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The Dragon Roars: A KMT Quest

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The Fengtian Clique is a Qing puppet to the point that they're not even represented seperately on the map. Information from the discord is that the Qing have a standing army of 300-400k, but they're spread a bit thin due to tensions with Russia and weirdness in Korea.

A very important point that was brought up is that stalling would mean that in the case of a war the Qing parliament would also be on board instead of it being a sole effort of the emperor. This is important due to them having the power to order a mobilization. An immediate rejection would result in the emperor acting as commander-in-chief of the army to order them around as he wants to, but he cannot trigger a proper mobilization himself without the permission of parliament which is currently divided.

[] Reject the Demand
[] Partial Mobilization
[] Internationalist Left.
 
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If we didn't choose the [Zhili Clique] option...

Yuan Shikai: "I pretend to die, and they don't even come to my 'funeral'? That's it. Screw the Republic! Qing Empire is my best friend now. Again."
 
"Desperate times, desperate measures." So, how desperate are we? Because there are certain... options that we are not considering, yet.

It goes like this.
[] Conservative Right. --> Because of course.
[] No Mobilization --> Keep the economy going, try to not escalate the situation.
[] Stall --> Gain some time for what's coming next.

Maybe we can reach some kind of agreement, or compromise. Maybe we can get away with it.

If not, well...

If we can't keep Zhili province, why should the Imperials have it? Or at least, all of it.

Grab as much as we can carry, and take it back with us to the Republic. Deny those resources to the enemy. Perhaps even convince people to come with us, to fight for their freedom; we can always use the manpower.

No scorched earth tactics, because we don't want everyone else to hate our guts.

On the other hand, if we ever face an existential threat to the Republic... How far are we willing to go?
 
Can I ask why people are in favor of a pre-emptive strike? From my understanding, this would basically be throwing everything on the hope that a quick strike can seize Mukden and force a peace before the Qing army mobilizes and the Japanese arrive. We... have not made any preparations for a war whatsoever yet. And while the Qing will take some time to gather and recover from the Manchurian Plague, we will also take quite some time to gather our own forces. It's quite the distance from Lanzhou to Mukden after all and we literally only just got the ability to start building rails through the warlords territories.

Honestly I'm at a bit of a loss at what to do here myself... damnit Yuan Shikai, you idiot. He makes a deal centered around his lifetime and is surprised when we start to act when he fakes his imminent death.

Meanwhile Sun Yat-Sen's opinion according to the DM is: "The revolution did not wither in '08, it will not wither because of a minor loss."
 
[] Accept the Demand
[]Partial Mobilization
[] Syndicalist Left.

Picking partial mobilization cause we do have to go to war in a couple of turns anyways...
 
Striking out for a big prize without having cemented our position was not a great idea, now all our options kind of suck.

Still, we should not panic and act rashly. Both of the actions immediately leaping into war seem very bad. There is no confidence that we will weather the Qing assault should we reject the demand already; I severely, severely doubt that we'd be in any better position with a pre-emptive attack since that will totally shove their parliament against us and they are something of an 800 lb. gorilla with better armies and friends than we have (Germany can also be very easily cut off from us whereas the reverse is not true for Japan and the Qing). Bear in mind that our neighbors also hate us and committing our full strength against the Qing in a longshot to come out on top is likely to see vultures eying us.

I think the best option is to stall and no mobilization to try to keep the economy from imploding and to hopefully avert a war that we are not at all prepared to handle right now until we can get some more actions in that will involve actually shoring up our military. We are nationalists and should keep in mind the welfare of the Chinese nation split between us and argue to that end… the Qing parliament seems amenable to resolving this peacefully if we engage with them in good faith.
 
Since I'm going to sleep shortly before the vote opens, I'll put my new suggested position here right now. After thinking about it some more just rejecting the demand and waiting for the Qing to come to us is not a good idea given our militaries pessimistic view on their odds.

If we choose to stall, we can still decide to accept their demand if the Qing Parliament does decide to press forward. And mobilization is expensive for them too, so they would be unlikely to try and press further. The best case of course is that they decide to refuse the emperor.

Not mobilizing maximizes the chance of that happening with us not making any moves that could provoke them. A partial mobilization is still a fairly threatening gesture and if the Qing mobilize in response we'd be relying on the NRA's predictions being wrong for the better, or for an outside actor beyond our control to intervene.

The army does not think we can win unless we go straight for a pre-emptive strike, which would basically rely on capturing the emperor or otherwise compelling him to accept a quick peace and I don't know what would do that. The KMT has a rather poor presence in Qing so we don't know how willing they actually are to fight and what we do know seems to suggest that the emperor is decently popular, so a general uprising is unlikely to happen.

Tl;dr either stall and don't mobilize or gamble on a decisive strike with ??? odds.

[] Stall
[] No Mobilization
[] Internationalist Left.
 
[X] Plan Chinese Blitzkrieg
-[x] Conservative Right.
--[x] Pre-emptive Strike
--[x] Full Mobilization
 
[X] Stall
[X] No Mobilization
[X] Progressive Right.

I think it's very important to maximize the chance of peace with no mobilization because it's expected that we get stomped in any war.
 
[X] Stall
[X] No Mobilization
[X] Progressive Left
 
[X] Stall
[X] Partial Mobilization
[X] Progressive Right.

Bringing the Japanese into the war by activating the defense pact between them and the Qing is elaborate suicide. Please do not vote for preemptive strike.
 
[X] Stall
[X] No Mobilization
[X] Syndicalist Left.

Losing Beijing would suck. Getting into a slugfest with the Qing and the Japanese would suck even more. We bide our time until the Revolution is ready to come to the Qing.
 
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