HOME | DD

Description
=======
Da Intro
=======

Decided to do a little glimpse into a single region of Earth in the version of 1999 from Overheaven’s timeline. You like maps? You like flags? You like giant walls of L O R E? Contain your boners, friends. It’s all here.

Side-note, this is my first time working with an M-BAM map template, and I really like the results. I can do so many damn little details. I might do another one of these for the US, sometime in the near-future.

Anyway, enough dilly-dallying.
….

HONG KONG

=======
Da Lore
=======

So, starting off our tour of East Asia, and (at the risk of invoking contemporary IRL politics, which normally isn’t my style) to provide a perhaps-cathartic vision of what could have been: Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s story begins in 1972, when China forgets to ask for the territory to be removed from the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. Later, after a very different Falklands War, in which Britain demonstrated the effectiveness of the Commonwealth in coordinating its combined military powers on short notice, Margaret Thatcher holds a referendum in Hong Kong regarding its future, in January of 1984, ahead of a Sino-British conference regarding the 1997 expiration of the UK’s lease of the territory. Overwhelmingly, Hong Kong votes in favor of independence. After Hong Kong declares independence in April of that year, Beijing is not amused, but Thatcher politely informs the Chinese that she has no jurisdiction over the affairs of sovereign nations, and can no longer return Hong Kong to China.

Almost immediately, Hong Kong opted to join the Commonwealth of Nations. In 1989, a nuclear power plant is opened in Hong Kong, based on newfangled fission designs innovated on Luna earlier in the decade. This will allow for Hong Kong to develop desalination facilities to overcome its greatest strategic weakness with regards to China - the fresh water which normally is pumped in from the mainland. Additionally, the under-utilized farmland in the New Territories is revolutionized and optimized with the latest techniques gleaned from the Commonwealth’s experience of colonizing Mars, and speaking of space, the Stanley Ho Space Centre is opened for business in 1993. Around this time as well, relatives of Hong Kong families living in Guangdong are evacuated to Hong Kong amid growing anti-Hong Kong sentiment in China, due to widespread democracy protests (more on that in the China section of this post). And through it all, the Hong Kong Defense Force was built up with hardware purchased mostly from the Commonwealth, Taiwan, Israel and Europe.

By 1996, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin was growing desperate and opted to invade Hong Kong and reunite it with the “Fatherland” to galvanize patriotic support at home. He gave the “Third Rate Empires” a year to evacuate the enclave, or else they would be evicted by force. In response, the HKDF swelled to 72,000 men and women between the ages of 16 and 65, with may lying about their age in order to enlist. Due to the HKDF’s policy of permitting foreigners to serve in their ranks as long as they had a grasp of English or Cantonese, around 15,000 of the HKDF’s forces were made up of foreigners - Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Americans, Brazilians, Iranians, Turks, Indians, Malaysians, Filipinos, Soviets, Germans, Greeks, Frenchmen, Italians, Swedes, Israelis and even volunteers who made the 100-day journey from Mars, just to fight for Hong Kong. These ranged from grizzled veterans, die-hard anti-communists, and special forces covertly acting on behalf of their government’s national interest, to middle-class waiters who quit their day jobs for an adventure. Where Beijing spun this as “foreign mercenaries bolstering a colonialist gangster regime”, the RHK spun it as “humanity will remember when the world came to Hong Kong’s aid in her hour of need". Additionally, supporting the HKDF were 35,000 Commonwealth soldiers from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, Rhodesia, Nigeria and the West Indies Federation, organized into Commonwealth Task Force - Hong Kong (CTF-HK), who brought in air, ground and naval assets unavailable to the HKDF, and provided Hong Kong’s air force with most of its pilots. In the months leading up Jiang’s promised invasion, the New Territories were evacuated and prepped for invasion with tank traps, barbed wire, sandbags and more.

On January 1st 1997, 200,000 People’s Liberation Army soldiers, backed by 520 tanks and numerous artillery pieces and aircraft, were sent into Hong Kong. 62,000 Chinese soldiers didn’t come back, and as many as 90,000 surrendered to the Commonwealth forces at the first opportunity. The fighting was brutal, with Commonwealth forces pushed all the way to Kowloon, despite punching well above their weight-class. The PLA was unable to bring their full force to bear on Hong Kong, due to its value as an intact territory, and the Commonwealth took advantage of this by stationing SAM batteries at the nuclear plant and spaceport, knowing the Chinese wouldn’t try to bomb them. After the first offensive lost momentum during house-to-house fighting in Kowloon, a stalemate settled in and a ceasefire was declared. While the attackers and defenders exchanged bodies and prisoners, politicians met in Bangkok. While the Chinese could have simply run out the clock and waited for the people of Hong Kong to revolt due to rationing, Jiang was unaware of these tensions behind the British lines (a subject of many alternate history enthusiasts to this day), and pressed for an unacceptable and comedic “One Country, Two Systems” proposal. As peace negotiations in Bangkok broke down, the US and Soviet Union both threatened to get involved in the conflict if China did not disengage; the entire UN Security Council (with the exception of Guinea-Bissau and China itself) voted in favor of a resolution for China to withdraw its forces from Hong Kong; and the British were loaned a kinetic penetrator by the Americans, which was loaded into their unfinished Excalibur k-sat and shot off the coast of Hong Kong as a “test-fire” of the Commonwealth’s orbital bombardment capabilities.

After almost two months of war, February 8th marked China’s withdrawal from Hong Kong and Beijing’s official, begrudging recognition of Hong Kong sovereignty - a day commemorated in Hong Kong as “Freedom Day”.

======
Da Flag
======

The flag of Hong Kong has blue and white as its predominant colors, which invokes the city-state’s nickname, “Pearl of the Orient Sea”; blue = sea, white = pearl. The red-white orchid flower in the top-right, meanwhile, represents not only the country’s national flower, but also its British colonial heritage, by serving as an allusion to Hong Kong’s old colonial ensign by way of the red-white-blue Union Jack.

KOREA

=======
Da Lore
=======

Amid the Soviet Union’s reset, China’s descent into chaos, and North Korea’s own ill-timed famine, the “Second Korean War” (technically just a continuation of the “First” Korean War) began in the early morning hours of November 2nd 1993. By the end of the week, most of South Korea was overrun by the KPA, and Seoul had become a war zone of shelling from Kaesong, chemical weapons and waves of KPA soldiers in gas masks.

A US-South Korean counter-offensive pushed the North Koreans back, with some minor help from Taiwanese troops, Hong Kong special forces, and Japanese air and naval support. To end the shelling of Seoul, US President Donald Trump ordered the complete ordinance-saturation of North Korean artillery positions near Kaesong. For four days and four nights, an estimated twelve million tons of ordinance (greater than the air campaigns over Germany, Japan or North Vietnam) was dropped on a small area of the map barely larger than downtown Chicago. Waves upon waves of B2’s and B52’s dropping daisycutters and cluster munitions, cruise missiles fired off the decks of American warships and South Korean missile bases, and most of all: 8,155 Minuteman-KP (kinetic penetrator) tungsten projectiles, each the size of a telephone pole and packing the equivalent force of five kilotons of TNT, were fired down from Eagle orbital weapon platforms in High Earth Orbit. Attempts by the DPRK to shoot down these platforms with anti-satellite missiles were foiled by anti-missile laser batteries in Low Earth Orbit, which killed the sluggish KPA missiles. One by one, the North Korean guns went silent.

After savage fighting in the gas-choked, ruined streets of Seoul, the KPA ordered a full retreat back across the DMZ, leaving behind their wounded to man machine guns and hold off the capitalist dogs. As the December snowfall arrived, the American and South Korean offensive was sluggish, but the sheer technological edge of the coalition forces made the outdated and increasingly-demoralized KPA no match for this slow-moving hurricane lumbering its way towards Pyongyang. Savvy KPA commanders began to surrender to coalition forces, deeming the war a foolish and hopeless effort that would cost the people of North Korea dearly. Which of course prompted the Kim regime to purge its ranks of anyone even suspected of cowardice/sobriety, until only a core of toadies and lackeys remained in Kim Jong-Il’s inner circle.

By late February, the snow had melted and the beginning of Spring would mark the start of the Battle of Pyongyang, which would last for the whole of March. In a final act of callous barbarity, as many as 540,000 North Korean civilians - schoolgirls and housewives, old men and teenage boys, were mobilized to defend the capital. Many were only armed with antique Mosin-Nagants and Arisakas, others had only knives and grenades. North Korean casualties were steep and mass-suicides were ubiquitous, as terrified civilians convinced by decades of propaganda took their own lives instead of surrendering to the Americans or South Koreans. And at the end of it all, Kim Jong-Il (now the most hated man on Earth) was nowhere to be found in his palace. Just his Japanese porno tapes, Elvis records and British sports cars. Instead, Kim was apprehended attempting to escape via submarine, was tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity on Jeju island in 1994, and executed by hanging in 1995.

In the aftermath of the Second Korean War, the people of North Korea had their entire understanding of the world flipped upside down. Some joined short-lived guerrilla movements to undermine the occupation of North Korea, going so far as to chop off the arms of children if they had been vaccinated by coalition medics. Others, in response to having everything they knew turn out to be a lie, embraced their liberators. President Trump offered a “tremendous” air lift of food and medical supplies to the “men, women, children and babies” of North Korea, engendering much goodwill. The work camps were liberated; entire generations of North Koreans had spent their entire lives unaware that there was a universe of things and people beyond the walls, or indeed, that some of the lights in the night sky now had people living on them. However, owing to ingrained stigmas, ex-prisoners in North Korea were often ostracized, forcing them to immigrate to the south, or further abroad.

In 1994, the Comprehensive Plan for the Reunification of the Korean Peninsula detailed the creation of the “Confederation of the Korean People”. Given the stark differences between the two countries due to the long period of separation, and not wishing to encounter the same issues Germany had to deal with when it reunified in 1990, the Plan outlined that the ROK and DPRK would be formally abolished, replaced by a confederation of the “Republic of North Korea” and “Republic of South Korea”, with a new capital city to be built atop the ruins of Panmunjom, named “Hwahae City” (Korean for “reconciliation”). In time, the two countries will merge their systems and cultures together, with the hope of establishing a unitary Korean republic down the line.

As of 1999, many North Koreans are enthusiastic participants in the reconstruction efforts, possessed by re-purposed socialist zeal, even if they’re still a bit backwards in how they interact with the modern world; the culture shock of northerners who move south, and have difficulty learning how to, say, use a computer, has become a stock trope of the modern Korea daytime TV drama. Additionally, you see those “megastructure/arcology” icons in North Korea? Those are the “vaults” built by the Kim regime. These cylindrical, vertical bunkers were secretly built to house hundreds of thousands of people underground in the worst-case scenario. At the end of the Second Korean War, most of these vaults remained unscathed, and while some will hold out against the “evil capitalists” as late as 2010, most opened their doors to the outside after the conflict was over. Since the regime kept their best and brightest in the vaults, the engineers and technicians who would prove invaluable to rebuilding the north invariably came out of these holes in the ground, and as of 1999, many of the vaults are being increasingly “Seoulified”, with neon lights and advertisements alongside the old Juche murals.

Diplomatically, the Confederation is going for that “Switzerland of the East” look. In the last five years since the end of the war, things have improved drastically - more than anyone could have predicted, given the devastation of the war, and the sheer number of starving ex-communists that the South’s economy would have to absorb. But the reunified Korean peninsula found itself in no condition to get involved in foreign military entanglements, at least for now. Instead, the Korean government has rather wisely opted for a “if you got money, we’re open for business” kinda strategy. Friends with everyone, allies with nobody. The fate of North Korean refugees in Chinese sex trafficking rings is currently a hot-button issue between Busan (the temporary capital of the Confederation, while Hwahae City is still being built) and Beijing, with the CKP invoking its status as the legal successor to the DPRK and demanding to know what has happened to these people.

=======
Da Flag
=======

The flag of the Korean Confederation combines elements of the old South Korean and North Korean flags, which are united by the three-color samtaegeuk; blue for heaven, red for earth, yellow for humanity.

CHINA

=======
Da Lore
=======

China has a very different history from OTL. While China is successful in getting a man in space by 1974, and even put taikonauts on the moon by 1977, Japan beats them to orbit (1971) and the moon (1976), and was the second country to reach Mars (1979), while China lagged behind. On top of this, their earthly affairs were no better.

The West doesn’t invest as much into China OTL. The US was already investing in launch sites in South America and the Caribbean, and a lot of labor got outsourced there instead. While China didn’t get as much foreign investment as OTL, it got enough for its economy to start emerging from the Maoist dark ages. Because China in this timeline didn’t pressure for the UN to take Hong Kong off of its list of non self-governing territories, there wasn’t much China could do in response to Hong Kong declaring independence, except for grimace and abide by the terms of the lease as if nothing happened. Then a far, far worse Tienanmen Square massacre broke out in ‘89. Protests spread all across China, the government cracked down violently, foreign investment withdrew from the country, an influx of North Korean refugees fleeing “baby-eating American demons” caused all sorts of trouble for China in the northeast, the Tibetans and Uyghurs rose up, and a massive earthquake in Sichuan made it all seem like even Heaven was displeased with the CCP. By ‘93, thousands of protesters had died and the unrest showed no signs of slowing down, even though the protesters were still not entirely organized. By 1996, however, the protests had come under the leadership of dissident leaders united under the umbrella of the “Chinese Democrats”. As 1997 rolled around, Jiang Zemin figured that reuniting Hong Kong with the Fatherland would help galvanize the support of the Chinese people.

As covered in the Hong Kong section, this did *not* go over well for China. Even before the Hong Kong War, there were dissident elements in the PLA who broke rank in favor of the protesters. After Jiang’s micromanaging of the war effort in Hong Kong, the military was now in rebellion against the Party. On the 1997 anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, an unprecedented 500,000 people entered the square, and the military let them in. By September of that year, the Chinese Communist Party, now under the leadership of Hu Jintao, relinquished power following the first multi-party election, in which the CCP lost in a colossal landslide to the insurgent Chinese Democrats. By December of 1997, a new constitution was approved and the People’s Republic of China was officially abolished in favor of the Federal Republic of China.

Under the 1997 Constitution (actually written in 1996), China would no longer be a single-party state, and instead adopted a political system similar to that of Sun Yat-Sen’s “Three Principles of the People”, with four branches of the government: legislative (National People’s Congress), judicial (Supreme Court), executive (the cabinet of the President and Premier) and examination (Federal Selection Office). This in some ways mirrored Taiwan’s own political system, though it lacked the auditing branch, due to disagreements as to how to implement such a board.

Guarantees in the 1997 Constitution were made for freedom of speech and religion, and concessions were given to Tibetan and Uyghur activists within the movement (Xinjiang had too many Han Chinese to be allowed to secede, and Tibet was where all of China’s water came from), who now had representation within the National Congress via political parties such as the Uyghur Congress and the Tibetan People’s Party. In the case of Tibet, the agreement wherein Tibet would be granted genuine autonomy under Chinese sovereignty, was reached following a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Chinese President Wei Jiangsheng. The martial law imposed on China’s lunar colonies was lifted, and they were formally incorporated into China as the Yueliang Autonomous Region.

Over a million political prisoners (many of them imprisoned only in the last ten years) were released, while guilty parties in the worst massacres perpetrated by the Chinese government were brought to justice. While some PLA personnel were swept up in this affair, many former PLA personnel continued to serve in the newfangled Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of China.

As of 1999, the new China is still barely two years old, and is still recovering from the decade-long unrest. Economically, China is a bit of a basket case, but is showing definite signs of improvement as it rebuilds its relationships with the rest of the world. Time will tell if democracy lasts or is just a brief fling in the Middle Kingdom.

======
Da Flag
======
The flag of the FRC is mostly red - the color of joy and good fortune in Chinese culture, rather than communism. The white plum blossom symbol was chosen because of its association with the democracy protests which toppled the Communist Party in 1998, and was seen as an optimistic departure from the communist iconography of the old Chinese flag; in Chinese culture, the plum blossom is a symbol of perseverance through winter, and of the coming spring. The six petals can be seen as representing Han, Zhuang, Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs, which overlap each other and become one in the center. The two white stripes represent the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, which have historically nurtured all of the great Chinese civilizations. The combination of red (fire) and white (metal) can also be interpreted as China re-forging itself.

JAPAN

=======
Da Lore
=======

As you’ve likely gathered, East Asia in the least ten years has been *uneasy* to say the least, and Japan has been the greatest beneficiary of this chaos, at the expense of China and Korea, soaking up a great many opportunities that those countries might have otherwise scored instead.

A non-performing loan scandal in 1980 had the effect of ushering in reforms to the Japanese financial sector, preventing the burst-bubble that would come ten years later in our own timeline. Combined with the profits reaped from Japan’s adventures in space, and the chaos in China and Korea, and as of 1999, Japan remains the second-largest economy on Earth after the United States, and the margin of separation isn’t very wide.

As mentioned earlier, Japan put their first “uchunaut” in orbit in 1971, becoming the third nation to independently put men into orbit. They were the second to third to reach the moon, the second to colonize Mars, third to the asteroid belt, fourth to Mercury and second to reach Jupiter as of 1996. Today, as many as two million Japanese live in orbit aboard rotating habitats in Earth orbit and at the Earth-Luna and Earth-Sol Lagrange points, with half a million on Luna itself, and another half-million Japanese on Mars, and all of these populations are growing fast, faster than the terrestrial Japanese even. To enable this incredible expansion into space, it required the development of dozens of dedicated launch sites for Japan’s fleet of public- and private-sector rockets. On the map, you can see ten launch sites on the Japanese home islands and the Ryukyu chain, with an additional five built on Japan’s outlying islands and reefs, plus Marine City. Not shown on this map are additional launch sites such as the Asada Goryu Space Center in New Guinea’s Bismarck Archipelago, or the Mizuchi 1 and Mizuchi 2 mobile platforms, built from converted oil drilling platforms, currently anchored near the equator in the South Pacific. Additionally, this map does not show the docks where Watatsumi rockets (a heavy-lift vehicle resembling the American “Sea Dragon” rocket, which is launched out of the ocean) are assembled and prepped for towing out to sea, or the airports where spaceplanes take off to bring payloads and passengers into low orbit (the spaceplanes and rockets have their own advantages, and will continue to exist side-by-side for the foreseeable future).

Okinotori is quickly turning into a more high-tech, space-age version of Hashima Island (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_… ), except not abandoned and still growing. The same can be said of the “Bird Islands” to its north. The fact that these seasteading projects extend Japan’s economic exclusion zone is a nice side-benefit, but the payoff of the steep investment of turning these rocks and reefs into spaceports has been Japan’s status as the second-most relevant player in space (the Soviet Union was once number-two, and even now, it’s an extremely close third behind Japan). Japan’s space industries include the mass-production and export of dirt-cheap reusable and expendable launch vehicles, propellant and nuclear fuel production, satellite launches (still not enough of those things in orbit quite yet), extraterrestrial real estate via Japan’s many orbital habitats, space-based manufacturing and research, asteroid and Lunar mining, space tourism, space-based solar power and more. Additionally, countries that lack sufficient space infrastructure look to countries like the US, USSR or Japan for lifts into orbit and beyond.

Construction of the Shimizu Mega-Pyramid began in 1987, made possible by advances in the carbon nanotube engineering, which were all but necessary for Soviet colonists on Venus. Meanwhile, off the coast of Ishigaki, the vision of Kiyonori Kikutake’s Marine City (www.pinterest.com/pin/23334282… ) was built between 1975 and 1985, and serves as a major hub for launching Watatsumi rockets thanks to its closer proximity to the equator than many of Japan’s territorial spaceports. The architectural movement Kikutake was a part of, Metabolism, achieved its highest popularity on Mars (where modular, compact living quarters proved incredibly useful), this style of architecture has also caught on back on Earth, mostly thanks to its association with Mars. And speaking of Mars, while Japan’s Mars colonies (organized into the Federation of Kasei) don’t really export much back to Earth in terms of physical goods, the nearly unfettered lack of regulations on Mars and absence of Earth’s tangleweb of copyright laws, means that the Japanese of Mars are able to export inventions and intellectual properties back to the motherland which might otherwise not be amenable due to legal or regulatory constraints. By a similar token, the “Free Nuclear Zones” on Luna (where there’s basically zero regulations for developing new reactors and nuclear fuels) developed the first viable deuterium fusion reactors in 1989, and Japan is one of three nations to currently operate deuterium reactors on Earth as of 1999 (the other two being the US and Germany). It’ll take a while for fusion to catch on as an energy source, mostly because the technology is still expensive and complicated, but it is shaping up to be quite revolutionary.

In terms of foreign policy, Japan continues to align with the United States, and has been close friends with Taiwan since it declared independence. Relations with Korea have seen marked improvements, in part thanks to Japan making the bold decision to deploy naval vessels and Phantom fighter-bombers to Korea during the conflict at the start of the decade. This was in response to North Korean ballistic missile attacks on US military bases in Japan; the missiles frequently went off-course and killed rural Japanese civilians. Japan stopped short of deploying ground forces to Korea given how most of the neighborhood wouldn’t be amused by Japanese soldiers on another country’s soil. However, Japan did send large numbers of combat engineers and medics to assist coalition forces, as well as search-and-rescue experts to help their South Korean counterparts pull people out of the rubble left by North Korean missile strikes in Busan, along with thousands of pints of donated blood.

Relations with China are...perhaps a bit mixed. Only two years with their shiny new government, and experts are already predicting China is going to be Japan’s number-one competitor in the region. For now at least, Japan sees the Chinese as potential customers, and haven’t put much thought into any “long games” Beijing might be playing.

=======
Da Flag
=======

Not much to say here, it’s the OTL Japanese flag.

TAIWAN

=======
Da Lore
=======

Taiwan’s story begins in 1967, when Chiang Kai-Shek falls down the stairs and perishes ingloriously.

HK Yang is then sworn in as the new President of the Republic of China. On October 25 1971, when the United Nations votes to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the sole Chinese state, President Yang accepts the offer for Taiwan to remain in the UN as a separate country. Taiwan ceases to be the “Republic of China” and becomes the “Chinese Republic of Taiwan”. Taiwan is recognized by US President Robert F Kennedy, as a way of beating back criticism of his much earlier withdrawal from Vietnam, by sticking it to the Chi-Coms. Taiwan will spend much of the 1970’s democratizing, as well as developing both a space program and a nuclear energy program, both with considerable Japanese aid. China very reluctantly accepts this reality, gritting their teeth as they themselves recognize Taiwan’s independence in 1972, but in the end, Beijing decided that international legitimacy and on seat on the UN Security Council was worth losing a single province.

Taiwan would put its first astronaut into orbit with Japanese-made rockets in 1974, becoming the seventh country to do so (the Commonwealth of Nations was number six, in 1973). Taiwan’s space efforts would end up being closely-linked to those of Japan, and unlike a lot of East Asian countries Taiwan’s uniquely-positive experience with Japanese colonialism meant that they were fine with relying on Tokyo for these sorts of things (unlike the South Koreans, who dragged their feet until the 80’s, until catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure gave them no option but to swallow their pride and look to their east for help with their manned program).

While Taiwan’s official name is the “Chinese Republic of Taiwan”, almost no-one in Taiwan is looking to reunify with the mainland. “Chinese” in this context refers to Taiwan’s cultural heritage, similar to the “Arab Republic of Egypt”. Even after China has democratized and shed itself of communist rule, the dream of reunification with the mainland has by now been replaced by fierce Taiwanese nationalism and patriotic fervor.

=======
Da Flag
======

The flag of Taiwan is basically the OTL “hearts-in-harmony” flag. A bit anachronistic, since it was adopted in the 1970’s, but hey, I like it. It is not my creation, and all the credit for this design goes to Reverend Donald Liu. The flag has green for Taiwan’s natural beauty and resources, white to symbolize the purity of Taiwan’s people, and the red device in the centre symbolizes four hearts in harmony, representing the republic’s four population groups: the indigenous peoples, Hakka, Hoklo, and mainlanders.

USSR

=======
Da Lore
=======

Not really an “East Asian country”, but I decided to throw in the USSR for funsies anyway.

Gorbachev rolls all sixes with his New Union Treaty, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more, replaced by the post-communist Union of Soviet *Sovereign* Republics.

Not everyone was on board with the New Union. Moldova left the party to federate with Romania, who had just recently thrown off communism themselves, but Transnistria and Gaugezia both opted to remain in the Union. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania opted out of the new USSR, as did Armenia and Georgia, though Abkhazia and South Ossetia chose to remain in the USSR; Georgia disagreed, but a few days of pew-pew later, and Tbilisi told them to get lost and lick Moscow’s boots if they wanted to so bad. Ukraine narrowly chose to remain, as did Belarus, and the Kazakh, Azeri, Uzbek, Tajik, Krygyz and Turkmen SSR’s, and of course the Russian SFSR.

The Union was reorganized into a confederation, with a single currency (Soviet Ruble), a single foreign policy and military (Soviet Armed Forces, still affectionately called the “Red Army”). The reformed USSR consists of thirty-six Soviet Sovereign Republics, thirteen Autonomous Republics and three Union Cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg and Star City); the SSR’s each have a level of autonomy slightly higher than that of a US state, while an AR is overseen by its respective SSR and in a sense is further-autonomous, and UC’s are autonomous cities. The former Russian SFSR was broken up into twenty-four new SSR’s and seven AR’s.

The USSR has become a multi-party democracy, with an economy that’s a slightly more involved version of the Scandinavian social-democratic mixed-market approach. In many ways, though, the USSR is also seen as a sort of “wild west” for new investment; some sectors of the economy are pretty tightly regulated, while others simply are not. The collapse of communism has opened up the appetite of the Soviet people for American, European and Japanese goods; the Internet is exploding (some censorship here and there, but nothing on the level of, say, modern OTL China); Western and Japanese tourists are all over the place, and the new Tourism Ministry is using cartoon characters to rehabilitate the Union’s image.

The Soviet Far East is a very different place from how one in our timeline might think of it. In light of Seward’s Success taking off in this timeline’s 1970’s, and the broader industrial boom in other parts of Alaska, the Soviets saw fit to match American ambitions in their own Arctic frontier regions. Old diamond mines were converted by the Soviets into half-underground domed cities, and similar projects centered around Marxist central planning (and an embedded surveillance apparatus) were constructed east of the Urals, to encourage greater settlement of the Far East and, hopefully, encourage greater access to the region’s abundant natural resources and economic potential. This had mixed results under communism, but at least in the part of the Far East shown on this map, we did get four spaceports and two “indoor cities” with all sorts of tacky communist kitsch.

Coca-Cola and Nintendo are flooding the Soviet Far East these days, and one reason why has to do with the Intercontinental Peace Bridge, connecting the Far Eastern SSR’s Chukotka Autonomous Republic, to the American State of Alaska. Built between 1993 and 1997, the ICPB allows one to travel from New York to Moscow by land, or even Buenos Aires to London, if you’re insane. The bridge is also symbolic of the dramatic reset in Soviet-American relations. At a critical moment in the Soviet Union’s reforms, the United States under President Donald Trump (Independent, New York) enacted “Marshall Plan II” - an economic assistance package intended to transition the Soviet Union into a capitalist democracy. This was part of the larger “Trump Pivot”, which came after the collapse of NATO at the end of the Cold War (to be precise, an Anglo-Canadian-American divorce from the bloc made NATO into a continental European security club, so it was shut down by Brussels and remade into something else), with “Mr. Wildcard’s” logic being “fuck you, Reagan - you may have beaten the Russians, but I’m gonna one-up you and make them our buddies”. Brash? Certainly. And it’ll definitely have consequences down the line with regards to Euro-American relations, as Moscow’s strategic interests become America’s strategic interests. But so far, this Soviet-American alliance has proven to be quite warm. And profitable. The Soviets have no shortage of cool resources and assets to sell (the Soviets made more expendable launch vehicles than anyone could ever think to use in a thousand lifetimes), and the Americans and Japanese have no shortage of cash.

At the opening of the ICPB in 1998, US President Trump and Soviet President Nikolai Ryzkhov (no, this is NOT a self-insert, look the guy up on Wikipedia) shook hands as American Tomcats and Soviet Sukhois flew in formation together. While the US and USSR still view one another as rivals, they don’t regard one another as enemies; think America/Goku to Russia/Vegeta. Their relationship is one of friendly competition and banter, basically.

And speaking of anime, Japan’s relationship with the reformed USSR has also been a very amenable one. This is attested by the surging popularity of maid cafes in Vladivostok, and Japanese investment in various half-finished industrial projects which were privatized by Moscow in the last ten years. Some fear it’s Japnese neo-imperialism, but Moscow knows what they’re doing. Mostly.

In terms of “active” foreign policy, as of 1999, the Soviets have focused on getting their newfangled mixed economy up and running. Decades of communism means that too many Soviet citizens don’t know how to do business, and much of the economy is behind the rest of the world. Therefore, aside from commitments to its off-world colonies on Venus, the Martian Lagrange Points and the Asteroid Belt, the Soviets have had to scale down everything that isn’t domestic. Military adventures have been limited to a few pew-pew sessions along their new borders in the 90’s, mostly in Transnistria and the Caucasus. Spetsnaz operatives and Soviet aircraft did participate in the war against North Korea after a border skirmish with the KPA drew Moscow out of its prior policy of strict neutrality in the conflict, but Ryzkhov was averse to deploying ground troops into Korea. In early 1997, the United States Armed Forces and the Red Army held their first-ever joint training exercises in Khabarovsk. Known as “Eastern Thunder”, this exercise was on both country’s schedules as early as ‘95, but it happened to coincide with China’s refusal to withdraw from Hong Kong, as did the joint letter that American and Soviet diplomats sent to Beijing expressing their respective governments’ synchronized perspective on Hong Kong. Totally just a coincidence, you guys.

=======
Da Flag
=======

While some considered ditching the red banner altogether, in the end, there was too much nostalgia attached to the flag of the October Revolution, the Great Patriotic War, Gagarin and Tereshkova. The basic design was therefore kept when the Union went from Socialist to Sovereign, but the star was removed, since it represented the Communist Party’s authority over the workers and peasants. The hammer and sickle emblem has also been enlarged in size, to make up for the absence of the star.

Description
=======
Da Intro
=======

Decided to do a little glimpse into a single region of Earth in the version of 1999 from Overheaven’s timeline. You like maps? You like flags? You like giant walls of L O R E? Contain your boners, friends. It’s all here.

Side-note, this is my first time working with an M-BAM map template, and I really like the results. I can do so many damn little details. I might do another one of these for the US, sometime in the near-future.

Anyway, enough dilly-dallying.
….

HONG KONG

=======
Da Lore
=======

So, starting off our tour of East Asia, and (at the risk of invoking contemporary IRL politics, which normally isn’t my style) to provide a perhaps-cathartic vision of what could have been: Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s story begins in 1972, when China forgets to ask for the territory to be removed from the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. Later, after a very different Falklands War, in which Britain demonstrated the effectiveness of the Commonwealth in coordinating its combined military powers on short notice, Margaret Thatcher holds a referendum in Hong Kong regarding its future, in January of 1984, ahead of a Sino-British conference regarding the 1997 expiration of the UK’s lease of the territory. Overwhelmingly, Hong Kong votes in favor of independence. After Hong Kong declares independence in April of that year, Beijing is not amused, but Thatcher politely informs the Chinese that she has no jurisdiction over the affairs of sovereign nations, and can no longer return Hong Kong to China.

Almost immediately, Hong Kong opted to join the Commonwealth of Nations. In 1989, a nuclear power plant is opened in Hong Kong, based on newfangled fission designs innovated on Luna earlier in the decade. This will allow for Hong Kong to develop desalination facilities to overcome its greatest strategic weakness with regards to China - the fresh water which normally is pumped in from the mainland. Additionally, the under-utilized farmland in the New Territories is revolutionized and optimized with the latest techniques gleaned from the Commonwealth’s experience of colonizing Mars, and speaking of space, the Stanley Ho Space Centre is opened for business in 1993. Around this time as well, relatives of Hong Kong families living in Guangdong are evacuated to Hong Kong amid growing anti-Hong Kong sentiment in China, due to widespread democracy protests (more on that in the China section of this post). And through it all, the Hong Kong Defense Force was built up with hardware purchased mostly from the Commonwealth, Taiwan, Israel and Europe.

By 1996, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin was growing desperate and opted to invade Hong Kong and reunite it with the “Fatherland” to galvanize patriotic support at home. He gave the “Third Rate Empires” a year to evacuate the enclave, or else they would be evicted by force. In response, the HKDF swelled to 72,000 men and women between the ages of 16 and 65, with may lying about their age in order to enlist. Due to the HKDF’s policy of permitting foreigners to serve in their ranks as long as they had a grasp of English or Cantonese, around 15,000 of the HKDF’s forces were made up of foreigners - Koreans, Taiwanese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Americans, Brazilians, Iranians, Turks, Indians, Malaysians, Filipinos, Soviets, Germans, Greeks, Frenchmen, Italians, Swedes, Israelis and even volunteers who made the 100-day journey from Mars, just to fight for Hong Kong. These ranged from grizzled veterans, die-hard anti-communists, and special forces covertly acting on behalf of their government’s national interest, to middle-class waiters who quit their day jobs for an adventure. Where Beijing spun this as “foreign mercenaries bolstering a colonialist gangster regime”, the RHK spun it as “humanity will remember when the world came to Hong Kong’s aid in her hour of need". Additionally, supporting the HKDF were 35,000 Commonwealth soldiers from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, Rhodesia, Nigeria and the West Indies Federation, organized into Commonwealth Task Force - Hong Kong (CTF-HK), who brought in air, ground and naval assets unavailable to the HKDF, and provided Hong Kong’s air force with most of its pilots. In the months leading up Jiang’s promised invasion, the New Territories were evacuated and prepped for invasion with tank traps, barbed wire, sandbags and more.

On January 1st 1997, 200,000 People’s Liberation Army soldiers, backed by 520 tanks and numerous artillery pieces and aircraft, were sent into Hong Kong. 62,000 Chinese soldiers didn’t come back, and as many as 90,000 surrendered to the Commonwealth forces at the first opportunity. The fighting was brutal, with Commonwealth forces pushed all the way to Kowloon, despite punching well above their weight-class. The PLA was unable to bring their full force to bear on Hong Kong, due to its value as an intact territory, and the Commonwealth took advantage of this by stationing SAM batteries at the nuclear plant and spaceport, knowing the Chinese wouldn’t try to bomb them. After the first offensive lost momentum during house-to-house fighting in Kowloon, a stalemate settled in and a ceasefire was declared. While the attackers and defenders exchanged bodies and prisoners, politicians met in Bangkok. While the Chinese could have simply run out the clock and waited for the people of Hong Kong to revolt due to rationing, Jiang was unaware of these tensions behind the British lines (a subject of many alternate history enthusiasts to this day), and pressed for an unacceptable and comedic “One Country, Two Systems” proposal. As peace negotiations in Bangkok broke down, the US and Soviet Union both threatened to get involved in the conflict if China did not disengage; the entire UN Security Council (with the exception of Guinea-Bissau and China itself) voted in favor of a resolution for China to withdraw its forces from Hong Kong; and the British were loaned a kinetic penetrator by the Americans, which was loaded into their unfinished Excalibur k-sat and shot off the coast of Hong Kong as a “test-fire” of the Commonwealth’s orbital bombardment capabilities.

After almost two months of war, February 8th marked China’s withdrawal from Hong Kong and Beijing’s official, begrudging recognition of Hong Kong sovereignty - a day commemorated in Hong Kong as “Freedom Day”.

======
Da Flag
======

The flag of Hong Kong has blue and white as its predominant colors, which invokes the city-state’s nickname, “Pearl of the Orient Sea”; blue = sea, white = pearl. The red-white orchid flower in the top-right, meanwhile, represents not only the country’s national flower, but also its British colonial heritage, by serving as an allusion to Hong Kong’s old colonial ensign by way of the red-white-blue Union Jack.

KOREA

=======
Da Lore
=======

Amid the Soviet Union’s reset, China’s descent into chaos, and North Korea’s own ill-timed famine, the “Second Korean War” (technically just a continuation of the “First” Korean War) began in the early morning hours of November 2nd 1993. By the end of the week, most of South Korea was overrun by the KPA, and Seoul had become a war zone of shelling from Kaesong, chemical weapons and waves of KPA soldiers in gas masks.

A US-South Korean counter-offensive pushed the North Koreans back, with some minor help from Taiwanese troops, Hong Kong special forces, and Japanese air and naval support. To end the shelling of Seoul, US President Donald Trump ordered the complete ordinance-saturation of North Korean artillery positions near Kaesong. For four days and four nights, an estimated twelve million tons of ordinance (greater than the air campaigns over Germany, Japan or North Vietnam) was dropped on a small area of the map barely larger than downtown Chicago. Waves upon waves of B2’s and B52’s dropping daisycutters and cluster munitions, cruise missiles fired off the decks of American warships and South Korean missile bases, and most of all: 8,155 Minuteman-KP (kinetic penetrator) tungsten projectiles, each the size of a telephone pole and packing the equivalent force of five kilotons of TNT, were fired down from Eagle orbital weapon platforms in High Earth Orbit. Attempts by the DPRK to shoot down these platforms with anti-satellite missiles were foiled by anti-missile laser batteries in Low Earth Orbit, which killed the sluggish KPA missiles. One by one, the North Korean guns went silent.

After savage fighting in the gas-choked, ruined streets of Seoul, the KPA ordered a full retreat back across the DMZ, leaving behind their wounded to man machine guns and hold off the capitalist dogs. As the December snowfall arrived, the American and South Korean offensive was sluggish, but the sheer technological edge of the coalition forces made the outdated and increasingly-demoralized KPA no match for this slow-moving hurricane lumbering its way towards Pyongyang. Savvy KPA commanders began to surrender to coalition forces, deeming the war a foolish and hopeless effort that would cost the people of North Korea dearly. Which of course prompted the Kim regime to purge its ranks of anyone even suspected of cowardice/sobriety, until only a core of toadies and lackeys remained in Kim Jong-Il’s inner circle.

By late February, the snow had melted and the beginning of Spring would mark the start of the Battle of Pyongyang, which would last for the whole of March. In a final act of callous barbarity, as many as 540,000 North Korean civilians - schoolgirls and housewives, old men and teenage boys, were mobilized to defend the capital. Many were only armed with antique Mosin-Nagants and Arisakas, others had only knives and grenades. North Korean casualties were steep and mass-suicides were ubiquitous, as terrified civilians convinced by decades of propaganda took their own lives instead of surrendering to the Americans or South Koreans. And at the end of it all, Kim Jong-Il (now the most hated man on Earth) was nowhere to be found in his palace. Just his Japanese porno tapes, Elvis records and British sports cars. Instead, Kim was apprehended attempting to escape via submarine, was tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity on Jeju island in 1994, and executed by hanging in 1995.

In the aftermath of the Second Korean War, the people of North Korea had their entire understanding of the world flipped upside down. Some joined short-lived guerrilla movements to undermine the occupation of North Korea, going so far as to chop off the arms of children if they had been vaccinated by coalition medics. Others, in response to having everything they knew turn out to be a lie, embraced their liberators. President Trump offered a “tremendous” air lift of food and medical supplies to the “men, women, children and babies” of North Korea, engendering much goodwill. The work camps were liberated; entire generations of North Koreans had spent their entire lives unaware that there was a universe of things and people beyond the walls, or indeed, that some of the lights in the night sky now had people living on them. However, owing to ingrained stigmas, ex-prisoners in North Korea were often ostracized, forcing them to immigrate to the south, or further abroad.

In 1994, the Comprehensive Plan for the Reunification of the Korean Peninsula detailed the creation of the “Confederation of the Korean People”. Given the stark differences between the two countries due to the long period of separation, and not wishing to encounter the same issues Germany had to deal with when it reunified in 1990, the Plan outlined that the ROK and DPRK would be formally abolished, replaced by a confederation of the “Republic of North Korea” and “Republic of South Korea”, with a new capital city to be built atop the ruins of Panmunjom, named “Hwahae City” (Korean for “reconciliation”). In time, the two countries will merge their systems and cultures together, with the hope of establishing a unitary Korean republic down the line.

As of 1999, many North Koreans are enthusiastic participants in the reconstruction efforts, possessed by re-purposed socialist zeal, even if they’re still a bit backwards in how they interact with the modern world; the culture shock of northerners who move south, and have difficulty learning how to, say, use a computer, has become a stock trope of the modern Korea daytime TV drama. Additionally, you see those “megastructure/arcology” icons in North Korea? Those are the “vaults” built by the Kim regime. These cylindrical, vertical bunkers were secretly built to house hundreds of thousands of people underground in the worst-case scenario. At the end of the Second Korean War, most of these vaults remained unscathed, and while some will hold out against the “evil capitalists” as late as 2010, most opened their doors to the outside after the conflict was over. Since the regime kept their best and brightest in the vaults, the engineers and technicians who would prove invaluable to rebuilding the north invariably came out of these holes in the ground, and as of 1999, many of the vaults are being increasingly “Seoulified”, with neon lights and advertisements alongside the old Juche murals.

Diplomatically, the Confederation is going for that “Switzerland of the East” look. In the last five years since the end of the war, things have improved drastically - more than anyone could have predicted, given the devastation of the war, and the sheer number of starving ex-communists that the South’s economy would have to absorb. But the reunified Korean peninsula found itself in no condition to get involved in foreign military entanglements, at least for now. Instead, the Korean government has rather wisely opted for a “if you got money, we’re open for business” kinda strategy. Friends with everyone, allies with nobody. The fate of North Korean refugees in Chinese sex trafficking rings is currently a hot-button issue between Busan (the temporary capital of the Confederation, while Hwahae City is still being built) and Beijing, with the CKP invoking its status as the legal successor to the DPRK and demanding to know what has happened to these people.

=======
Da Flag
=======

The flag of the Korean Confederation combines elements of the old South Korean and North Korean flags, which are united by the three-color samtaegeuk; blue for heaven, red for earth, yellow for humanity.

CHINA

=======
Da Lore
=======

China has a very different history from OTL. While China is successful in getting a man in space by 1974, and even put taikonauts on the moon by 1977, Japan beats them to orbit (1971) and the moon (1976), and was the second country to reach Mars (1979), while China lagged behind. On top of this, their earthly affairs were no better.

The West doesn’t invest as much into China OTL. The US was already investing in launch sites in South America and the Caribbean, and a lot of labor got outsourced there instead. While China didn’t get as much foreign investment as OTL, it got enough for its economy to start emerging from the Maoist dark ages. Because China in this timeline didn’t pressure for the UN to take Hong Kong off of its list of non self-governing territories, there wasn’t much China could do in response to Hong Kong declaring independence, except for grimace and abide by the terms of the lease as if nothing happened. Then a far, far worse Tienanmen Square massacre broke out in ‘89. Protests spread all across China, the government cracked down violently, foreign investment withdrew from the country, an influx of North Korean refugees fleeing “baby-eating American demons” caused all sorts of trouble for China in the northeast, the Tibetans and Uyghurs rose up, and a massive earthquake in Sichuan made it all seem like even Heaven was displeased with the CCP. By ‘93, thousands of protesters had died and the unrest showed no signs of slowing down, even though the protesters were still not entirely organized. By 1996, however, the protests had come under the leadership of dissident leaders united under the umbrella of the “Chinese Democrats”. As 1997 rolled around, Jiang Zemin figured that reuniting Hong Kong with the Fatherland would help galvanize the support of the Chinese people.

As covered in the Hong Kong section, this did *not* go over well for China. Even before the Hong Kong War, there were dissident elements in the PLA who broke rank in favor of the protesters. After Jiang’s micromanaging of the war effort in Hong Kong, the military was now in rebellion against the Party. On the 1997 anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre, an unprecedented 500,000 people entered the square, and the military let them in. By September of that year, the Chinese Communist Party, now under the leadership of Hu Jintao, relinquished power following the first multi-party election, in which the CCP lost in a colossal landslide to the insurgent Chinese Democrats. By December of 1997, a new constitution was approved and the People’s Republic of China was officially abolished in favor of the Federal Republic of China.

Under the 1997 Constitution (actually written in 1996), China would no longer be a single-party state, and instead adopted a political system similar to that of Sun Yat-Sen’s “Three Principles of the People”, with four branches of the government: legislative (National People’s Congress), judicial (Supreme Court), executive (the cabinet of the President and Premier) and examination (Federal Selection Office). This in some ways mirrored Taiwan’s own political system, though it lacked the auditing branch, due to disagreements as to how to implement such a board.

Guarantees in the 1997 Constitution were made for freedom of speech and religion, and concessions were given to Tibetan and Uyghur activists within the movement (Xinjiang had too many Han Chinese to be allowed to secede, and Tibet was where all of China’s water came from), who now had representation within the National Congress via political parties such as the Uyghur Congress and the Tibetan People’s Party. In the case of Tibet, the agreement wherein Tibet would be granted genuine autonomy under Chinese sovereignty, was reached following a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Chinese President Wei Jiangsheng. The martial law imposed on China’s lunar colonies was lifted, and they were formally incorporated into China as the Yueliang Autonomous Region.

Over a million political prisoners (many of them imprisoned only in the last ten years) were released, while guilty parties in the worst massacres perpetrated by the Chinese government were brought to justice. While some PLA personnel were swept up in this affair, many former PLA personnel continued to serve in the newfangled Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of China.

As of 1999, the new China is still barely two years old, and is still recovering from the decade-long unrest. Economically, China is a bit of a basket case, but is showing definite signs of improvement as it rebuilds its relationships with the rest of the world. Time will tell if democracy lasts or is just a brief fling in the Middle Kingdom.

======
Da Flag
======
The flag of the FRC is mostly red - the color of joy and good fortune in Chinese culture, rather than communism. The white plum blossom symbol was chosen because of its association with the democracy protests which toppled the Communist Party in 1998, and was seen as an optimistic departure from the communist iconography of the old Chinese flag; in Chinese culture, the plum blossom is a symbol of perseverance through winter, and of the coming spring. The six petals can be seen as representing Han, Zhuang, Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs, which overlap each other and become one in the center. The two white stripes represent the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, which have historically nurtured all of the great Chinese civilizations. The combination of red (fire) and white (metal) can also be interpreted as China re-forging itself.

JAPAN

=======
Da Lore
=======

As you’ve likely gathered, East Asia in the least ten years has been *uneasy* to say the least, and Japan has been the greatest beneficiary of this chaos, at the expense of China and Korea, soaking up a great many opportunities that those countries might have otherwise scored instead.

A non-performing loan scandal in 1980 had the effect of ushering in reforms to the Japanese financial sector, preventing the burst-bubble that would come ten years later in our own timeline. Combined with the profits reaped from Japan’s adventures in space, and the chaos in China and Korea, and as of 1999, Japan remains the second-largest economy on Earth after the United States, and the margin of separation isn’t very wide.

As mentioned earlier, Japan put their first “uchunaut” in orbit in 1971, becoming the third nation to independently put men into orbit. They were the second to third to reach the moon, the second to colonize Mars, third to the asteroid belt, fourth to Mercury and second to reach Jupiter as of 1996. Today, as many as two million Japanese live in orbit aboard rotating habitats in Earth orbit and at the Earth-Luna and Earth-Sol Lagrange points, with half a million on Luna itself, and another half-million Japanese on Mars, and all of these populations are growing fast, faster than the terrestrial Japanese even. To enable this incredible expansion into space, it required the development of dozens of dedicated launch sites for Japan’s fleet of public- and private-sector rockets. On the map, you can see ten launch sites on the Japanese home islands and the Ryukyu chain, with an additional five built on Japan’s outlying islands and reefs, plus Marine City. Not shown on this map are additional launch sites such as the Asada Goryu Space Center in New Guinea’s Bismarck Archipelago, or the Mizuchi 1 and Mizuchi 2 mobile platforms, built from converted oil drilling platforms, currently anchored near the equator in the South Pacific. Additionally, this map does not show the docks where Watatsumi rockets (a heavy-lift vehicle resembling the American “Sea Dragon” rocket, which is launched out of the ocean) are assembled and prepped for towing out to sea, or the airports where spaceplanes take off to bring payloads and passengers into low orbit (the spaceplanes and rockets have their own advantages, and will continue to exist side-by-side for the foreseeable future).

Okinotori is quickly turning into a more high-tech, space-age version of Hashima Island (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_… ), except not abandoned and still growing. The same can be said of the “Bird Islands” to its north. The fact that these seasteading projects extend Japan’s economic exclusion zone is a nice side-benefit, but the payoff of the steep investment of turning these rocks and reefs into spaceports has been Japan’s status as the second-most relevant player in space (the Soviet Union was once number-two, and even now, it’s an extremely close third behind Japan). Japan’s space industries include the mass-production and export of dirt-cheap reusable and expendable launch vehicles, propellant and nuclear fuel production, satellite launches (still not enough of those things in orbit quite yet), extraterrestrial real estate via Japan’s many orbital habitats, space-based manufacturing and research, asteroid and Lunar mining, space tourism, space-based solar power and more. Additionally, countries that lack sufficient space infrastructure look to countries like the US, USSR or Japan for lifts into orbit and beyond.

Construction of the Shimizu Mega-Pyramid began in 1987, made possible by advances in the carbon nanotube engineering, which were all but necessary for Soviet colonists on Venus. Meanwhile, off the coast of Ishigaki, the vision of Kiyonori Kikutake’s Marine City (www.pinterest.com/pin/23334282… ) was built between 1975 and 1985, and serves as a major hub for launching Watatsumi rockets thanks to its closer proximity to the equator than many of Japan’s territorial spaceports. The architectural movement Kikutake was a part of, Metabolism, achieved its highest popularity on Mars (where modular, compact living quarters proved incredibly useful), this style of architecture has also caught on back on Earth, mostly thanks to its association with Mars. And speaking of Mars, while Japan’s Mars colonies (organized into the Federation of Kasei) don’t really export much back to Earth in terms of physical goods, the nearly unfettered lack of regulations on Mars and absence of Earth’s tangleweb of copyright laws, means that the Japanese of Mars are able to export inventions and intellectual properties back to the motherland which might otherwise not be amenable due to legal or regulatory constraints. By a similar token, the “Free Nuclear Zones” on Luna (where there’s basically zero regulations for developing new reactors and nuclear fuels) developed the first viable deuterium fusion reactors in 1989, and Japan is one of three nations to currently operate deuterium reactors on Earth as of 1999 (the other two being the US and Germany). It’ll take a while for fusion to catch on as an energy source, mostly because the technology is still expensive and complicated, but it is shaping up to be quite revolutionary.

In terms of foreign policy, Japan continues to align with the United States, and has been close friends with Taiwan since it declared independence. Relations with Korea have seen marked improvements, in part thanks to Japan making the bold decision to deploy naval vessels and Phantom fighter-bombers to Korea during the conflict at the start of the decade. This was in response to North Korean ballistic missile attacks on US military bases in Japan; the missiles frequently went off-course and killed rural Japanese civilians. Japan stopped short of deploying ground forces to Korea given how most of the neighborhood wouldn’t be amused by Japanese soldiers on another country’s soil. However, Japan did send large numbers of combat engineers and medics to assist coalition forces, as well as search-and-rescue experts to help their South Korean counterparts pull people out of the rubble left by North Korean missile strikes in Busan, along with thousands of pints of donated blood.

Relations with China are...perhaps a bit mixed. Only two years with their shiny new government, and experts are already predicting China is going to be Japan’s number-one competitor in the region. For now at least, Japan sees the Chinese as potential customers, and haven’t put much thought into any “long games” Beijing might be playing.

=======
Da Flag
=======

Not much to say here, it’s the OTL Japanese flag.

TAIWAN

=======
Da Lore
=======

Taiwan’s story begins in 1967, when Chiang Kai-Shek falls down the stairs and perishes ingloriously.

HK Yang is then sworn in as the new President of the Republic of China. On October 25 1971, when the United Nations votes to recognize the People’s Republic of China as the sole Chinese state, President Yang accepts the offer for Taiwan to remain in the UN as a separate country. Taiwan ceases to be the “Republic of China” and becomes the “Chinese Republic of Taiwan”. Taiwan is recognized by US President Robert F Kennedy, as a way of beating back criticism of his much earlier withdrawal from Vietnam, by sticking it to the Chi-Coms. Taiwan will spend much of the 1970’s democratizing, as well as developing both a space program and a nuclear energy program, both with considerable Japanese aid. China very reluctantly accepts this reality, gritting their teeth as they themselves recognize Taiwan’s independence in 1972, but in the end, Beijing decided that international legitimacy and on seat on the UN Security Council was worth losing a single province.

Taiwan would put its first astronaut into orbit with Japanese-made rockets in 1974, becoming the seventh country to do so (the Commonwealth of Nations was number six, in 1973). Taiwan’s space efforts would end up being closely-linked to those of Japan, and unlike a lot of East Asian countries Taiwan’s uniquely-positive experience with Japanese colonialism meant that they were fine with relying on Tokyo for these sorts of things (unlike the South Koreans, who dragged their feet until the 80’s, until catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure gave them no option but to swallow their pride and look to their east for help with their manned program).

While Taiwan’s official name is the “Chinese Republic of Taiwan”, almost no-one in Taiwan is looking to reunify with the mainland. “Chinese” in this context refers to Taiwan’s cultural heritage, similar to the “Arab Republic of Egypt”. Even after China has democratized and shed itself of communist rule, the dream of reunification with the mainland has by now been replaced by fierce Taiwanese nationalism and patriotic fervor.

=======
Da Flag
======

The flag of Taiwan is basically the OTL “hearts-in-harmony” flag. A bit anachronistic, since it was adopted in the 1970’s, but hey, I like it. It is not my creation, and all the credit for this design goes to Reverend Donald Liu. The flag has green for Taiwan’s natural beauty and resources, white to symbolize the purity of Taiwan’s people, and the red device in the centre symbolizes four hearts in harmony, representing the republic’s four population groups: the indigenous peoples, Hakka, Hoklo, and mainlanders.

USSR

=======
Da Lore
=======

Not really an “East Asian country”, but I decided to throw in the USSR for funsies anyway.

Gorbachev rolls all sixes with his New Union Treaty, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was no more, replaced by the post-communist Union of Soviet *Sovereign* Republics.

Not everyone was on board with the New Union. Moldova left the party to federate with Romania, who had just recently thrown off communism themselves, but Transnistria and Gaugezia both opted to remain in the Union. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania opted out of the new USSR, as did Armenia and Georgia, though Abkhazia and South Ossetia chose to remain in the USSR; Georgia disagreed, but a few days of pew-pew later, and Tbilisi told them to get lost and lick Moscow’s boots if they wanted to so bad. Ukraine narrowly chose to remain, as did Belarus, and the Kazakh, Azeri, Uzbek, Tajik, Krygyz and Turkmen SSR’s, and of course the Russian SFSR.

The Union was reorganized into a confederation, with a single currency (Soviet Ruble), a single foreign policy and military (Soviet Armed Forces, still affectionately called the “Red Army”). The reformed USSR consists of thirty-six Soviet Sovereign Republics, thirteen Autonomous Republics and three Union Cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg and Star City); the SSR’s each have a level of autonomy slightly higher than that of a US state, while an AR is overseen by its respective SSR and in a sense is further-autonomous, and UC’s are autonomous cities. The former Russian SFSR was broken up into twenty-four new SSR’s and seven AR’s.

The USSR has become a multi-party democracy, with an economy that’s a slightly more involved version of the Scandinavian social-democratic mixed-market approach. In many ways, though, the USSR is also seen as a sort of “wild west” for new investment; some sectors of the economy are pretty tightly regulated, while others simply are not. The collapse of communism has opened up the appetite of the Soviet people for American, European and Japanese goods; the Internet is exploding (some censorship here and there, but nothing on the level of, say, modern OTL China); Western and Japanese tourists are all over the place, and the new Tourism Ministry is using cartoon characters to rehabilitate the Union’s image.

The Soviet Far East is a very different place from how one in our timeline might think of it. In light of Seward’s Success taking off in this timeline’s 1970’s, and the broader industrial boom in other parts of Alaska, the Soviets saw fit to match American ambitions in their own Arctic frontier regions. Old diamond mines were converted by the Soviets into half-underground domed cities, and similar projects centered around Marxist central planning (and an embedded surveillance apparatus) were constructed east of the Urals, to encourage greater settlement of the Far East and, hopefully, encourage greater access to the region’s abundant natural resources and economic potential. This had mixed results under communism, but at least in the part of the Far East shown on this map, we did get four spaceports and two “indoor cities” with all sorts of tacky communist kitsch.

Coca-Cola and Nintendo are flooding the Soviet Far East these days, and one reason why has to do with the Intercontinental Peace Bridge, connecting the Far Eastern SSR’s Chukotka Autonomous Republic, to the American State of Alaska. Built between 1993 and 1997, the ICPB allows one to travel from New York to Moscow by land, or even Buenos Aires to London, if you’re insane. The bridge is also symbolic of the dramatic reset in Soviet-American relations. At a critical moment in the Soviet Union’s reforms, the United States under President Donald Trump (Independent, New York) enacted “Marshall Plan II” - an economic assistance package intended to transition the Soviet Union into a capitalist democracy. This was part of the larger “Trump Pivot”, which came after the collapse of NATO at the end of the Cold War (to be precise, an Anglo-Canadian-American divorce from the bloc made NATO into a continental European security club, so it was shut down by Brussels and remade into something else), with “Mr. Wildcard’s” logic being “fuck you, Reagan - you may have beaten the Russians, but I’m gonna one-up you and make them our buddies”. Brash? Certainly. And it’ll definitely have consequences down the line with regards to Euro-American relations, as Moscow’s strategic interests become America’s strategic interests. But so far, this Soviet-American alliance has proven to be quite warm. And profitable. The Soviets have no shortage of cool resources and assets to sell (the Soviets made more expendable launch vehicles than anyone could ever think to use in a thousand lifetimes), and the Americans and Japanese have no shortage of cash.

At the opening of the ICPB in 1998, US President Trump and Soviet President Nikolai Ryzkhov (no, this is NOT a self-insert, look the guy up on Wikipedia) shook hands as American Tomcats and Soviet Sukhois flew in formation together. While the US and USSR still view one another as rivals, they don’t regard one another as enemies; think America/Goku to Russia/Vegeta. Their relationship is one of friendly competition and banter, basically.

And speaking of anime, Japan’s relationship with the reformed USSR has also been a very amenable one. This is attested by the surging popularity of maid cafes in Vladivostok, and Japanese investment in various half-finished industrial projects which were privatized by Moscow in the last ten years. Some fear it’s Japnese neo-imperialism, but Moscow knows what they’re doing. Mostly.

In terms of “active” foreign policy, as of 1999, the Soviets have focused on getting their newfangled mixed economy up and running. Decades of communism means that too many Soviet citizens don’t know how to do business, and much of the economy is behind the rest of the world. Therefore, aside from commitments to its off-world colonies on Venus, the Martian Lagrange Points and the Asteroid Belt, the Soviets have had to scale down everything that isn’t domestic. Military adventures have been limited to a few pew-pew sessions along their new borders in the 90’s, mostly in Transnistria and the Caucasus. Spetsnaz operatives and Soviet aircraft did participate in the war against North Korea after a border skirmish with the KPA drew Moscow out of its prior policy of strict neutrality in the conflict, but Ryzkhov was averse to deploying ground troops into Korea. In early 1997, the United States Armed Forces and the Red Army held their first-ever joint training exercises in Khabarovsk. Known as “Eastern Thunder”, this exercise was on both country’s schedules as early as ‘95, but it happened to coincide with China’s refusal to withdraw from Hong Kong, as did the joint letter that American and Soviet diplomats sent to Beijing expressing their respective governments’ synchronized perspective on Hong Kong. Totally just a coincidence, you guys.

=======
Da Flag
=======

While some considered ditching the red banner altogether, in the end, there was too much nostalgia attached to the flag of the October Revolution, the Great Patriotic War, Gagarin and Tereshkova. The basic design was therefore kept when the Union went from Socialist to Sovereign, but the star was removed, since it represented the Communist Party’s authority over the workers and peasants. The hammer and sickle emblem has also been enlarged in size, to make up for the absence of the star.