East Asia

Japan dominates East Asia in 1970, its economy and military are the third most powerful in the world after the Europabund and the United States.

A war threatened to break out between Japan and the United States in 1941 when the two powers were competing for influence and markets in China.

The United States, operating from its island colonies in Guam and the Philippines, attempted to gain ground in the mainland by way of its client state, 'China,' which consisted of the southwestern provinces of the former Qing Empire now in the hands of the Guomindang led by Jiang Jieshi. United States goals, officially, were to advance Chinese 'democracy' and a so-called 'open door' for American capital in the mainland. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands tended to support the United States, but not to the point of war. France increasingly tended to favour an understanding with Japan.

Japan, which already controlled Manchuria, occupied most of northern China together with the lower Yangtze provinces from 1937 onwards, but grappled with a certain amount of guerilla resistance in some provinces, together with Guomindang resistance at the borders of the occupied territory, found it difficult to find a solution to the expensive quagmire into which its military leaders on the ground had tended to lead it. American sanctions and other pressures from powers unwilling to allow Japan much room for manoeuvre on the mainland led the Japanese government to think about other ways of cutting the knot. The army in the late 1930s favoured expansion into Siberia. The Soviet Union proved too tough a nut to crack, however, which led Moscow and Tokyo to end their intermittent border skirmishes and sign the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1941. Mongolia was recognised by both signatories as an independent state. Japanese attention subsequently returned to war against the Guomindang. Also, skirmishes were fought against the Chinese Communist Party in northern Shaanxi province.

The heightening of war between Japan and the Guomindang from late 1930 to late 1941 led to greatly increased tension between the United States and Japan. Japan, at risk of running out of crucial military imports thanks to American sanctions, and seeing no way of gaining any concessions from European imperial powers in Southeast Asia, turned increasingly to Germany for diplomatic and economic support.

Germany, although invested in the Guomindang as well as Japan, called an international conference of all interested parties to meet in Berlin in November 1941. The powers that met at the Berlin East Asia Conference were:

The Chinese Communist Party, which controlled a number of districts in northern China, was not invited in spite of Soviet requests that it be allowed to participate.

The Berlin Conference was successful at averting war in East Asia. The Treaty of Berlin, signed early 1942, divided China between four states:

Manzhuguo / Manchukuo was recognised by all signatories as a legitimate state and a protectorate of Japan.

The Republic of China, or in other words the area of southwestern China under Guomindang control, was recognised by all signatories as the legitimate government of those provinces.

Negotiation was toughest over the remaining provinces of China. The solution, skilfully brokered by von Neurath, was the creation of two new states.

The Wei Empire, with its capital at Beijing, consisted mostly of the former provinces of Zhili, Shanxi and Shandong. Wei was recognised by the signatories to the Treaty as a Japanese protectorate. Its head of state was the Emperor Puyi, who would reign over the new state jointly with his existing state of Manchukuo.

The Wu Republic, with its capital at Nanjing, consisted mostly of the former provinces of Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei and Henan, was conceived as a buffer state with an 'open door' economic policy and neutral status. A conservative constitution, granting a limited suffrage to property owners, was guaranteed by all the signatory powers of the Berlin Treaty.

International concessions in Shanghai and Tianjin, together with the Portuguese colony in Macao, the French colony in Guangzhouwan and the British colony of Hong Kong, were all recognised by the signatories to the Treaty of Berlin.

East Asia since the signing of the Treaty of Berlin has been more or less stable politically. Japan and its possessions, together with the Wu Republic, have continued to be dominated by conservative governments. All have boomed economically. Although the CCP has managed to hold on to its small enclave in Shaanxi, they depend on what little help can be spared by the Soviet Union. No other power has an interest in maintaining the tiny CCP statelet. As a whole, the people of the various successor states of Qing China are not responsive to calls for socialism; nor are they even very responsive to calls for democracy. The Republic of China occasionally attempts to inspire Han nationalism outside its borders. Han nationalism has found few followers, however, among the mass of the population of Wu, Wei and Manchukuo. So long as the economies of those countries are thriving, most Han people accept the status quo. The people of Wei and Manchukuo are no more eager to overthrow their Japanese governors than their forebears under the similarly 'foreign' Qing dynasty during the 19th and 18th century were anxious to expel the Manchus.

**Guomindang China** controls southern China with Guangzhou as its provisional capital. Jiang Jieshi is still the President but is getting increasingly older and less able to govern, and, rumour has it, depressed. In theory it controls central and western China but these areas are mostly autonomous. It is the most chaotic of the three Chinese states, something Japanese propaganda plays up, but it enjoys more legitimacy than the others, particularly outside China. Germany and the USA both grant the Guomindang quite extensive economic and, to a lesser degree, military support, building it up as a bulwark to Japanese expansion, but the increasing incapacity of the Generalissimo, the continuing influence of communists, and continuing banditry, corruption and small-scale warlordism in the countryside make it hard for the state to absorb this assistance effectively.

**Manzhuguo / Manchukuo** is, after nearly 50 years, the most "solid" of Japan´s Chinese client states. It is ruled by Pujie, Pu Yi´s younger brother, who is more independent-minded than his brother but is also married to a Japanese noblewoman. Manchukuo has raised its standard of living but the economy is still dominated by Japanese corporations - since it is not considered to be part of China there is no "open door" in Manchukuo. Pujie is in his 60s but fairly vital, although he only has daughters, so his heir is his younger brother Puren.

**Wu**, officially the reformed Chinese government, is a republican Japanese puppet state centred on Nanjing. It was originally ruled by Wang Jingwei, but his death in the 1950s led to something of a crisis until the Japanese intervened and installed Ding Mocun, Jingwei´s security minister. Mocun has maintained an authoritarian but free-market oriented regime which permits few civil liberties but substantial economic ones. Wu is also dominated by Japanese corporations but not the extent of Manchukuo since the Berlin treaty guarantees the "open door", meaning that American and German companies are entitled to formal equal access - although this somewhat obscures the truth, since Japanese corporations benefit from behind-the-scenes influence exercised by the very powerful Japanese plenipotentiary and his well-staffed trade office. Wu has a relatively small military, since most serious tasks are undertaken by the Japanese forces stationed there, but a very extensive police and intelligence apparatus.

**Shanghai** is officially part of Wu but it is still highly internationalised, with the British and French concessions still in existence. It also has a large Japanese military contingent permanently stationed there.

**Wei** is the third of the Japanese puppet states and the least stable of them. Centred on Beijing, it originally had Pu Yi as its head of state but was effectively governed by local Mandarins with Japanese advisors. When Pu Yi died the Japanese were not willing to replace him with Pujie since they feared he might begin to work for a union of Wei and Manchukuo, something that goes against Japanese policy. Since 1967 Wei has been ruled by a regent, Japanese General Teiichi Suzuki, while Japan tries to find a new Emperor. There are four candidates, all of whom cause hesitation in Tokyo, albeit for different reasons.

* Yuan Jiarong, aka "Luke Yuan", the grandson of self-proclaimed Emperor Yuan Shikai, who is seen as too pro-American (he studied and lived in California)
* Kung Te-Cheng, the descendant of Confucius and former Duke of Yansheng, who is considered to be too Chinese nationalist (he is close to Jiang Jieshi and refused a previous offer by the Japanese)
* Nijo Tanemoto, a Japanese Marquis from one of the high-ranking *Kuge* families. Possibly too insulting to Chinese nationalists.
* Zhu Lidong, the claimed son of the last Marquis of Extended Grace, Zhu Yuxun, and thus theoretically heir to the Ming dynasty. Many suspect he is simply a conman, and possibly not even Chinese.

As Wei is a monarchy, senior military positions are mostly held by old noble families. The Wei army is even more ineffective than that of Wu, infamous for being extremely top heavy due to the distribution of military honours to friends of the regime despite lack of military experience. There are substantial Japanese garrisons in the western provinces which generally do the heavy lifting in fighting border banditry. Wei does not have the same efficient police-intelligence apparatus that Wu enjoys, and its large cities are hospitable territory for common criminals as well as foreign spies and trouble makers.

**Korea** is still under Japanese occupation. There have not been any significant uprisings for a long time - some anti-Japanese Korean groups are active in Manchukuo near the triple border point but they are small scale and are generally just bandits. There is a Korean independence movement based in California although it has little success operating in Korea itself.

**The Chinese communists** were initially left to themselves and were theoretically the responsibility of the Guomindang, who officially controlled their Shanxi redoubt. However Jiang showed little inclination or ability to crack down on them. In 1949 communist guerilla activity against Wei became a serious threat to the government´s control over its eastern border. The Japanese deployed an expeditionary force of some 60,000 Japanese soldiers with substantial air power to wipe out the Shanxi redoubt. The communists were decisively defeated as a field force and had to flee, some going west, some splitting into small groups to fight a continued guerilla war, but some attempting a second Long March to the south to join up with the Guomindang. Chairman Mao died during the Japanese attack, officially he was killed by a Japanese bomb, but some believe an internal power struggle resulted in his execution. The group going to Guangdong was the largest group, led by Peng Dehuai and Zhou Enlai, and were, despite some tension, allowed to enter Guomindang territory. Under the banner of the United Front the communists still exist and form the permitted opposition to Jiang´s government.

**Japan** is the regional hegemon and the third most powerful country in the world although it is not a true global superpower like the USA or Germany. Japan has managed to reduce large parts of China to puppet status and still deploys most of its armies in its puppets on the mainland. The Japanese navy is deployed in a range of bases scattered throughout the central Pacific. Japan does what it can to quietly support anticolonial movements in Africa and Southeast Asia although it is constrained by not wanting to provoke a conflict with either the Anglo-American or European blocs. It is particularly worried about a war with the USA, fearing it would lose. Germany is a more distant but still real threat. The Japanese have amassed a respectable nuclear arsenal which is, again, the third most powerful in the world. Japan itself is still governed by the militarist clique that lead it into China in the 1930s. The current Prime Minister is Tsuji Masanobu, a general who served extensively in China. Japan enjoys a high standard of living, although the existence of a large servile underclass of Chinese and Japanese workers, brought in to perform low-paying jobs, is slowly changing the face of Japanese society.

**The Karma Society** is a new religious movement that has grown throughout East Asia since the 1950s. It is a confusing combination of millenial christianity, hinduism, traditional Chinese folk buddhism and several Japanese "new religions". The Karma Society has no acknowledged leaders, instead organising on a chapter level. Its followers are known for wearing yellow clothes, giving it its second name, the "Yellow Club". The Society preaches many apolitical concepts like self-actualisation, vegetarianism and meditation, but it also advocates for a casting aside of "old thought" such as communism, nationalism, monarchy, democracy etc in the name of creating a single unified state of the "Karma following lands", which is generally understood to cover all of non-Islamic Asia. It is very popular in China, largely due to many seeing it as holding out the best hope of Chinese unity, and as such is quite harshly suppressed in Japan´s puppet states (although in Japan itself, ironically, it is more tolerated). In the Chinese Republic there is considerable confusion about whether to repress it, ignore it or embrace it, and in the absence of a clear lead from Jiang (who is said to find the whole concept very confusing) regional governors have taken different paths, although as a general rule the coastal cities are less tolerant.