Empire of the South Han

The Imperial Technate of East Asia, or as it's referred to diplomatically, The Empire of the South Han, is the most populus realm under the Great House of East Asia and ruled by Lady Gao Guan-Yin, also known as MachWolf, it is located in southern china, spanning the old provinces of Guangdong, Sichuan, Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan, Jiangxi, Fujian, Guizhou, Chongqing and Hainan, which continue as administrative divisions within the realm.

## History

The origins of the Imperial Technate of East Asia, lay in the rise of modern metahumans in China. During the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, the People's Republic of China under, Mao Zedong, recognizing the decisive geopolitical advantage the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had over China, commissioned the creation of a military program that would find, cultivate, replicate or create metahuman abilities. By the late 50s significant progress had been made in constructing facilities for this purpose and by the mid 60s China was is able to enter the international stage with the capacity to deploy metahumans of immense power, though they'd remain well behind the US and the USSR.

In 1970, the metahuman program received a boost. The Communist Party of China, fearing that the population growth that it had been encouraging up until then would cause difficult to them in the future, instituted a two child policy. However, one of the key exceptions to the policy was to families who were willing to offer their children up to the metahuman program, vastly increasing what they had to work with. A similar clause was provided for after the 1980 implementation of a one child policy.

From the beginning, but especially through the 70s and to the mid 80s, the Chinese metahuman program was brutal and inhumane. Metahumans were kept under control with a potent mixture of a 'patriotic' education and consciousness efforts to defeat group solidarity through encouraging conflict. Metas would be repeatedly, consistently pushed to the absolute limits of their abilities in the hopes of strengthening them. Inevitably, some would end up broken in this process. Records show, however, that this was treated as undesirable, with those responsible being reprimanded for wasting state resources, rather than it being part of a deliberate effort to weed out the 'weak'.

In the late 80s and early 1990s, the metahuman program moved away isolation and brutality as a means of maintaining control over the metas, as they made efforts to integrate them into civil society rather than have them restricted to the military, in an aim to improve economic growth in China during Deng Xiaoping's reforms.

These efforts proved fruitful, but they'd have peculiar effects in Southern China, emanating from Guangdong outwards. From there, metahumans working at the highest level in the emerging Chinese technology sector, would end up meeting with legendary figures with immense sway over South Han Metahumans. Under the nose of the Communist Party of China, they'd create and staff the outline of what would by the late 90s form a parallel metahuman government to coordinate their influence over the region. They had ambitions to extent this system over the whole of China, by the time of the New Year Revolution, only the 10 provinces were sufficiently organized through this means. However, with a organization structure already in place, the transition from shadow government to overt government was far smoother than it had been in the rest of China, though this had the side effect of making the type of expansion undertaken by the Great Yuan infeasible, to the point where the Sichuan and Yunnan provinces could be occupied by the Yuan despite the South Han having government organs already in place.

Faced with those limitations, along with the fact that the South Han were operating with an Emperor that functioned more as an elderly spokesperson of a committee rather than a proper lord, despite their ambitions, they could not challenge the Yuan's claim to the Great Lordship of East Asia. While the South Han state would be ran smoothly and competently for the next through years, a fierce debate would continue to be waged regarding how to go about who the heir to the sitting Emperor would be. Faced with few options when he passed, the elders of the South Han, concerned about a war of succession, gave their backing to a gladiatorial tournament to succeed the emperor, which would see Gao Guan-yin claim victory and become Empress.

## Government

### Philosophy

Since the rise of the Gao Imperial Family, all organs of government follow the *Five Levels* system of management and control, which seeks maximize both participation and decisiveness in all institutions:

**First Level:** Makes decisions for the organ as a whole after taking in formation relayed by the Third Level

**Second Level:** Facilitates and records conditions in the environment outside of the organ, to inform Third Level

**Third Level:** Relays boundaries to the Fifth Level as they've been defined by the First Level, relays information to the First Level to influence how it sets boundaries for the Fifth Level

**Fourth Level:** Facilitates and records interactions between Fifth Level sub-organs, to inform the Third Level

**Fifth Level:** Sub-Organs interacting with each other within boundaries relayed by the Third Level.

The Five Level system is recursive, meaning that Sub-Organs that qualify as Level 5, are, within themselves, Level 1's within their own organ. It is said that the administrative levels themselves roughly follow a 5 Level model, With the Empress, Her Provincial Governors, District Directors, Township Mayors and Individual Citizens representing Levels 1 through 5 respectively, but this does not directly reflect how the government is internally structured. This system represents the extent of 'constitutionalism' or 'representation' within the ITEA. Ultimately all law flows from Empress Gao Guan-Yin's decrees and the decrees by rulers below below her, with everyone's decrees responding to feed back from those below them.

### Administrative Divisions

As previously implied, the ITEA has 4 levels of administrative governance, the Imperial Organ Provincial Organs, District Organs and Township Organs However as previously mentioned, their interactions are not as a singular organ, but as a chain of organs, with mayors serving as the fifth level within *their district* and onward up the chain of governance.

#### The Organs

Since the five level system is recursive, the form of the 4 levels of administrative divisions replicate the Imperial organ. The highest level in the imperial organ and the equivalent of both head of state and government in the ITEA is the Empress Gao Guan-Yin, the first level of the imperial organ. The Second Level of the Imperial Organ is the Imperial Foreign Service, variety of diplomats, scientists that gather information on both the rest of East Asia and the world. The Third Level of the Imperial Organ is the Imperial Civil Service, a collection of administrators and planners. The Fourth Level of the Imperial Organ is the Imperial Provincial Committee, a body made up of Her governors and their staff. The Fifth level of the Imperial Organ are the Provincial Governors themselves. Provincial Governors are the heads of their own recursive organs, with the main difference between that their second levels manage information gather between organs of their level, for example, Provincial Magistrates recording information relevant to it's province's interactions with other provinces, District Magistrates looking at interactions with other districts and township magistrates at other townships.

### Military

The Imperial Technate Military begun life working with the equipment and military formations of the hold PLA as it's basis with Metahuman individuals and units grafted on, primarily in officer and special forces roles, however as time went on and technology changed, the ITM sought to move to a model more befitting of 21st century threats. This has meant the rapid professionalization, specialization and automation of the ITM. As it stands, the ITMs Expeditionary Forces have remained much as they were the 20th century, holding onto tried and true methods of warfare, aside from some new technologies, but the core of the Imperial Military has seen rapid restructuring, particularly since the accession of the MachWolf.

The core of Technate Army, is built around 3 main categories of soilder: Paladins, Squires and Levies. All three, operating, with varying degrees of control, a variety of Semi-Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles, or SAUVs. Almost immediately after the ITEA took over southern china, it went to work building a military on this model, figuring that future conflicts would, inevitably, need to be structured around dealing with hostile metahuman threats, though officially the form of the army was presented as a way to center the importance of metahumans and keep the peace domestically in a more affordable manner. At the start, much of the formation was theory that technology and infrastructure was not quite yet there to fufill yet, The Paladins category was straight forward enough to implement, along with most Squire units, but the Levies and the SAUVs only became fully realizable in the 2010s.

#### Paladins

Paladins are units made up of combat trained metahumans, with a significant minority of "neohumans". Neohumans are a product of decades of research into bioloigical and cybernetic research, much ofit based on information gathered in the process of the PLA building its metahuman program. Neohumans are mundanes given a variety of augmentations intended to make them capable of competing with the average combat trained metahuman in a fair fight. For both political and practical reason, the size of the Neohuman program has been limited, primairly due to the domestic and foreign political controversy that inevitably comes with maintaining an army of mundanes augmented and trained with killing metahumans in mind, along with the practical limitations of expense associated with the program. Neohuman candidates tend to be selected in childhood to ease augmentation, with them being selected primarily for creativity over physical attributes, as the extent of their augmentations naturally pale to the differences between the physical attributes of mundandes. Paladins are the only Infantry within the core of the Technate Army, which soon after the revolution, came to the conclusion that masses of mundane troops that were little more than fodder in the face of metahumans would never serve as any thing more than a flagrant waste of human capital better utilized elsewhere. Paladins operate alongside and have generalized control over how SAUVs aide them in battle.

#### Squires

Barring catching a metahuman by surprise, or simply not being in their presence, the best way for a mundane to survive hostile metahumans is inside of stionary or mobile construct. Apart from Neohumans, Squires are the in-the-field presnce of mundane soldiers. They serve exlusively in forts and manned vehicles in land, sea and aerial warfare. In addition to manning forts and vehicles that they are inside of, they also offer more percise commands to SAUVs. While A Paladin might command a town to be overrun by SAUVs, Squires, are the ones that take care of which squads do what, block by block. Squires will also at times take control over individual SAUVs, overiding their animal-level artifical intelligence, but that sort of activity is mostly handled by the levies.

#### Levies

ITEA's war doctrine contains what appears on the surface to be a contradiction. It is a doctrine that believes in the necessity of having the capacity to mobolize the whole society to the ends of fighting a war of need be, but it has no space for waves of conscripts in the field. The keywords there, however, are 'in the field'. The Southern Han are a deeply, digitally connected people, through an intranet structure that is key to the governance and the economy of the realm. That very connectivity is heavily leveraged to the advantage of the ITM. In a program that has seen a significant expansion in investment since the accession of Empress Gao Guan-Yin, all sufficently able citizens are required to go through training in the remote operation of SAUVs. While there has never yet been a circumstance where its been nessecary, though there have been a variety of drills, the role of the levies is to serve as hundreds of millions of minds that can be handed more percise control over SAUVs when nessecary, to allow for the effective deployment of ar more than would otherwise be possible with the control of Squires and Paladins alone. So far, the Levy system has only been used to attract recruits into the squires, as it comes with an evaluation system that tracks each levies effectiveness, which can even mean monetary rewards. Levies have sometimes been given the oppertunity to participate in training excercises through this means, with the most capable targeted for recruitment into the squires