home. As often, the tides of political and national revolution in Europe created a class of military officer without an army to fight for, their cause being defeated or their political trustworthiness cast in doubt. Of the largest class of politically untrustworthy officers send abroad were a great many junior and senior officers of the German military, who either being branded “too liberal” or “too social-democratic” during the first year of the Communist government soon found work in Southern China, or were sent to China by the Communist government as a sign of alliance to support a “great progressive revolution” against the evils of “aristocratic warlord reactionaries”. With the core of their military instructors and theorists secured, the groundwork for the Kuomintang military academy was completed and the revolutionary government moved quickly to physically build their academy on an island in the Pearl River south of Guangdong, to be called Whampoa.

Funding for the project came from a number of sources. A near constant debate had erupted among the revolutionary Guangdong government over what to do with the nation's opium, introduced to the country in the last century, and a blight since. The cultivation of the crop had become too valuable to remove entirely, especially over night to the province of Yunnan, whose agricultural sector relied heavily on opium production. However, a non-insignificant number of provincial governors and even warlords were trying to break the addiction of opium among their local populations and did not wish to see an excess of production to be fed back into the local population, while some – such as the Green Gang – were indifferent if not encouraging the production of narcotic substances for the home market. To satisfy the positions, the revolutionary government passed a “temporary” law where-by a export monopoly would be established in Guangzhou and Kunming to handle opium from the districts where they were produced, a commission would settle the purchasing price from growers and plantations, and sell the opium and morphine base on the international market, seeking customers largely among the state opium monopolies of the colonial French, British, and Dutch administration in South, South-East Asia, and the Pacific. The funds from this policy, started in 1919 would be used to fund the academy in-part.

The presence of German training officers also in-part inspired a competition of influence in Guangzhou to counter the threat of “German Communism” in East Asia. In an emergency bid to stop the spread of “Germanism” in China, the French offered large sums of money and surplus weapons, followed by the British and some American capital. Political changes in France even saw a number of liberally-minded French officers escaping to China and joining the growing list of foreign instructors at the academy. The growing backing quickly funded the academy's construction and operations for some years out, and ground was broken early in 1921. Even while the buildings were being raised, the first class of officers were beginning to fill the ranks of the academy, and the first administrators were selected.

The preparatory committee of the Whampoa Military Academy was selected by Sun Yat-Sen, and approved by the Senate. Sun Yat-Sen gave himself, and was granted the ceremonial position as the first academy premier. The superintendent was named as Deng Yanda, a fairly minor officer but who had came strongly recommended by the Guangdong commanders, narrowly beating Chiang Kai-Shek who was offered the leading commissioner of training. Wang Jingwei accepted his first party post as the political commissioner and began working on a political program for the academy to inculcate Republican ideals among the cadet body. Liao Zhongkai became the legislative representative at the academy, in effect representing the Kuomintang at the academy.

In its first decade, Whampoa would only offered a brief instructional period, lasting no more than twelve months. During which time, the foreign instructors would teach men already having served in a local army modern European doctrine and receive a political and philosophical education in the tenants of the army. In addition to the military doctrinal core being largely made of European instructors, the political wing was made up of men who had participated early in the work-study program. For the later, some early elements of the Kuomintang right criticized the political instructors as being “communist”, as the political instructors were known or suspected to be members of the small, nascent Communist Party. In response, Sun announced it was “sufficient” and ignored the matter. It was suspected that his wife, Soong Ching-ling had something to do with it.

Soong Ching-Ling was the middle daughter of a family of five, the prominent Soong family of Shanghai. Her father had been a life-long supporter of Chinese Nationalism and a friend and partner of Sun Yat-Sen. As a merchant, and fellow Blue Gang member, he was sworn to protect and assist Sun; even as their personal relationship was strained. Charlie Soong, the patriarch of the Soon family had amassed a large fortune as a Shanhai industrialist and banker, and funded many of Sun's early days in revolution and adventure. But their personal relationship soured and turned after Ching-Ling's marriage to Sun, a man some thirty-years her senior, against Charlie's wishes. She was cut off from the family wealth, but being American educated brought her education and American, political progressivism with her. She believed deeply in the mission of Sun and that of China to the detriment of almost all else, her love of both was in one.

The death of Charlie Soong in 1918 ended the family freeze. Ching-Ling's eldest sister, Soong “Nancy” Ai-Ling had married the powerful H.H Kung the powerful financial advisor of Shanxi Warlord Yan Xishan, who while being sympathetic to Sun remained neutral in the affairs of China. Together with the financial talents of brother Tse-Vung Soong (TV Soong) they controlled a large amount of money for the Kuomintang and its allies. But while Kung, a descendant of the Confucian – Kung - family was more conservative in his disposition, TV Soong was a Harvard Liberal, conservative by American standards, but nearly revolutionary in China; if personally squishy.

The first cadres from out of Whampoa would form a small but highly effective armed force. They proved themselves highly effective given their poor material circumstances when in 1923 a military mutiny against the political threat imposed by a Kuomintang Academy against the local military hierarchy was soundly defeated by a body of three-hundred Whampoa graduates allowing for a shake up of the local military hierarchy and the imposition of the Whampoa men into the local clique. And again in 1924 Whampoa graduates fought against and beat an uprising of merchants and their hired thugs in the city, protesting taxes and the emergence of a Kuomintang controlled back Sun ordered established by TV Soong to consolidate the finances of the southern markets.

Composed of men from Yunnan and Shanghai, the graduating classes of the academy, who had started their training in tents on the marshy island south of Guangzhou and were now undergoing more rigorous doctrinal training in halls and classrooms became a powerful military clique in their own right that began to infuse many of the armies under Kuomintang control and bringing them, at least ideologically, into a single weapon. Discussed since their expulsion from Beijing, the Northern Expedition Sun Yat-Sen had been dreaming of was becoming a reality and based on their effectiveness in battle it was believed these new revolutionary soldiers would readily match the warlords of the north.

While the likelihood of the expedition was possible, conditions in the north had changed and at present the Beijing government was warming to the Kuomintang in the south. Sun embarked on a tour of the country, giving speeches in Hong Kong and Tianjin in the north, set to also meet with dignitaries in Beijing. In Hong Kong he publicly outlined the political program of the Kuomintang, a synthesis of Chinese idealism and materialist necessity to see it put through and an image of the social future of China, free from a class of aristocratic gentry and an end of feudalism in China. Traveling north to Tianjin with his wife, Wang, and close followers he repeated his message to a packed crowd in Tianjin, and added he hoped to see in the near future a congress of all-China that would see to an end of the warlord period in the north. The response to the speech was ecstatic, and he was personally complimented by Muslim general Ma Fuxiang and Feng Yuxiang who reported they would be “more than willing” to join the cause of a United China.

He meant to meet with then-president Duan Qirui, who had been appointed president the year before during a war more apocalyptic than the revolution of 1911 by the Japanese-backed Fengtian Clique. However the influence of the president was weak, and all the same Sun arrived weak to the meeting. The two talked inconclusively for a time, before he retired for the day, canceling a public appearance. The speech he was to give was published afterwards in the newspapers, and recovering from his bout of weakness traveled to Kobe Japan to give a speech to a congress of Pan-Asianism, speaking out against the tradition of the unequal tradition and the encroachment of Russian warlords from Siberia into China, exacerbating conditions there (the 1924 Zhili-Fengtian War was soon followed by a Fengtian-Primorski War just before the arrival of Sun).

On his return to the south, Sun sought to broaden the base of the government. 1925 was a Legislative election year, during which some seats were lost by the Kuomintang and the old minority parties and picked up by new additions to the political scene. A nascent Communist party emerged in the legislature, seeking to expand worker's right and predominately supporting Shanghai labor unions, hard street fighting had erupted between the communists and the Green Gang, which saw a departure of Chiang Kai-Shek from his official positions and then reveal of his arrest by British authorities in the city, sparking an international episode which would not conclude until 1926. But also from the American Chinese community emerged the Public Interest – or Zhi Gong – Party, which assumed the rule of a federalist opposition to the desire to of Sun to expand the centrality of government. Reaching an agreement with the Communist Party over an anti-imperialist, anti-treaty platform, Sun was able to expand the Kuomintang platform on the promise of an expansion of Party social doctrine. However, he would not fully realize this.

During the 1925 elections, Sun made sparse public appearances, rumors would be confirmed come March that the president had undergone medical diagnostic procedures back in Beijing under secrecy and protection by warlord Feng Yuxiang that diagnosed him with gallbladder cancer. It was discovered in an advanced stage. Though the medical staff in Beijing had given him only ten days to live, treatment by radium exposure had seen him through the initial ten days. The official news broke in February, when disputes arose over the repatriation of Sun over fears of intrigue and an assassination attempt force Sun's then acting Vice-President Zhang Renjie – Song Jiaoren having passed away over cirrhosis two years prior – to publicly demand his return to the south. There were legitimate fears as well that the acting president of the north Duan Qirui may return the outlaw status to the Kuomintang, reversing Li Yuanhong's earlier clemency, over concerns of the Kuomintang's growing base of power which would soon rival and overtake the Beiyang warlords.

Sun had not traveled alone to Beijing, and Soong Ching-Ling and Wang Jingwei were present with him. He agreed that he should return to the south and seek additional treatment. But in the shock of cancer went back and forth over whether he should seek traditional care, or follow his western medical training and seek European medicine further from the warlords of the north. Despite the protests of the doctors caring for him, he was finally moved. Before he did, witnessed by a nurse, Wang Jingwei and Soong Ching-Ling took Sun's will on the event the trip would kill him. Packing him on a train, he went south in the dead of the night, arriving in Shanghai to rest, before being moved onto a steamer and arriving in Guangzhou to party headquarters.

By this stage he had grown delirious from exhaustion and was unable to speak from himself. His wife made the decision to move him to Hong Kong to seek further treatment, and despite the reluctance of British authorities he was moved to Hong Kong where he was given mixed treatment for his cancer.

At this stage he had far outlived the expectations of the doctors. But physically too unwell to rule, matters of rule passed to Zhang Renjie, who saw to the end of elections.

Zhang Renjie was a Chinese anarchist, born in Zhejiang in 1877. His family owned and operated a successful salt enterprise, and their estates were expanded when his father married the daughter of local powerful silk merchants. They could afford to put Renjie through the Confucian exams, where he was able to progress into the halls of political power. As an academic he discovered Anarchism, and though working within the Qing government became critical of the current state of imperial politics.

He joined a small revolutionary clique within the Imperial Court in 1902, moving to Shanghai where his contacts with fellow revolutionaries expanded and he would later move from there to Paris where he discovered Anarchism and joined local Chinese Anarchist societies. Ever the thrifter, he also established an export company, importing to Paris silk, tea, and Chinese art. The later becoming a prominent part of Renjie's mercantile portfolio, as during the revolutionary years he became a prominent dealer in Chinese artifacts, earning the moniker “Curio Chang”. He met Sun on one of his trips through Europe to raise funds and support for his fight against the Manchu Qings, and joined the Tongmenhui.

After the Xinhai Revolution, Zhang Renjie returned to China. He was offered important posts on his return, which he declined. He soon adopted a more important position for Sun as one of his financiers. Zhang proved especially good at trading international stocks in Shanghai, and amassed for himself a small personal fortune which went into his private businesses and into a pipeline of funds for the Kuomintang which proved useful in supporting it during its rocky early days as an outlawed rebel government in the south of China. In Shanghai as well, he met and became an associate member of the Green Gang and supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek.

As the star of the Kuomintang rose, he rose with it, finally accepting the position of Vice President of the revolutionary Guangdong government after the death of Song Jiaoren. But with the arrest of Chiang Kai-Shek, his attentions were turned in trying to get him out of sentence by the British. But his co-affiliation with the Green Gang blocked his efforts, and very nearly ruined the Kuomintang's attempts to move Sun Yat-Sen to Hong Kong.

As Sun Yat-Sen recovered in Hong Kong, or passed slowly into hospice uprisings occurred in Shanghai during May. On the 15th of May, a Japanese foreman shot and killed a Chinese laborer picketing a Japanese owned cotton mill. Tensions in the city had been growing over the last year. The electoral win of the Chinese Community Party only raised tensions as members of the Green Gang began retaliation and the Japanese ordered Japanese nationals working in Shanghai to be armed for self-defense. Matters were made worse, as Sun's “illness” was attributed to Japanese intrigue, as much as it was the presence of Japanese-backed warlord Zhang Zoulin being posted just outside the city. Protests and strikes in the city saw arrests, especially after the foreman was shot and killed in retribution. Protesters appeared outside of the British-commanded police-station where the retribution killer was being held and tensions mounted throughout the day as brazen attempts to break into the police station and free the prisoner were mounted. Eventually, a squad of police riflemen were called up to disperse the crowds, and firing into the crowd several dozens were killed. Over the next couple of days hundreds more were killed.

Since the conclusion of the German Communist Revolution in 1921, small numbers of German cadres had been arriving into China's industrialized cities alongside the politically suspicious officers sent overseas there. As part of a larger delegation, they recognized the offer of the Kaiser that former German territories “in the East” were justifiably Chinese. For the Chinese Proletariat, they galvanized anti-imperialist sentiment against the Japanese and British. Already heavily unionized, Shanghai workers were readily taught how to raise barricades and to fight street battles, leading to their victory vs Green Gang candidates. Through the screening of German and union cadres, intelligence was leaked to the general party that filtered a large number of Green Gang members who were bound for Whampoa for training. By April, due to the incidents of May the city was brought to a state near to siege by general Zhang Zoulin. Zhang Zongchang was called down to the city, who managing to enter sewed a mass field of destruction through the neighborhoods his soldiers managed to enter before being stopped by cadres. As sympathy strikes broke out in Hong Kong and Macau, freezing those cities international pressure mounted to keep the violence in Hong Kong from spreading.

Sun Yat-Sen tried what he could do to settle the situation without upsetting his hosts. Merely issuing a written statement of timid support for the Shanghai workers but advising against excessive violence in Shanghai. It was enough that until he finally passed June, embargoes of British business and to sell to Europeans in Hong Kong was quietly held. But as his body was removed to Guangzhou, the sorrow turned to anger and the city's workers resorted to violent demonstration over British imperialism as the last Kuomintang member left the city. The Portuguese colony in Macau was practically frozen for the better part of the remainder of the year. Where-as in Hong Kong, British regulars were summoned to put down the demonstrations and upwards of four-hundred people were shot and killed at demonstrations, marking a pattern of suppression the British deployed as well in British South Asia.

The death of Sen Yat-Sen put a lot of things on hold, namely the fate of the Northern Expedition. A state funeral was held for him, with plans to build a grand tomb for him in the city that was to otherwise be the capital, Nanjing. The issues of military command came into doubt, as Zhang Renjie had no experience of interest in military command or revolutionary violence; he was a man of money. He used his position to petition firmly for appointing Chiang Kai-Shek as overall command of the military, and for a position separate from president to be made to facilitate that. But in the intervening time, the arrest of Chiang and gossip had called a faction of the Kuomintang into doubt and the office of vice-president needed to be filled. Debates opened in the legislature as to who would become vice-president. Because of her closeness to the recently deceased president, Soong Ching-Ling, at thirty-two was elected by the senate as the acting vice-president in November. And in protest against the right of the Kuomintang Party, Wang Jingwei was given the temporary position of the Generalissimo under Zhang with the charge he would abdicate the position on the closure of the Northern Expedition. This naturally caused protest, and a small clique of Whampoa graduates actually mutinied and retired their commands, offsetting the Expedition for another several months.

In February 1926, the British finally agreed to release Chiang on condition that he never return to Shanghai. Later that month, Cai E would pass away leaving his position in the Chief of Staff open. Bitterly, he was nominated and elected to serve in Cai E's place to prevent uproar over Cai E's successor in the Yunnan Clique, Zhu De from inheriting the post and causing another wave of protest in the still fragile government. By this time, Zhang Renjie accepted now was the time to mount the expedition and forces were mobilized to the north to prepare for the invasion. To keep Chiang from entering Shanghai, he was posted to the west. To spearhead the invasion, a small division of armored cars, Type-1s were put at the front.

As part of the assistance the Germans offered to China with instructors and theorists, so also soon arrived the technical parts and capabilities to build a factory in Guangzhou for the construction of small armored vehicles. Built during the construction of the Whampoa military academy, the factory was constructed and staffed initially with German technicians to train a Chinese workforce on the agreement that the Chinese would send to Germany regular shipments of medical morphine base as a for-kind exchange. German and Chinese vehicle designers struggled initially to construct a low-expense fighting vehicle for the Republican military, but soon settled on a small vehicle chassis. It needed only to be lightly armored, to protect it from the small arms of the northern warlords, whose quality of fire arms would prove to be too weak for the small, loud, whining vehicle. It was mounted with a light machine gun, and in addition could carry five infantrymen. Under almost cottage industry conditions, by the time the expedition launched they had only built two-hundred trucks, twenty of which were set aside as reserve or as training vehicles for Whampoa and select training regiments as-needed. The vehicles were built for a plan of combined-arms warfare developed by the exiled German command, learned in their experience in the European Great War, if they were denied access to the heavy armored units they hoped to have, due in part to China's impoverished industry and development, and a light flexible platform was called for.

The first moved of the Expedition was the forcing the southern warlords in Jiangxi and Hunan to heel. Predominately neutral towards the Revolutionary government, they were caught off guard with the arrival of Kuomintang troops. And to their surprise the armies of the Kuomintang proved far more effective than they had anticipated. By autumn, The Kuomintang had taken Wuhan and Nanjing. Chiang's forces under support of the Yunnan Clique's private air-force took Chongqing and Chengdu. Fighting the forces of Zhang Zoulin outside of Shanghai and Zhang Zongchang was forced to retreat all the way back to his home base in Shandong. This engagement in the early winter of 1926 alerted the Fengtian Clique to the dangers of the Kuomintang government at last, and he scrambled to organize forces to fight them and he ordered tanks from the French, which were shipped out of Vietnam and Tianjin the following year. Yan Xishan declared his support for the Kuomintang and joined the expedition in December, meeting with the forces of Chiang to march West.

Crossing the Pearl River before winter, the Kuomintang army ended the first phase of the Northern Expedition on the banks of the Huai River, bringing the entirety of the South of China under the banner of their revolution. As Chiang's forces moved north along the interior mountains, the forces under the Hui Muslim Ma families were either defeated, or declared their support of the Revolution and submitted to the Kuomintag government.

During the period of the invasion, the government deliberated over where next to move the government. The more conservative elements of the state argued to move the seat of the Republic to Nanjin, which had been the location chosen by Sun Yat-Sen. But a faction of detractors had arisen and took the opposite half, arguing to relocate to Wuhan, which had been where the revolution began in 1911. The later was informed over a growing distrust of Chiang Kai-Shek and his ambition in the government. But as the armies reached the Huai River, the government elected by a bare majority to move to Wuhan on a temporary basis and decamped there in January.

The move to Wuhan would also be an important for the left of the Chinese Republic, as the city held a large population of revolutionary cadres, either of progressive or socialist students or communist organized unions in the large industrial city. These radically charged groups would form a base of street fighters that would defend the young government from internal threats in the decade to come.

The history of the Chinese Communist Party was at this point very young, as were many minority parties who belonged to the Kuomintang revolutionary coalition, even if they stood in political opposition. Began as a reading groups among China's universities in the early 1910s. The party remained small due in part to the small base of interest that existed in China, much the potential manpower that could be mobilized by the party initially small, and centered in only a handful of cities; the bulk of China living as rural peasants and urbanized artisans, merchants, or students. But following the German Revolution and the turbulence of May 1925 there party was able to grow in strength, reinforced by German revolutionary agents that taught the workers of Shanghai how to engage in street battles and giving shape to an ideological project. As a product of that project, the Chinese Communist Party adhered itself electorally to the principles of Sun Yat-Sen as a vision for China, so that it might someday become a unified and developed enough state that the nascent proletariat may become fully matured enough to take over after the German model.

To the revolutionary heart of the Kuomintang, especially for the likes of Wang Jingwei any counter-balance to the suspected influence of the Shanghai underground in steering the direction of the Revolution was an all-around good. The arrest of Chiang in Shanghai had revealed a small window, from which the light of suspicion glowed. From just inside that room, the green light could only emanate from the criminal conservatism of the Green Gang the Chen family. The Communists, as coarse as they were came forward as an opportune force to bolster a revolutionary energy that was starting to flag leading up to the Northern Expedition, and to keep it safe the base of the Revolution needed to be as far from southern warlords and Shanghai as possible. It was at this time that president Zhang Renjie was feeling himself more ostracized.

The Northern Expedition hit a snag during the winter and spring, as the feared revolutionary support in the south bore some truth. Garrison officers in Guizhou, Guangxi, and Guangdong attempted a mutiny against the Republic after their move to Hubei. The rebellions forced the Expedition to turn around and put down the mutiny and the provincial armies were disbanded and the remaining forced put under direct command of Whampoa officers. In Yunnan raids from out of Tibet called for the recall of several units to bolster the border with Tibet, during late winter and into spring, skirmishes would ensue in the high mountains of Tibet's foothills and in and around Lijiang. But with the end of spring on the horizon, the expedition continued en'force. The northern warlords had during the brief peace assembled a coalition army of their own called the National Pacification Army with the goal of halting the advance, and invading the south to crush the upstart southern revolutionary army. Armed by the Japanese and the French, the National Pacification engaged the Kuomintang Army at Nanyang and Suqian. More compared to that of the Kuomintang armies, the conditions of the NPA soldiers were far less consistent and many warlord units broke and fled or cast of their uniforms and ran. The hastily assembled tank units of the Fengtian Clique were defeated and the full tank armament captured and sent south to equip the army's own tank training units to-be.

A turning point occurred in the Northern Expedition when Feng Yuxiang couped the president in Beijing and took the city for himself, cutting the NPA off at the head. The city was surrendered to Wang Jingwei on September 1, 1927. Following was a successive serious of mop-up campaigns. The assassination of Zhang Zuolin in the closing days of the Northern Expedition brought his son Zhang Xueliang to power in Manchuria who surrendered Manchuria and the Fengtian Clique to the Kuomintang fourteen days after the surrender of Beijing. On October 12, 1927 Kuomintang soldiers entered Ulaanbaatar, driving out the Russian warlord who had taken power there and bringing Mongolia into the Republic, although intermittent fighting in Mongolia would not end until 1931.

As the government moved to Wuhan, a new era in the Revolution began. With their rivals in the north vanquished, the process of writing a new constitution was dusted off. But with the position of the Kuomintang and their allies more firmly secured they had all the time and space to enforce their ideals. Over the course of 1927, a new constitutional convention would be called to draft a constitution “for the Second Phase” of the Revolution, where-by the Revolutionary parties would oversee a period of development in China that would see China arise as a modern power and could seek its own absolute self-determination. During this period, with political stability being brought back to China many of the forgotten developmental and economic needs of the nation could be met.

As Kuomintang-Ma forces invaded Xinjiang, liberating the province from the Central Asian warlords that had spilled into the region after the collapse of the Russian Empire the capital structure of China was changed under the oversight of – or rather, competition – between TV Soong and HH Kung. Taking advantage of his association with the government, Soong and Renjie founded a new investment bank in Shanghai, the Central China Exchange Bank. Along with the South China Commercial Bank owned and operated by Soong they consolidated financial resources to purchase shares in international companies, funneling their dividends into Chinese development as the world's economic system went through turbulence. The capital raised was swept through the treasury to fund developmental projects in South China and to repair the railroads and transit links along the Yangtze to Shanghai. Where as Kung built for himself a insular financial and mercantile empire in North and Central China, handling the money of the warlords of the North that had surrendered and joined the Kuomintang forces.

In 1928, a new constitution for this second phase was written. Four branches of government were fully articulated, a Executive Yuan housing the office of president, vice-president, and the cabinet. A Legislative Yuan housing the dual houses of the legislature and the premier, the representative of the legislature to the Executive Yuan. Third: the Control Yuan, a body dedicated to the oversight of national regulation and the examinations of government ministers. And fourth: the Judicial Yuan, which would become the highest court in China. The rights of provincial governments would be ensured, but expressed in the Constitution was a later goal to reorganize the military in order to someday manage the erratic structure of the national army, without a firm and expressed date given. But most controversial was the decision that the Kuomintang Party would maintain a minimum 1/3 presence in the legislature. The constitution would take effect at the end of the presidential term.

China managed to weather the 1929 crash, its money back predominately in silver. Albeit the cash situation in the Republic was best described as “anarchic” as they busied themselves in creating a new currency to replace the Yuan-era Silver Yuan. Favored by the northern warlords, the Silver Yuan was the only legal tender in China, but incapable of enforcing its own laws after the death of Yuan Shikai himself, the currency had become nearly worthless as counterfeiting ran rampant, numerous warlord factions mass producing fake bills had crashed the value of the Yuan, and the problem was still endemic. Many cash purchases therefore had drifted towards foreign currencies depending on the region of China. The British Pound Sterling, US Dollar, Mexican Dollar, French Francs, and even miscellaneous gold and silver coins, if not straight barter exchange (in southern China, opium had become a common exchange commodity). This had greatly hampered the tax ability of the government in Beijing, who turned to exchanging the raw silver in reserves with foreign governments, and accepting raw silver in loans. Factions from outside Beijing, like the Kuomintang had been forced to finance their operations and raise their own cash for circulation against the Silver Yuan through foreign enterprise.

But by October, a new national currency was announced the government, ahead of the presidential elections was fast working to consolidate the national silver reserves to back and prepare for the transition to the Chinese Dollar. The government reinforced its commercial position by being able to negotiate with the western powers to begin unraveling the unequal treaties, a skill Zhang Renjie was more than capable of performing. A series of debt exchanges were performed, where-by the trade debt the former war-time countries contracted with China for war-time production were written off against the debts forced upon the Chinese. Abandoning their recognition of Russia as a nation-state as they were in their own period of warlordism, the entire debt with Russia was written off, and not even the money they lent to Yuan would be repaid, and the silver and gold they had sent to Yuan was simply added into the reserves. Germany, having had a revolution that changed not only its government but its economy was, as had it been written out of the books fully. What gold reserves China had was converted to silver, or handled by TV Soong to acquiring more foreign stocks.

With the election of 1930, Zhang Renjie announced he would be stepping down and returning to civilian life. This would also be the election of the new Constitution came into effect. Per its initial directives, an appointed Control Yuan was raised, comprised entirely of members of the Kuomintang Party to hand pick the new legislatures who would fill the Kuomintang pool and manage the first all-China election since 1911. Given the fractiousness of the country at the time, and the influence of several warlords being still strongly felt it was severely contentious. Numerous denouncements of violent coercion and bribery were made across the country. Most significant was what was felt in Shanghai, where the riots and police suppression forced communist supporters to stay at home and there was one case of kidnapping in Beijing over the election. All the same, the Control Yuan validated the results of the election, and the Kuomintang returned to being the majority party in the entire country. The new government elected, Li Jishen was elected by the legislature as president in the face of competition from Wang Jiangwei.

Shortly after the election, scandal broke out in Shanghai where allegedly, in a repeat of May 1925 another Japanese manager at a factory shot and killed a Chinese worker. The eruption of anger over the incident became much more focused against the Japanese than it had last time, with the city's police force being in transition towards Chinese management following the first rounds of negotiations winding down the Unequal Treaties. Serving as the new chief of police in the Consolidated Shanghai Police force, the 30 year old Chen Lifu, nephew of the slain Chen Qimei issued a statement that the police would take the matter seriously, and swiftly, detaining the Japanese manager “for his safety”. It however broke eight months later the suspect was quietly returned to Japan, and the investigation that concluded two months after blamed a conspiracy of “Anarchic-Communists” in the city acting “outside the regular union channels” and several hundred arrests were made in the weeks following, including several known organizers and all charged with conspiracy for murder. The incident became divisive and the response from the central government indicated to the public for the first time the ideological split slowly forming within the Kuomintang organization.

In 1931, internal rivalries within Tibet spilled over into China, the 9th Panchen Lama having fled to Chinese territory in Sichuan to escape the bitter relationship he had with the 13th Dalai Lama over control of Tibetan spiritual and secular matters. In Sichuan he was protected by any one of a number of the still-extant warlords who controlled the province. Tibet as well had territorial claims within China, and the flight of the Panchen Lama only inflamed those disputes further. The 13th Dalai Lama made the decision to invade China. Opportunistic armies in Central Asia took the invasion as a chance to themselves raid into China, and former-Russian Islamist armies allied themselves with the Tibetans to invade Western China, lead by Wahabbist and Salafist imams and leaders who had been expelled by the otherwise secular Muslim leaders of the Ma armies.

An immediate Republican response to the invasion was delayed, as in the same year a mixture of heavy rains from an unseasonably heavy typhoon season following a drought that had afflicted much of China converged with the melting of heavier than usual snow packs in the Tibetan plateau. A tremendous flood overcame China's Yangtze watershed and spilled out up the tributaries of the Yangtze and the many canals that linked the rivers to inundate lower China. The immense humanitarian disaster proved to be a crisis more disastrous than that of the Tibetan invasion and even that of the wars between warlords that threatened to destabilize the economy. The armies being mobilized to respond to the war in Tibet and Xinjiang were immediately diverted by necessity to flood relief. Zhang Renjie emerged back into the public stage with a large donation for flood relief along with TV Soong, who was picked by the government by influence of his sisters to manage flood relief.

The nepotism of the decision was well founded, as the financier was a proven manager. With Zhang and his brother-in-law HH Kung he built up a flood relief program. He brought in the aide of American missionary organizations, tapping into the Christian organizations his family had been deeply involved in to throw up field hospitals and render aid and to raise money abroad. Long entrenching themselves in the Republican regime, German aid by way of direct material was shipped to China to manage the distribution of relief and the repair of the infrastructure damaged in the flood. But the repair efforts would take years, and the portfolio of the relief efforts would become the efforts Soong would retreat into in the coming years. The floods, effectively leveling Wuhan would also hamstring the Republican government, who found their transitional offices demolished in the flood waters. Administrative crisis gripped the government, further slowing their response to the war in Sichuan.

Between the floods and the fractious nature of Sichuan, the Tibetan armies were quick to gain a fast and easy foothold in the province, taking the ethnic Tibetan territories in dispute. The warlord Liu Wenhui himself was captured and killed by Tibetan soldiers when they left the highlands and took Chengdu. The Ma family armies declared their support for Sichuan, but had to themselves respond to the attacks from the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in the Tarim Basin and Tian Shan mountains. The Republican government organized a response, and sent soldiers to pacify the province. In the winter of 1933 the Republican Army re-entered Sichuan after restoring vital links into the province damaged by the floods and drove out the Tibetans. Liberating Chengdu they chased them back to the mountains of Tibet. The warlords of the province having been defeated by the Tibetans and the flood, the re-organized government of the province was much more centralized, rather than divided between four different armies. The permanent Republican Army garrison in the province meant that in the future, Sichuan would be much more integrated.

In late 1934 with flood relief still ongoing anger broke out in America over growing ownership of American company stock by Chinese firms and individuals. It was revealed that figures like TV Soong had come to own large controlling shares in major US firms like General Motors. The news broke when it was announced that a General Motors factory would be built on Chongming Island, in the Yangtze River delta north of Shanghai. A panic ensued when an investigation indicated that China owned “upwards of 70% of GM stock”, although TV Soong and Chinese investors would insist that they owned far less, just about half of General Motors. But the new government in the US and American share-holders, intent on protecting American interests launched their own investigation, putting the rate of Chinese ownership much higher at 80%. While the Chinese investment banks protested these figures were inflated far out of reality, they were forced to scramble. Half of General Motors was cut to form General Asian Motors in 1935 to continue work on the factory inviting American sanction against the new company and the technicians who had gone to China to work on and in the factory. TV Soong's bank was brought to the brink of collapse over the episode, and he retired temporarily from active finance for a year and a half over the harsh public and diplomatic criticism levied against him. HH Kung came in in the meanwhile to fill the gaps TV Soong's departure left behind, managing to work himself into the same cross-Pacific relationship Soong had developed, if in a less robust way. Even as the American response was receiving criticism from the Chinese public, likening it to the Unequal Treaties the government saw it necessary to work to the best of their ability to smooth it over, dependent on an inflow of charity from American organizations for flood relief.

A part of the deepening crisis of the Yangtze flooding was that food production in China was greatly reduced. While the government fought to keep the humanitarian conditions from worsening, especially through reaching out for international donations of food, the relief efforts were haphazard and poverty and starvation became common place as all other events carried on. Coastal provinces where direct access to such assistance was easier by proximity to ports, or those provinces unaffiliated by the floods did fare better. Food riots ignited on and off throughout the central and north-southern China in winter 1931, 1932, 1933, and 1934 as the bodies piled up. But in 1935 widespread discontent lead to the lynching of local military commanders and the exile of the provincial government from Hunan as peasants from across the province conducted a wide-spread uprising. Such an uprising was not new to the province, as one such mass-uprising had been key to the Kuomintang's success in seizing Hunan in their march northward, helping to end a regional famine in the mid-20s. Perhaps inspired by this success the peasants had, they did so again.

The uprising had been organized by the Gelaohui, a loose confederation of rural fraternities, which in the century prior had been dedicated to anti-Qing activity, and anti-foreigner violence. During the revolution they joined with the Tongmenhui to establish a Republic, but due in part to their decentralized and leaderless nature had soon after faded from actual politics. They emerged now and again as opportunity and incident inclined, often partaking in actions against European and Japanese agents. Known for concealing hatchets on their person, they were typically regarded as gangs of brigands in the Chinese countryside and their suppression under the later Republic drove them underground, or far from the Chinese cities. But with the massive flooding of China, they evoked peasant superstition and lead attacks of foreign missions and aid attempts in the countryside, blaming them for angering the ancestral gods and otherwise conspiring to weaken the Chinese people by depriving them of food. In Hunan in particular this made relief efforts all the more difficult and could only be distributed by the Chinese authorities, which while distracted by other crises made their ability to do that very limited. This lack of aid lead to the continued radicalization of the peasant rebels, who transitioned into attacking the local gentry of Hunan, breaking into their houses to steal their grain or even butchering entire families as “traitors”. The sort of violence they carried out was reminiscent of the Boxers, and when they graduated to overthrowing the provincial government did the Wuhan government finally take the matter seriously.

The arrival of troops to the province to quell the violence had mixed effects. Inspired by the presence of the Republican Army, large numbers of peasants stepped down from their violence under the belief that aide had finally arrived and they would soon be relieved from their poverty, as had happened during the Expedition. But when troops from Guizhou marched into the province, bands of peasant militants fought them. These armies of peasants intensified the violence in the province, and poorly armed and fed soldiers and insurgents lead to endemic looting in Hunan through 1935 and 1936.

During the beginning of the uprising, the government dispatched a team to write a report on the conditions of the province in 1935, as troops were moving in. Lead by a journalist for the New Youth magazine, Mao Tse Tung the report concluded that the desperate conditions suffered by the peasants was due in part to the the landlord relationship they still lived under. While economic conditions of the province would have suffered tremendously in the aftermath of the flood, they would have been able to obtain a bare substance level of existence the report claimed, had the landlords not been present to demand their share of rent over top of the republic's tax policy. The report came out in time for the 1935 election, and the timing of events threatened the presidential position of Li Jishen whose response so-far had been to restrain the rebellion with force. The right-wing coalition took a public hit in the narrow moment before the polls when the investigative team revealed evidence of a massacre of peasants at Yiyang. Promising to drive ahead with a firmer hand the land policy of Sun Yat-Sen, to lesson or fully abolish the role of landlords Wang Jingwei was elected president. But his promises to perform land reform were frustrated from the Kuomintang right and center which had built up a base among the small merchant and old landlords of China.

Land reform attempts were frustrated in China, and the rebellion in Hunan continued apace. Anti-Land Lord revolts spread among the rest of the peasantry through 1936 bringing with armed crackdowns against the insurgent peasants in Southern China. An additional army under Chiang Kai-Shek was sent into Hunan from his army's base in Xi'an. Under pretext of security, Chiang entered Wuhan and compelled the government, under threat of arms to relocate from Wuhan to Nanjing. While the move was not itself considered a coup of the government, it was very much charged as one, as relocation to Nanjing put the government in close vicinity to the right-wing military clique based in Jiangsu. But an attempt to charge Chiang for the attack of the government failed under the reason of the peasant revolts. All the same, the arrival of Chiang's army sparked outrage in Wuhan and partisan clashes with the army threatened to spill over into more regional violence. But instances of protest and mutiny among Chiang's troops forced him to move his army from Wuhan, but not without pitched battles. Sensing tension a number of other regional military governments put their armies on the alert in the event of a coup in Hubei. Zhang Xueliang, the former warlord of the Fengtian Clique in Manchuria raised the troops he had surrendered to the Kuomintang previously to march south to Nanjing to meet with the government. Privately announcing to Wang Jingwei his anger at Chiang's aggression towards the government. He offered to kidnap the commander if need be.

This wouldn't come to be, because late in the Winter of 1936 a bomb went off in Northern China.

Since the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894 Japan established and had been growing a sphere of influence as with the Western nations in China. During the Russo-Japanese Waar, they took the city of Port Arthur, or Dalian on the Liaodong Peninsula. Its presence expanded again after the Boxer Rebellion and several more times in the aftermath of the Xinhai Revolution until it controlled a vast spread of railroads in Northern China that fed its commercial and industrial ambitions as far south as Shanghai and its heavy industry in Korea. The bomb that went off south of Shenyang damaged one of those tracks, derailing a passenger train on the way north from Dalian killing seventeen Japanese citizens and injuring upwards of three-hundred. The incident sparked outrage in China, and equal outrage – and confusion – in Japan. The Chinese government promised to investigate the matter.

The Chinese however would not have the opportunity to do so, as at the beginning of the new year the Japanese Kwangtung Army invaded, initially at the surprise of its own commanders but a near coup in Dalian and Tokyo cowed the Japanese command and government to complying. The invasion was further supported by elements from Sakhalin, which had been conquered by Japan in 1929 and the Amur which the Japanese had snatched away in 1932. Supported by Russian warlord commanders the 1937 invasion rapidly snatched away Mongolia and Manchuria from the Chinese government and Beijing was threatened by summer. The Japanese guards of the railroad between Beijing and Tianjin – one of the multi-national left overs of the Boxer treaties, where the railroad was protected by several units of foreign countries, the RoC agreeing to keep them as security vs banditry in the north – was cut when the Japanese security detail blew the line in several places.

Zhang Xueliang was the first to return north to respond to the threat. While Chiang insisted on remaining in Hubei to contain the peasant uprising, but the change of China's fates had the effect on cooling the revolt. The same fraternities that inspired the revolt quickly latched onto the attack by the Japanese in the north and their priorities shifted. Chiang was finally convinced to join the defense and his army sent north to form a defensive line at the Great Wall. And while his forces did, he made the puzzling decision to not join them, instead leaving for the city of Tai'an where he officially established his headquarters, while personally retreating to sacred Mt. Tai.

Forces primarily under the command of Zhang Xueliang engaged the Japanese forces at Jinzhou in a counterattack in May 1937, but by April were in a fighting retreat. In June forces of the Japanese were converging in the mountains north of the Beijing suburbs as the Kuomintang army arrived to reinforce the line. The foremost defensive perimeter of Beijing being at the Great Wall itself which, while in ruins would serve valiently in mid-June. While the Republican Army was capable in fighting the warlords of China, they were fought into retreat by the Japanese. Their withdrawal was covered by the 31st and 22nd Standard Divisions of the army, who managed to hold the Japanese forces back for two days, depleting their ammunition and fighting the Japanese with swords and rocks until they were killed or captured by the Japanese military.

From out of Beijing the Japanese created the puppet state of Manchukuo, at whose head was the restored emperor Puyi, and a council of former Qing revanchists and Japanese officials. At this stage, the Japanese government attempted a petition for peace in China, offering to restrain the Kwantung Army and its allies if the Republican government would agree to recognize the existence of Manchukuo. However the invasion was the last straw for the Chinese political class, and despite ironic protests from the Kuomintang far-right crediting the invasion of China as a weakness within the Party and the Republic, the offer for peace was answered with broad formal deceleration of war against Japan for the restoration of Chinese territorial integrity against the invader.

The summer of 1937 was spent carrying out a counter-attack against the Japanese. Trenches had been dug just south of Baoding and the civilian population began evacuating ahead of the Japanese advance. The main forces commanded by Chiang Kai Shek held the Japanese in the northern part of the Central Plains. As the Japanese attacked Chiang's trench lines, Zhang Xueliang mounted a counter-attack, combining with men under Feng Yuxiang to attack through Datong. The maneuver forced the Japanese to turn, and the newly formed puppet government in Beijing was sent to Cheifeng.

In the north, the Japanese found a grueling gorilla war in the under-developed north of Manchuria, made difficult by a lack of coordination with their Russian allies who chose often to simply raid the landscape to take supplies and wealth back to Russia to supply their own competitions against one another for influence and hegemony in military politics.

Chiang had declared his intention to hold Northern China like the French in the Great War. In this way he bet that for the time being the manpower differences between he and the Japanese would eventually sap the Japanese forces. But the northern campaign suffered from a lack of coordination, the old subjugated warlords returning to a position of autonomous prominence in the army from a lack of organized demilitarization. The old cliques reasserted themselves and Xueliang and Yuxiang were free to act much more independently of one another. Likewise, the Ma generals did not concern themselves with the Japanese directly, and instead invaded Mongolia to fight with the Russian armed forces there. Unchecked, an Islamist and Turkic uprisings overwhelmed Xinjiang Province, ousting the Kuomintang warlord there.

The war inspired massive anti-Japanese riots in China, particularly after the official declaration of war by Wang Jingwei. The riots reached a peak in November and December where an effective pogrom of Japanese and Japanese property was conducted in Shanghai. Five Buddhist monks were killed of November, 23 1937 and several days later on December 1 the Japanese concession was put to siege by mobs. An element of the Chinese river fleet assisted the attack, moving gunboats into the river Whangpoo south of the concession and opening fire. In response on December 18, 1937 the Japanese sent their own navy to Shanghai and engaged the Chinese river fleet there, smashing it and landing marines who attacked the rioters, indiscriminately shooting to kill thousands in the next three days. Following shortly after a Japanese battle group arrived off the coast of Shanghai, and airplanes launched from carriers bombed the city on December 28, 1937 and mounted a full invasion of Jiangsu province.

This incident forced Chiang's forces to turn to race to Shanghai and contain their forces there. Under direct threat in Nanjing, the recently relocated Chinese government returned to Wuhan for safety. The commitment of additional Chinese Whampoa forces to the Battle of Shanghai – incorporating cities as far away as Hangzhou as part of its theater represented the first step in intensifying the war and an actual commitment by the government of Japan to fighting the war itself. The Chinese defensive line in Hebei began to falter under the commitment. Especially as more and more Japanese air assets were committed to the war. The Chinese airforce, which was small in size and scattered had to this point been able to be an equalizer. But with more airplanes under the Japanese this advantage began to break down. In January 1938 the first Chinese tanks began to arrive, Hai-Gui 1 type armored tanks, the successors to the haphazard Type 1 vehicle of the twenties. But unable to establish an actual staging position, instead of becoming the armored spear tip of a mobile offensive they became the shields for a fighting retreat as Chiang's men fought to find purchase as Japanese forces sought to link along the coast with their landing in Shanghai. Japanese offensives along the Yangtze river sought out the land supply routes and the Summer 1938 campaign was yet again defensive as the Chinese tried to fight back a Japanese thrust west along the northern edge of the Yangtze. But the Japanese forces were met and successfully repulsed at Nanjing in autumn of that year. Chiang Kai-Shek, who was being accused of being too soft on the Japanese had left the seclusion of Mt Tai to join his forces in Nanjing, and allowed himself to be photographed “taking command” at the mausoleum of Sun Yat-Sen when the Chinese completed a successful encirclement of the Japanese forces. In the north before winter, the Japanese managed a breakthrough of Xueliang's forces and poured into Inner Mongolia. The scale of the defeat was such that Xueliang's men broke, and the general himself was forced to flee on foot, dressing as a peasant towards Xi'an where he hoped to personally join up with Yuxiang and rebuild his efforts. The Japanese were met by the Shaanxi warlord, who kept them in the mountains.

The invasion of the Japanese had a profound effect on the rest of the world. Most immediately, the Germans redoubled their aid in the name of “anti-imperialism”. The Japanese invasion drew in the British, British troops on the Tianjin railroad were attacked breaching the remaining effective remnant of the 1901 Boxer Protocol. While they stopped short of declaring war on Japan the way the Germans did, they sanctioned the Empire and sought means by which to support the Chinese in their efforts from their uncertain colonies. This represented a broadening of the war. From the onset the French had tepidly supported the Republic, but with German support for the Republic they began slowly withdrawing until by 1939 they were neutral. However independent support came from French Indochina, where the Southern Chinese military establishment had long-running commercial relationships.

By 1940 the Japanese attempted a series of naval invasions along the Chinese southern coast. This represented a tactical change from another change in military government in China as the navy took a dominant role. A Kuomintang hold out position had been made on the Shandong peninsula where local commanders managed to build impressive defensive works. Japanese naval shelling and bombardment softened them enough for Japanese marines to take it before army units could. The Japanese successfully invaded Hainan in 1939, though pockets of resistance remained in the interior of the island, lead by communists. In 1939 they invaded and captured Guangzhou, taking also Hong Kong signaling a more serious commitment to the expanding War in Asia. The IJN unsuccessfully invaded Fujian (December 1939) and Guangxi (February 1940).

In an effort to further isolate China, the Japanese requested permission from France to move troops through Vietnam from Haiphong. They were granted this permission and in 1940 landed men in northern Vietnam who began a land invasion of Southern China from French Indochina, capturing the colonial capital of Hanoi without protest from the French and assuming defacto control of Vietnam, and pushing as far inland as Nanning.

The response from the invasion of Vietnam by the Japanese resulted in a rebellion against both them and the French by Vietnamese nationalists. The move was read as a weakening of the colonial regime. This gorilla war extended into Guangxi itself. This jungle insurgency was a point where the Second Wuhan Government began to acknowledge the importance of the anti-Japanese insurgencies as part of their greater defensive strategy. Informed by German strategy developed during the Great War, the government had been discussing the formalization of and support of insurgent groups to assist in the infiltration missions necessary to create openings for the Chinese to exploit. But the plans had received a lot of resistance from the military establishment, who were either too conservative to support it, or institutionally protective of their position in the army. Insurgent strategy hadn't been fully accepted prior to 1942 but was adopted by several commanders of the left to some success, notably Zhou Enlai in the north and Liu Siàu That in the south. The Japanese advance into southern China had been massively frustrated by irregular units in the hills, and they faced staunch resistance from the urbanized and industrialized Vietnamese workers. In the north, Japan had constructed vast heavy industry, weaving the region into his economic sphere in Korea. These factories required vast numbers of Chinese workers, who while paid incredibly low wages, also gave the Chinese left access to Japanese war industry and information. Connected informally with Korean nationalists and Anarchists, a network of independent pockets in northern china was growing, spreading out from Korea to slow the wheels of the Japanese advance.

To ease the Chinese burdens even more, Chinese pilots had found a way to fly over the Himalayas to pick up British assistance in India and deliver it to Chengdu, from which it was distributed to the rest of the Chinese war effort by rail. These routes represented a drip through an IV line for the ailing Chinese war effort and even economy, as financiers like Soong and Kung found themselves reliant on unwieldy mail-planes that transited over the windy Himalayas. Over land, British supplies were driven north through Burma, part of British India to Kunming.

But the war for the Japanese was starting to take on an overstretched character. While the Japanese had managed to push as far south as the Huai River, the need to deploy more and more men to odd theaters of the war which had fully engulfed Indochina and was entering British India threatened the strategic integrity of their front in China. In 1940, elected to his second term, Wang Jingwei managed to get the general staff of the Chinese army to commit to new general orders working insurgent irregulars into the military strategy. His second term began with a rocky majority in his favor, faced with stiff competition from an insurgent right under Hu Hanmin, who blamed Wang of entrenching the military. Civilian policy froze with Hanmin's election to president of the senate by the new legislature. Wang Jingwei chose to side-line civilian affairs, concerned with ending the war he had promised to fight and began his work on a new strategy for his second term.

On a trip to inspect the troops on July 2, 1940 there was an assassination attempt against Wang Jingwei. Leaving his train in Xuchang to greet a crowd gathered there, an assailant armed with a knife charged him. Making it passed his security detail the blade penetrated his abdomen on the right side just below the ribs. The attacker was arrested, and in the chaos president Wang Jingwei was carried back onto the train and sent back to Wuhan as medics treated him. He arrived back in Wuhan, alive but unconscious. The attacker was identified as an assassin in the pay of the Japanese, and he was found hanged in the jail cell. The government faltered and the Japanese advanced into Henan province as the army's moral faltered. As Japanese airplanes reached Wuhan, the government was withdrawn further from the front to Chongqing. There, Wang Jingwei recovered enough that on August 1 he made his first address to the country by radio. Back in control, Wang recommended to congress that the state be allocated funds for the commission of a railroad through Burma, so as to more rapidly transport war material. He had been meeting with the British before his full return to public politics to discuss the likelihood of a project so long as the Japanese could be held at bay and they were willing to pay half the expenses of the project. He had found some private investors willing to go in on the project, but when he presented the plan to the Legislative Yuan, he was met with opposition citing concerns over the military nature. He handed the negotiations to his vice-president, Liao Zhongkai.

At this time he was exploring the insurgent options available to China. In the South, an informal partnership with Vietnamese nationalists was showing itself to be effective at combating the Japanese. But without formal coordination the impact of this partnership was limited. But physically choked at their bottleneck in Vietnam and forced to garrison defenses and operate patrols to combat native resistance the Japanese front in Guangxi was no longer becoming as much of a threat. But the physical effect of Japan in Indochina was an expanding regional isolation as Japanese diplomatic maneuvering slowly pulled Thailand into the Japanese orbit, which would threaten Burma. The Thai issue compounded by their suspicion of ethnic Chinese in Thailand since the Chinese Revolution. But months after the attempt on his life, the injuries from the knife became a cause for chronic health issues for Wang, and he was unable to concentrate on the issue. He delegated much more to military commanders.

The proposed railroad project would be finally passed by the Legislative Yuan in January of 1941 on condition it was under the authority of the Ministry of Rail, and not the army and several million more dollars could be secured from private funds. Wang Jingwei signed the bill and sought out additional funds. Seeking out the usual source of capital, the Soong Family took it on themselves to find capital in America, but the government saw in the fundraising a threat to their national policy of isolation and would naturally attract the attention of the Japanese, and the forbade any more fundraising for the Chinese in America. It would take several years for the family to find and allocate the money necessary, and in time the widening War in Asia would make the tenability of the project uncertain, continually delaying it. It wouldn't ever be built.

But stretched thin on the mainland, and the Chinese army beginning to rally in 1942 conditions were improving. A general strategy of insurgent infiltration in the army was adopted and put into action in the 1942 spring offensive. Communist action under the command of Zhou Enlai disrupted Japanese logistics networks, allowing a regular Chinese offensive back into the Central Plains and isolating Shanghai by land. Shanghai fell into a new state of siege as the Chinese army moved in and prepared. But with access to the sea, forces in Shanghai proper could be well prepared and out of caution no assault as planned for 1942.

Born in Jiangsu province, Zhou Enlai was a quick witted member of mid-level provincial level clerks from the Qing dynasty. He attended modern western-style academies in China, where he was a strong student, reading voraciously and being an award winning rhetorician in his school's speech club. Later in his studies he developed a fondness for both classic Chinese literature and modern progressive Chinese literature. In his young adult hood, he participated in the Work-Study programs and went to Europe.

There in France he was taken in by the factory romance the operators of the Work-Study program hoped all their participants would pick up on. Picking up welding as well as modern European political theory. He started traveling Europe, visiting Great Britain and Germany at the time of Revolution, remarking paradoxically that he saw the value in both Germanic Revolution and British reform. He returned to China in time to become one of the first generation Chinese instructors at Whampoa and participated in the Northern Expedition.

He returned to China as one of the most senior Chinese members of European communist politics and was a favorite of the German revolutionists and French socialist exiles in Southern China. He was formally brought into the Chinese Communist Party and played bit parts alternatively in parliamentary, street, and military politics. Personally, he sought to mediate the tensions with the Kuomintang right in the army and academy, believing in Sun's principle of military guidance in Chinese politics and came to one of the largest supporters of Wang Jingwei, who valued him in part because of his formal connections to Europe and as one of his students. But through the late thirties began to quietly criticize Wang Jingwei for his egotism, before the Japanese invaded.

During the new campaign phases of 1942 on-wards, Zhou Enlai assumed a position in command equal to and to the left of Chiang Kai-Shek which caused considerable animosity with the peanut-headed commander. He fought continuously with Enlai over “matters of territory” and was slow to commit troops, or hasty to commit his armies in full to beat Enlai. In a official communique, Enlai suggested to the Chief of Staff dated June 14 to redeploy Chiang to Burma where he could be out of the way of operations in the north. The offer was rejected, but Chiang was ordered to a new command to take Guangzhou. In protest, he suddenly terminated his service, and “retired” leaving the Shanghai encirclement. He was allowed to do so.

In November 1942, simultaneous uprisings in Dalian (Port Arthur), Shenyang, and Beijing became another opening for the Chinese army to exploit and they pushed north for the 1943 winter campaign. Uprisings by Koreans along the border destroyed or damaged several crossing points, complicating over-all resupply of Japanese forces in the north. This was accompanies by a general uprising in Jinin. Republican forces returned to Beijing in February, in the same month the exhausted armies of the warlords managed to push and hold Mongolia. Armored support helped push the offensive further and in March all Hebei was back in control of China. Closing in on Chifeng in April, the Manchukuo government, acting independent of Japan surrendered to the Chinese. Puyi and his courtiers fleeing to Japan.

The successes of the Chinese army inspired partisan revolts in Korea, and for the Chinese to overthrow their Japanese officials in North-Eastern China. With momentum gaining, the Chinese continued their push, spearheaded by their mechanized units clear into Japanese held Vladivostok on May 28. The Chinese moved into Khabarovsk in Spring, isolating remaining Japanese units in the wilderness of Amur.

While the Japanese would not formally agree to cede the war for another few months, the victory on the mainland would not by enjoyed by Wang Jingwei who died quietly of his injuries the week before Chinese forces entered Vladivostok, declaring the city Haisenwei. Wang's death marked the ascent of Liao Zhongkai as presidency, who to keep morale kept the death of the president secret for a few weeks more. Wang Jingwei's body was quietly removed to a hospital to be prepared by the government for burial.

Before Japanese accepted defeat on July 18, 1944 Chinese forces took the moment to re-secure Xinjiang from rebel forces, and formally deposing the warlordship of the Four Mas in Gansu, Ginghai, and Ningxia, allowing them to politely retire. The last nominal theater was in Burma, which was a slow and grinding theater but would end with the peace in July. On the 18th, the Japanese government agreed to a ceasefire pending a treaty.

The ceasefire was received with a mixed reception in China. On the one hand, the war was over, but on the other the economy was left devastated and millions of lives had been lost in carrying it out. Millions more felt bitterness over the Japanese for the extent of their violence against the civilian population, either by the hands of Unit 731's experiments on Chinese peasants or the raw human brutality by the Japanese military in and around Shanghai. As well, the act of government censorship over the death of Wang Jingwei infuriated the general population, and the feeling was not entirely quenched by the ceasefire.

Peace itself would leave many hundreds of thousands feeling alienated. Meeting in Brisbane in November, Japan agrees to acknowledge the territorial integrity of mainland China, ceding – with protest from the Russians – Vladivostok and lands south of the Amur to China. China's Korean and Vietnamese allies also walked away feeling bruised with the government for its failure to stand up to Korean and Vietnamese sovereignty. In fact, to attract French buy-in to the treaty, Liao Zhongkai acknowledged French privilege in Indochina. This alienated Zhongkai at home, where a large number of progressive Chinese who had been supporters of Wang Jingwei felt that China had a right to support Asian independence in the model of the Japanese pan-Asianism of 1920. By foregoing anti-colonial commitments, Zhongkai had hoped to leverage a balance between China and the broader world. And though the Brisbane treaty was ratified on October 1st with support from France and tepid support from Germany, it was decried as merely leaving the tinder of future violence strewn across the continent. In fact, as French troops returned to Vietnam in the months following insurgency in Vietnam would return and frustrate the French there-after.

Ironically, the railroad Wang Jingwei had sought through Burma, would begin work in 1946, with any concerns of angering the Japanese lifted, and the project would be finished by the beginning of the new decade.

In the post-war, Zhongkai would attempt to initiate de-militarization in China and the demobilization of its remaining warlord armies and institute a managed transition to civilian government. But when the election year of 1945 came, he had lost support of the electorate.

In 1945 a conservative of the Kuomintang came to power, Li Su. Identifying himself as a conservative for the constitution he moved the national capital from Wuhan to Nanjing. From Hebei province, he has risen up through the army as an officer, taking divisional command during the war with Japan. During the demilitarization efforts, he retired from the army on a pension, intending to lead a civilian life as a landlord before entering the race. With the old right-wing of the Kuomintang scattered, he was easily able to build a new coalition of old militarist Kuomintang, and civilian federalists of the Zhi Gong to be the first non-Kuomintang/Tongmenhui president of China.

Largely, he would oversee quietly the reconstruction of China. Allowing TV Soong to raise funds abroad for China relief. Much of it suspected of being captured by himself to be used in his own personal investments and a political machine he was building. But whatever criminality he could be blamed to exercise is largely overlooked for “lacking too much ambition” according to anonymous insiders. The land reform proposals that had land been sleeping during the Second Sino-Japanese War were quietly withdrawn by Li Su as Congress took on a more centrist character, with progressives arguing over the Brisbane Treaty and Communists relegated to the cities. The new political clique of Constitutional Kuomintang, upholding the provisional constitution of the post-Northern Expedition landscape as The Constitution of China settled in. But headed into the 1950s election, the Constitutional Kuomintang is moving into electoral competition by way of a Progressive Alliance Kuomintang by Soong Ching-Ling.

Marzan · Sep 6, 2024

Imperial Japan

bye bye enjoy the game

AaronMk · Sep 6, 2024

So I only just started and I want to compliment you on your research. However I want to add in the beginning that because of the nature of the Time-Line the Treaty of Versailles wouldn't exist, and the Great War ended in kind of a messy. There wasn't really a single peace per-say. As such, and because the nature of the US in this timeline I don't think the Washington Naval Treaty would exist but I do also need Mao Mao in to confirm this

Marzan · Sep 6, 2024

I can remove the Washington NAval Treaty and the Treaty of Versaille no problem. any other issues?

Everything i wrote in there is based on history and any and all military and industrial advancements written in there is based off of the facts of the japanese experimenting with them prior or during the period that would have been ww2. and i use all historical figures.

Mao Mao · Sep 6, 2024

I am leaning toward the idea that the Washington Naval Treaty cannot get anywhere because of disagreements amongst the European powers (particularly Germany and their still intact fleet) unless it ends up becoming a sort of unequal treaty enforced upon Japan and China. But I would like to hear from other players in Europe on it before giving a definitive answer.

Marzan · Sep 6, 2024

thats fair, to me it wont change anything for me

EDIT: I removed the mention of the treaty of versaille.

EDIT 2: Who is playing Germany? Russian Warlords?

AaronMk · Sep 6, 2024

Germany - No one (yet)
Russia - closest Russian player would be our Poland if they came back around

Marzan · Sep 7, 2024

Okay i just need to know, since i been Reading up on ww2 and other history for this

and going into Way too Much detail and depth of info for each region….

But im ready

AaronMk · Sep 9, 2024

I'm going to start working on filling out the map here soon. Because of me trying to finish the China NS and other obligation I had not done. But before starting up I am going to get everyone's app a [second] pass and if I notice anything I'll call it out. This doesn't imply a rejection.

If there is anyone who wanted to participate and hasn't posted anything yet, don't worry: door is still open. I'm inviting that way. That said: I'll get onto it

AaronMk · Sep 9, 2024

Mao Mao - Do you think you could do us a favor and describe who the veterans discussed in your NS are. I know you mentioned a while ago the intention to do US involvement in the Great War, but if they otherwise weren't, were these just some troops send to any number of previous US adventures abroad?

Marzan - I had more time to review your app and I had to call in for some second opinions because there's a great deal of positioning towards asserting some sort of Great Power status the NS develops towards. As well, it doesn't line up that well still with events described in the OP and other apps, namely my own. For starters, with no Treaty of Versailles and Mao Mao's America app, there wouldn't be a League of Nations (and about all that implies) in this universe, so anything involved the LoN wouldn't be a factor in the background for Japan at all. Likewise, I moved the Mukden incident around, it occurs in 1936 instead and initiates the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Mukden incident, launches only the invasion of Manchuria, and then several years of waiting. I figured with pre-war adventures in the Russian Far Easy, the inter-factional situation in the IJA that would have been the root cause in China were just sent over to Russia for the time being until the same army factions figured China would be too much of a national threat to Japan and blew up the railroad.

Marzan · Tuesday at 1:49 AM

Ill look into it

edit: Also there was no final decision on the Washington Naval agreement on the limitation of the japanese navy or not.

Edit 2: Also im Aware that The treaty of Versailles would not exist and The World would look different however Japan as a nation have been imperialistic and since The turn of The century (real life) they sought to expand and further Their influence and military and if we look at history up to The point of World war 2 at that point Japans navy and army was more modern than most except for perhaps USA, Germany, Britain and France, and Their navy was one of The largest in The World but i dont see a point in arguing or debating it. So i Said My Piece and i Will move on since you feel Its a problem with The assertion of great power.

EDIT 3: I changed the entire history.

EDIT 4:
Great Power Status and Historical Context: Japan’s position as a Great Power, even without World War II, is rooted in its historical trajectory. In the 1930s and 1940s, Japan was already a significant player on the global stage, with considerable military and industrial capabilities. The absence of World War II does not diminish Japan’s historical achievements in military and technological advancements. By 1955, Japan’s continued imperialistic policies and military innovations would logically lead to it maintaining or even enhancing its Great Power status.

Mukden Incident and Second Sino-Japanese War: I understand that the Mukden Incident has been repositioned to 1936 in this alternate timeline, initiating the Second Sino-Japanese War. My portrayal of Japan's actions aligns with this shift. The focus on the Russian Far East before turning to China as a primary threat is consistent with Japan’s historical expansionist tendencies. The idea is that the initial invasion of Manchuria and subsequent military focus on the Russian Far East would eventually lead to a reassessment of China's threat level, triggering further military actions in China.

League of Nations and Alternate History Dynamics: Given the absence of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, I acknowledge that Japan’s international interactions would differ from our real-world history. My application reflects Japan’s attempts to assert its influence and maintain its imperial ambitions within this new context. The lack of the League of Nations opens up alternative diplomatic and military strategies, which Japan would exploit to further its objectives and reinforce its Great Power status.

AaronMk · Wednesday at 11:25 AM

I thought you read the China NS how do you keep writing a fully different war what are you doing

Marzan · Thursday at 5:25 PM

dont worry i fixed it, look again

Mao Mao · Friday at 11:45 PM

I have made the adjustments in the sheet.

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