Do each of the polities of the Sinitic Meta Civilization qualify as states? Reminder that the Sinitic Meta Civilization is not a single entity but an umbrella term referring all the post-collapse states that claim to be the successor to the People's Republic of China.

THE SINITIC META-CIVILIZATION


As it turns out the fall of the People’s Republic during the collapse was not enough to get communism out of the blood of the Chinese people. As any visitor to the far east will tell you, that particular quirk is here to stay. Today every Chinese state is officially some form of communist or socialist, and all claim to be the (or at least a) successor to the People’s Republic. There is, amusingly, a legal continuity of government regime of the old PRC still operating in Taiwan, and the ruling party of the island is on paper at least well within its rights to claim that it is the CPC, but to be frank nobody really cares. The 30 states of the Chinese people represent their own kind of world, all viewing each other as reflections of the same shared legacy of “Chinese Civilizational Socialism”, though descended from different institutions, organs, and movements of the old empire that once dominated the land. 


The Third People’s Republic, based out of its capital of Xiong’an, is a unitary state that emerged out of a collapse era stewardship program established by China’s major state enterprises. Headed by the Continuing Committee, a descendant of the CPC Central Committee now staffed primarily by technical specialists and a consultative simulated intelligence that runs the economy, the TPR is often described as a kind of “People’s Technocracy”. Despite its heavily centralized state apparatus and potential to leverage immense amounts of power domestically, the TPR prefers to leave its people alone, operating under the belief that the continuing committee should only exist as a caretaker administration for a society that no longer needs to be ruled. To this end it has sought to make its regime at once flexible and ever present while also unobtrusive and has just recently abolished all taxation within its borders. The TPR is also known for its romanticism of early collapse era China, which it sees as the height of Chinese civilization both in terms of reach and cultural attainment. The TPR maintains a great deal of influence to its north, in the lands of former Mongolia and Siberian Russia, where Chinese settler states dominate. 


South of the TPR is the realm known as the Prefectural Confederation. Best described as an anarcho-syndicalist state, the Confederation is composed of a number of arcology communes and organizing committees composed of trade union representatives. This arrangement was the result of two main factors, first was the resettlement of large chunks of the coastal population to new inland linear arcologies as the sea level rose, and the second was what were known as the “two card reforms”. An attempt in the 21st century to transition away from reliance on enterprise unions, the ACFTU embarked on a program of expanding trade union participation by forming local sector unions to exist alongside enterprise-wide unions. These were known as the “two card reforms” due to the long period when many Chinese workers would be a part of two separate unions in the same work place and thus had two union cards. The success of the reforms was mixed, but it took hold deep in Jiangsu and Shandong where climate change would actually accelerate the transition in workplace structures as people had to physically move and restart their lives in the new linear arcologies. With the fall of the PRC the local workplace committees would strike, coopting the administrative structure given to them and organizing the network of arcologies along the lines of a dual communal congress and trade union senate structure. Today the Prefectural Confederation is seen as a kind of intermediate zone, largely uninvolved in the affairs of its neighbors and thought of as a region separating the north from the Malkutic states to the south. 


Before we go further south we will return to the north (and then the west briefly) to speak about the Liaoyang Ecological Secretariat. Descended from the United Front Work Group Coordinating Committee for An Ecological Socialist Civilization (try saying that five times fast), the LES was originally a regional sub-board representing Liaoning, Jilin, and North Korea. While both the PRC and DPRK would fall (though the latter not before unifying the peninsula) the board would not, maintaining a stranglehold on the region. The modern-day secretariat, which still calls itself a mere secretariat due to officially waiting for the legitimate PRC government to reassert itself, is most known for its ambitious program of ecological rehabilitation and radical self-reliance. While sometimes amusingly called an “Eco-Juche” state few can argue against its effectiveness, with its stunning resuscitation of the continent’s bee population earning it the other nickname “The Apiary”.


The Secretariat is also known for its ongoing program of settling Outer Manchuria and the Amur Basin and subverting local governments to bring them more in line with its long-term program of creating a “Northeast People’s Bioregion”. It may be worth checking back in at the turn of the 23rd century to see how that plays out. In the meantime, the Secretariat currently inspires a lot of thrillers based around its clandestine operations.


To the west is the aptly named Agency for the Western Domain. An intersection of two developments in late pre-collapse Chinese history, the expanding control over and resettlement of minority populations from the peripheral zones of the southwest (Zomia) and the security regimes established in the western territories of the old empire. During the collapse era local minorities began to take on greater roles in the administration of the local military apparatus due to the explosion in military enlistment as an avenue of social mobility. The resettled peoples of Yunnan such as the Lisu increasingly found themselves under the control of co-ethnic garrisons supported by the capital and party committees, as were the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tu and so on. As the PRC waned the mission of these local ad-hoc regimes continued, ultimately coalescing under the army and police structures that they all shared. The Agency for the Western Domain then is a latter-day Protectorate General to Pacify the West as it were, though its size and complexity dwarfs that of even some old dynasties. History might not repeat but it does often rhyme. Of course the agency is self-governing, and over the generations has ironically become rather thoroughly Islamized. An exceptionally proud nation, it maintains the air that it is the bulwark of Chinese civilization, the shield that protects the heartland (that it in theory is still beholden to) from the vicissitudes of the outside world. It also makes money hand over first in trade, having seized control of almost all of the major overland transport infrastructure of old Eurasia, but that’s neither here nor there.


South China is most known for its system called the Malkutate. Its full name is the All-China Apostolic Malkutate. An evolution of the successful program to Sinicize Christianity, the Malkutate is at once an imperial church and a sort of memetic or cultural space. Derived from Malkuth or “Kingdom”, the counter-oriented sefirot to Keter or “Crown”, Malkuth comes from creation itself, governs it and gives it sensibility, and exists in, through, and among the material world and human person when it reflects and is oriented towards God. It is also the mediative sefirot that in its reflection connects all of God’s emanations back to the top. In Christian Kabbalistic traditions it is manifested in the unity of mankind with God and Heaven as the Bride through the Church, and the Church as the community of all believers living, dead, and eternally alive (the saints). The implications of such a concept were seized on by the post-PRC communist church, to rhetorically justify and create a framework for a kind of “bottom-up” society, one beginning at the communal level, at the workshop, and the work battalion, directing itself towards the end of the salvation of the Chinese people.


The Malkutitic system is also known for its re-nestling of Chinese cosmology in this new era. For instance, the age-old idea in Chinese spirituality that Heaven or God is that which, grounding being itself, possesses a will that attempts to unify a humanity that is not naturally or intentionally separate from it but only contingently so towards itself as having been wholly expressed in history with the reconciliation of God with man in the person of Jesus. Likewise that immortality, the ultimate aim and telos of fusus, the subject, or the universal logic and that which it ultimately trends towards, is fully realized by and in Christ as the Resurrection. Malkutism essentially creates for itself a space to realize the re-establishment of a neo classical Chinese cosmology sublimated into an Abrahamic typological framework and thus a re-enchantment of Chinese civilization, with a Communistic society and a Christian cosmology as their final form. A common motif found in Malkutic states reflects this in a snapshot image of the big dipper in the four phases or seasons around an image of the three heavens (three circles expanding outwards) while four stars (no longer representing distinct classes as they did on the old PRC flag but the totality of the Chinese people) trailing behind the tail. Similarities have been remarked upon between many Malkutate patterns and the patterns of the old Ming era magic square banners, though this is believed to be a kind of convergent re-development of a related aesthetic style rather than an intentional move.


Malkutic states are, reflecting the broader culture, more or less universally Workers’ republics: self-governing communal federations often with a ceremonial party on top. The federations give way beyond the state level to the Ecclesiastical Conference which itself acts as a consultative organ back to the communes and parish-cadres: a circular system. Among the Malkutates themselves though two are often mentioned the most. The Sichuan and Huanan Workers’ Republics. Generally considered the “elder brothers” or sometimes “elder brother and sister” (which is which depends on who you ask) of South China, these two states are the ones that their cousins generally entrust the maintenance of foreign relations and the region’s standing army (an exception among world powers as noted earlier) to.