Class War Never Changes: How to write a Chinese Fallout setting

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Here is a draft for the sort of projects you'd be pursuing at the start of the quest. None of the projects associated with the 'Partnerships' feature (the equivalent of Eve's Joint Projects) have yet been included, since this would require an in-game vote. If no obvious actions are missing, then I would be just about ready to start the quest for real.
 
TheInnerMoon said:
Not unless circumstances change drastically. Minister Ren Jie is a labor bureaucrat, not an insurgent. That said, there may be some foreign terrorism if you go down the intelligence path.
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That's a good way to do it imo, I always thought the whole "you secretly hate the government you are working for" thing Eve did was a bad move and one of the reasons I stopped reading it.
 
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By the way, I've been thinking about what to call the actual quest. Should I just stick with "Class War Never Changes"? I have some alternatives, but none that can really beat it.
 
notbirdofprey said:
How is "Chinese dynasties did bad shit" relevant to "China was imperialized and colonized?"
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It's relevant specifically to my initial statement of 'this rhetoric sounds like being upset about being on the other end of the imperialism boot instead of being angry that there even is an imperialism boot'.

There is no such thing as a 'good' or even 'morally neutral' empire, every part of being one, from establishment to maintenance is morally bankrupt at every level, especially how it treats neighbours. No one deserves to have that shit inflicted on them.
 
TheInnerMoon said:
On a related note, I've been playing Fallout 76 over the past week, and I can definitely tell why y'all think the US was on the brink of collapse. That said, there are still nuanced distinctions between, let's say, Russia in January 1917, Russia in July 1917, and Russia in January 1918. Not sure where Fallout America falls on that spectrum, but the one thing they have going for themselves is that they actually won on the Alaskan front.
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Twiggierjet said:
The way I interpret the lore is that by the end both sides are essentially being carried by momentum and wartime inertia more then anything else. The US was technically winning in a purely "hoi4 victory points control" sense but even if instead of launching nukes that day both sides signed a peace treaty, collapse was all but assured.
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TheInnerMoon said:
My only quibble would be with the supposition that the bombs were dropped by the Enclave themselves in order to preempt the collapse of the country, since I think it's more poetic if we never find out who started it. Might even be funnier if the Enclave was ready to drop the bombs on Tuesday, and then the Chinese went ahead and dropped them on Monday.
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As I see it, Americans would have the following list of complaints with their goverment:
  • Stop using us as lab rats for your Mad Science.
  • Automation is taking all the jobs combined with a Red Scare attitude on the government's part which would rather see everyone starve in the streets than establish a BGI or outlaw the robots.
  • Peak Resources, the world literally doesn't have enough to maintain the quasi-fifties americana QoL for everyone.
  • Stop backing a rival superpower into a corner by outright invading their territory leaving them faced with otherwise-inevitable military defeat unless they use their nukes, this'll cause the apocalypse.
  • People were discovering en masse about the Enclave and their Mad Science atrocities and how little control they actually had over their country's politics and wanted revenge.
So, yes, I see it as quite plausible that the Enclave would try to destroy the world so long as they could survive in their bunkers and oil rig and had their GECKs and robot labor to rebuild, simply to kill everyone who they no longer needed and who potentially threatened their rule.

Ways things could've played out:
 
Bassoe said:
So, yes, I see it as quite plausible that the Enclave would try to destroy the world so long as they could survive in their bunkers and oil rig and had their GECKs and robot labor to rebuild, simply to kill everyone who they no longer needed and who potentially threatened their rule.
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I've always been of the opinion that it's better if we never find out who launched the nukes first, or that if we do it turns out both sides launched at basically the same time, and even those groups that knew it was going to happen and were making plans to create their own personal new world order out of the ashes didn't really want it to happen. Gives it a much more narratively satisfying tragic vibe.

Bassoe said:
The Enclave makes practical use of their technologies to actually solve the zero-sum nature of their problems. Instead of building pointless giant human lab rat mazes (Vaults) and other Mad Science, go full post-scarcity with Mister Handy's engine antigravity space launches sending von neumann probes derived from Sierra Madre's replicators to the asteroid belt and so forth and so on.
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Ah, but if they were practical they wouldn't be the Enclave now would they? That being said "more sensible alternative to the Enclave" does sound like a fun quest idea.

Bassoe said:
Maxson's rebellion is more successful/starts sooner and actually manages to win or at least ties up enough Enclave resources to prevent them from launching nukes/invading China.
The above, but while the Americans are too busy fighting each other to retaliate, China launches and wins WW3.
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Maxson's rebellion was mainly focused on seizing control of Mariposa though wasn't it? Even if it spread further, I doubt that it would be able to paralyze the entire US nuclear arsenal (or that Maxson aligned nuclear forces wouldn't launch anyways once they found out China launched their missiles). Maybe a few silos don't launch but that just means some place in China gets bombed less then it otherwise would have and goes on to have more successful post-apocalyptic societies rather then anything that might be called the Chinese government winning WW3.
 
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Twiggierjet said:
I think that suffering decades of warlordism, poverty, and occupation is bad actually and is not made more acceptable because of stuff emperors your peasant ancestors had no control over did generations ago.
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I had to go away a bit to word what I am about to say correctly. I am not interested in fighting you. I am not interested in strawmen or other nonsense tonight. This is where I am starting from. Whatever the hell you think I'm saying is, this is what I'm actually saying and thinking.
1) The victims of imperialism include the peasants/serfs/workers of the imperial core.
2) Europe (and the US) did not 'invent' imperialism, it just invented ways to export it across the world. Chinese dynasties did it as well (successfully enough that most of the victims were completely subsumed into 'Chinese' identities) and it's even older than the first dynasty. It's likely as old the very concept of 'conquest'. I consider imperialism the foundation of the very concept of 'empire'. You can't have empire without imperialism at some level.
3) The West did not 'cause' the Warlords; warlordism is baked in to Empire, it's effectively the 'crash' to the narcotic high of imperial power. You take the drug for the high, you're taking the crash. And yeah, the Western Empires have also devolved into warlordism, it's just economic warlords instead of military ones carving up the organs of power for themselves. Yes I am saying that neoliberalist capitalism is economic warlordism, I will die on this hill.
4) While the common folk suffered just the same regardless as they always have, in terms of state against state, the Western powers imperialising China was less 'came out of nowhere and started beating on us' like it was for, say, the peoples of what became Australia, instead it was 'caught another empire sleeping and jumped them'.
5) That does not change the suffering endured, it does mean that the 'flavour' of nationalism produced in response changes heavily; where 'usually' the victims of imperialism react with the 'positive' nationalism of 'resistance' which usually doesn't swing into the negative side until later (see India's current... whole thing), after 'freedom' or some other resolution is obtained, in the case of China (and Russia, if you see the revolution against the Tsars in a similar light) there existed a much lower 'threshold' for reaching that negative point, as there already exists a kind of 'nationalist baggage' to accelerate the swing.
I hope the quest goes well, I probably won't be replying in here again.
 
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