So your saying there is a chance?
Excellent.
Do recall from the opening of the quest that losing all our Chinese Opinion is a game over. Their smallest province's police group could roll over us with 7% casualties. We through off the Japanese invasion, but that was before we were bombed into the stone age and our population had to deal with decades of starvation and malnutrition weakening them.
Alright, here's my idea for a non-escalatory plan building off the current political fiction we built up.
[X] Plan: Public Dressing Down
-[X] We have the momentum, so while everyone else is still without a coherent plan steamroll forward and get people to work with us by being the only people with a plan. Start working on how to return the US navy personnel and what to do about the carrier, all couched within the political fiction we built about it being
just an incident of the US littering on Guangchou territory. It is vitally important to everyone that the fiction stays intact, or else the nukes get one step closer to being launched and nobody wants that. Agree to common sense concessions like a party of observers from neutral nations to ensure that US personnel are being treated well and that the USA don't try to sneak spies into or steal information from Guangchou during the operation, but don't let any nation bully us into anything. We are still under Chinese protection after all. Be reasonable, we know this is quite sudden and the fine for littering this much of material is quite high. So we can work with the US to make a payment plan of yearly installments over 5 years, and allow for partial repayment in non-monetary materials, with up the a third of the fine being able to be paid in industrial equipment of equal value, and another third being able to be paid in quality foodstuffs. Defective equipment, parasite ridden food, and other things of that nature will not be counted towards the total of what they owe, and they may be fined further for any damage caused by defective equipment or outbreaks.
--[X] State that in the interest of avoiding Nuclear Armageddon, Gunagchou is willing to allow the Americans to retrieve or destroy any sensitive information or technology currently aboard the Iwo Jima, as well as evacuate it's sailors, so long as the personnel dispatched to do so are unarmed and do not act to cause further harm to Guangchou.
--[X] Gunagchou is willing to let the Americans decide if they want to re-float the carrier or just decommission it in place, however they will have to do so with civilian workers and they will need to reimburse Gunagchou for the temporary loss of fertile soil as well as for any soil remediation that needs to be done afterwards (because their carrier is leaking engine oil and avgas into land needed to feed the country's population) in addition to the initial hazardous littering fine.
-[X] If the USA or any other NATO nation starts getting overly aggressive or pushy about us doing anything to the crew of the carrier or something, tell them Guangchou would not do such a thing as Guangchou does not wish to start World War 3 and be leveled to the ground for the second time in 50 years.
(Look the US contingent dead in the eyes) "After all, in a completely hypothetical situation where a hypothetical USN carrier hypothetically ended up beached in Guangchou, with the rest of the hypothetical carrier's hypothetical fleet playing a hypothetical game of chicken with a hypothetical Chinese fleet on who will break first and fire a hypothetical shot, it sure would be hard for Guangchou to keep together a hypothetical political fiction it put up in order to stop a hypothetical nuclear exchange as part of a hypothetical world war if an incident happened. Like a pair of hypothetical US pilots hypothetically breaching Guangchou airspace in a hypothetical spy plane by taking in on a hypothetical flight path that took the hypothetical plane directly down 72nd street in Guangchou's capitol, only 50m meters off the ground. Such a thing happening would surely bring the world much closer to mutually assured nuclear annihilation.
So we sure are glad such an incident Never. Happened. Right?"
-[X] If anyone brings up secret superweapons that we used to intentionally beach the carrier, deny that we have any secret superweapons, and say that even if we did have them we would not use them against the USA out of a desire to not be consumed in a nuclear fireball. Even disregarding death by ICBM, we have no reason to try to steal the
Iwo Jima like that as whatever we could get from a 40 year old obsolete carrier is not worth the damage the tsunami did to our agriculture and infrastructure.
-[X] Once the Department of Propaganda has made sure that none of our soldiers are going to shoot at the US Navy personnel and make this whole indecent even worse, get them working with whatever we have for an international relations department to translate our story into other languages and get it going internationally before the capitalist media gets the first word in.
-[X] Keep the Iron Tigers bundled up far away from international attention to keep them hidden, and just rely on our regular military in the area for now until this is over and all the observers go away.
