Main essay
New
TheInnerMoon
Anarchist, Author, All-Around Philosopher
- Pronouns
- They/Them
The Fallout series of video games has been many things over the years: a triumph of the isometric role-playing genre, a pioneer of its open world cousin, a creative grand strategy mod. It's even produced one of my all-time favorite games in the form of Fallout: New Vegas. One thing it has always been, however, is American. This makes some degree of sense: the developers themselves are from the US, and the country has always been strongly associated with post-apocalyptic fiction. During the Cold War 'atompunk' era which the series riffs on, the specter of nuclear annihilation was felt most strongly in the countries that were facilitating it, these being the US and USSR. And where the post-Soviet countries have Stalker and Metro to remind them of the power of the Atom, the Americans have Fallout.
Based on this reading, it seems inevitable that future installments of the Fallout series will take place on American soil. Still, in the list of countries which this series is interested in, a distant second place should be awarded to the People's Republic of China. This may strike one as a little odd, since the arch nemesis of Cold War America was clearly the Soviet Union. And yet, in the backstory to Fallout's own apocalypse, that role goes to that other bastion of communist perfidy, even if the difference seems little more than aesthetic in practice. Insofar as the 'Chineseness' of the enemy has any relevance to the game's plots, it is in the unfortunate way that Fallout 2 depicts the Shi, a group of submarine crew descendants who have turned San Francisco into an orientalist enclave. The depiction is as thin as it sounds.
Personally, I think Fallout's use of communist China as the pre-war antagonist has been a massive waste of potential. To be clear, I don't expect any future games to suddenly shift their focus across the Pacific, although a Fallout set in Hawaii seems both plausible and fascinating. But just because its current proprietors seem disinterested in exploring the Chinese parts of the setting, that doesn't mean that we have to be as well. I have long been convinced that fans of all kinds should channel their disappointment into creativity rather than rage, as the latter only deepens their subservience to our capitalist IP regime. Along these lines, I would use this opportunity to set out my own vision of what a Fallout in China would be like, and how I have come to those ideas. For while war never changes, this setting certainly can.
First off, let me answer an obvious question: why would one try to set the kind of atompunk post-post-apocalypse represented by Fallout in China specifically? To me, such a question answers itself, at least if you know a little bit about modern Chinese history. The fifties and sixties, the exact period from which Fallout derives its retrofuturistic sensibilities, were a period of mass upheaval in the people's republic, where every new year brought another campaign or catastrophe. The scope of these events can hardly be contained by such terms as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, since they effectively consisted of the mass mobilization and conflict of hundreds of millions of people. At the same time, this was also a time of great material development, with a process of 'socialist primitive accumulation' preparing the infrastructures that would later power China's rapid economic rise. Overall, the importance of the period is hard to be overstated, and it is at least as iconic (and ironic!) to contemporary Chinese culture as the same years are to Americans. I wonder if this did not inspire the original choice of China as the pre-war antagonist in the first place, as the parallel is perhaps even more potent than if they had gone with the more conventional choice of the Soviet Union. To extrapolate the Soviet 50s is interesting, sure, but the transformations of the Maoist period are on another level entirely. It's why this premise calls to me to begin with.
From the why, then, we can move on to the how, which is a lot more tricky. The sheer potential of a Chinese Fallout is exactly what would keep someone like me from trying to create it. On the one hand, there'd arguably be no wrong way to go about it; if the Fallout setting is defined by its 'kitchen sink' approach to pulpy, historically informed worldbuilding, then the choice of China represents an almost infinite supply of inspiration. An abundance of history and culture would be at one's disposal, and could be infused with the kind of sci-fi spectacle which allows for Fallout's ghouls, mutants, and energy weapons. At the same, this panoply of options could also prove paralyzing: where would one even begin? Moreover, the depth of Chinese culture is such that you could easily overlook a vital aspect of a given region's history, or reduce it to an orientalist projection. That's something I would avoid at all cost.
To meet this narrative challenge, then, I would propose that we establish a firm set of worldbuilding principles from the outset, just so we have something to hold onto as we dive into the post-nuclear particulars. The first of these principles is one I've already set up, that being the idea that China's nature in the Fallout universe is an extrapolation from its Maoist period, just as its America is based on the splendor and terror of the 1950s. Now, it would be silly to try and explain each and every nuance of this history, and what its narrative relevance might be. From what I've already said, it should be clear that this was a time of continuous mass turmoil, and this is what we would have to communicate first and foremost.
Secondly, based on what's already been established by the meager amount of in-game lore, I would argue that the PRC occupies the underdog position in its global conflict with the US. The main evidence for this is their invasion of Alaska, motivated by an acute energy shortage back home. Where the US is able to compensate for its own energy crisis through the gradual deployment of fusion power, China seems unable to make the same leap. This technological gap also applies to power armor, where the Chinese models lag behind their American counterparts. The only area in which China does seem to be ahead is stealth technology, but this seems like a minor advantage compared to their overall resource troubles. Were it not for the inevitability of total nuclear war, I would expect the US to have eventually won its war with China, though it would have been a pyrrhic victory at that. One way or another, the world of Fallout was on the brink of collapse, and many countries already had collapsed by the time the bombs finally fell. This is another key aspect of the lore to keep in mind.
Moving on, we head into more speculative territory, where the author's own preferences begin to make themselves known. In my case, that means a most daring supposition: that we treat Fallout's China as the lesser of two evils. This requires some obvious elaboration, lest I be seen as apologizing for Maoism's historical atrocities. The idea here is not to treat Fallout's PRC as some kind of utopia, even when compared to the fascist depths of its American counterpart. Rather, I merely want to point out that any extrapolation or exaggeration of China's Maoist era–the years from 1949 to 1976, if that wasn't clear–would have to include both the immense repression of its mass campaigns, as well as their sporadic democratic potential.
Now, the latter of these aspects is something which most casual students of this period are probably unfamiliar with, since it is easily overshadowed by the scale of the former. It certainly doesn't help that a lot of the popular histories of the early PRC tend to focus on these atrocities to the detriment of any contextual analysis, resulting in a rather sensationalist and frankly distasteful narrative. Again, my point here is not that events like the Great Leap famine do not matter, but rather that it is all too easy to reduce its victims to being just that, victims. This would be a shame in any piece of historical writing, but it especially doesn't make sense when talking about a society which, despite its evident abuses, still legitimized itself through popular appeal and mass mobilization.
Before they turned tragic, campaigns like the Hundred Flowers Movement or the Cultural Revolution were genuinely embraced by large segments of the populace; at their most radical edges, they were more committed expressions of socialism than anything within the Chinese party-state, and that might have actually contributed to their ultimate turn for the worst. It was simply not in the interests of Chinese party bureaucrats to actually let the grassroots elements take over. That they appealed to them at all was usually either a means of shoring up their popular support, or else a way to deploy auxiliary forces to their intra-party struggle. After the initial elimination of bourgeois elements like landlords and industrialists, the interests of the party and the people would rarely be entirely aligned, no matter how much the former claimed to speak for the latter. Still, the fact that these popular movements played a significant role in this period means that we should represent them in our pulpy exaggeration thereof. This time, why not let a Thousand Flowers bloom?
Finally, we should remember that Fallout is fundamentally a post-apocalyptic setting. (Or, if you want to get technical, post-post-apocalyptic). As interesting as its pre-war society might be, it will have to be annihilated for the real setting to emerge. In keeping with our second principle, I would expect the nuclear exchange between the US and China to hit the PRC hardest, producing an even greater devastation than we tend to see in the East Coast Fallout games. Even so, China is a big country, with its own history of preparing for nuclear war, and so we should expect at least some pockets of humanity to survive.
On top of this, we know that Fallout's version of nuclear radiation acts more like it does in a pulpy sci-fi novel than anything truly scientific, and this is sure to have an effect on China's biosphere. For while the term 'yaoguai' is mostly associated with a particular species of mutated bear in the American Fallout setting, it really just means 'strange creature', and post-nuclear China is sure to have a whole menagerie of those. In keeping with the series' traditions, we can expect these creatures to consist of a mix of corrupted humanoids, mutated wildlife, and folklore made real. Since Chinese culture is hardly lacking in mythical beings, we can expect this part of the setting to almost write itself.
As for the actual societies which will rise from the ashes, I expect these to be at least as diverse as Chinese history itself. As with the games set in the former US, there would have to be a good variety of new and old, local and foreign, progressive and reactionary. We can expect some people to try and harken back to China's rich history, however little they might actually know about it. Others could be the direct descendants of pre-war factions, still acting on their grand designs in the manner of the Enclave. A third group would consist of those who reject the old world on purpose, forging new ways of life from its detritus, and drawing various different lessons from its catastrophic failure. And who is to say that there are no possibilities beyond these types? Overall, I think a good start would be to try and look at Fallout's American factions, and see how some of them would act if transplanted into a Chinese context. Not that I would copy them entirely, mind you: as a great storyteller once said, the mark of a good story is that it kind of 'rhymes' with its point of inspiration. This seems like a great point of departure.
So, with all these narrative principles set down, what are we left with? Well, let's try and sum it all up, starting with the pre-war situation:
With the general worldbuilding of a Chinese Fallout setting resolved, all that remains for me to ask is what kind of specific story one might tell with such a setting. As you can perhaps tell by what I have established here, I believe that the city of Chongqing would be a perfect location for the kind of heroic, faction-driven narratives we see in Fallouts 3, 4, and New Vegas. That said, I would personally suggest a different medium by which to realize the potential of a Chinese Fallout. This would be the sort of interactive online 'plan quest' format which is popular on a forum like Sufficient Velocity. More specifically, I would take inspiration from Eve of Destruction, a Fallout-themed plan quest which focuses on the organization of America's pre-war disaster preparation efforts. As the players attempt to ameliorate the apocalypse, the author can present them with an ever-evolving set of potential futures, each of which is quintessentially Fallout. The result is a fantastic and dynamic bit of storytelling, and one I would be eager to emulate in a Chinese context.
Thus, if I can find the time, energy, and knowledge to do this premise justice, then you should expect just such a quest from me in the near to medium future. Indeed, it is for this reason that the world details described above might seem especially bleak; the point of my story would be to try and avert such dire fates. On top of this, I also already have found the perfect framework through which to organize a simulation of China's civil defense program. You see, back in the 1960s, the PRC committed itself to a huge military-industrial development project called the Third Front Campaign, moving entire factories and their workforce into the country's interior. The goal, if it should not be obvious, was to secure the nation's production against the most likely angles of attack–these being the First and Second Front.
In my quest, then, I would focus on a similar initiative called the Final Front Campaign, aimed at exploring every viable program for the survival of the Party, the State, and the People (in that order). If such a narrative sounds interesting to you, then I look forward to your participation therein. Together, we can save the People's Republic of China from being utterly annihilated, and maybe keep it from being its own worst enemy as well. Or, just as likely, we will become the charred skeletons that some hapless wanderer will pat down for duct tape.
Based on this reading, it seems inevitable that future installments of the Fallout series will take place on American soil. Still, in the list of countries which this series is interested in, a distant second place should be awarded to the People's Republic of China. This may strike one as a little odd, since the arch nemesis of Cold War America was clearly the Soviet Union. And yet, in the backstory to Fallout's own apocalypse, that role goes to that other bastion of communist perfidy, even if the difference seems little more than aesthetic in practice. Insofar as the 'Chineseness' of the enemy has any relevance to the game's plots, it is in the unfortunate way that Fallout 2 depicts the Shi, a group of submarine crew descendants who have turned San Francisco into an orientalist enclave. The depiction is as thin as it sounds.
Personally, I think Fallout's use of communist China as the pre-war antagonist has been a massive waste of potential. To be clear, I don't expect any future games to suddenly shift their focus across the Pacific, although a Fallout set in Hawaii seems both plausible and fascinating. But just because its current proprietors seem disinterested in exploring the Chinese parts of the setting, that doesn't mean that we have to be as well. I have long been convinced that fans of all kinds should channel their disappointment into creativity rather than rage, as the latter only deepens their subservience to our capitalist IP regime. Along these lines, I would use this opportunity to set out my own vision of what a Fallout in China would be like, and how I have come to those ideas. For while war never changes, this setting certainly can.
First off, let me answer an obvious question: why would one try to set the kind of atompunk post-post-apocalypse represented by Fallout in China specifically? To me, such a question answers itself, at least if you know a little bit about modern Chinese history. The fifties and sixties, the exact period from which Fallout derives its retrofuturistic sensibilities, were a period of mass upheaval in the people's republic, where every new year brought another campaign or catastrophe. The scope of these events can hardly be contained by such terms as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, since they effectively consisted of the mass mobilization and conflict of hundreds of millions of people. At the same time, this was also a time of great material development, with a process of 'socialist primitive accumulation' preparing the infrastructures that would later power China's rapid economic rise. Overall, the importance of the period is hard to be overstated, and it is at least as iconic (and ironic!) to contemporary Chinese culture as the same years are to Americans. I wonder if this did not inspire the original choice of China as the pre-war antagonist in the first place, as the parallel is perhaps even more potent than if they had gone with the more conventional choice of the Soviet Union. To extrapolate the Soviet 50s is interesting, sure, but the transformations of the Maoist period are on another level entirely. It's why this premise calls to me to begin with.
From the why, then, we can move on to the how, which is a lot more tricky. The sheer potential of a Chinese Fallout is exactly what would keep someone like me from trying to create it. On the one hand, there'd arguably be no wrong way to go about it; if the Fallout setting is defined by its 'kitchen sink' approach to pulpy, historically informed worldbuilding, then the choice of China represents an almost infinite supply of inspiration. An abundance of history and culture would be at one's disposal, and could be infused with the kind of sci-fi spectacle which allows for Fallout's ghouls, mutants, and energy weapons. At the same, this panoply of options could also prove paralyzing: where would one even begin? Moreover, the depth of Chinese culture is such that you could easily overlook a vital aspect of a given region's history, or reduce it to an orientalist projection. That's something I would avoid at all cost.
To meet this narrative challenge, then, I would propose that we establish a firm set of worldbuilding principles from the outset, just so we have something to hold onto as we dive into the post-nuclear particulars. The first of these principles is one I've already set up, that being the idea that China's nature in the Fallout universe is an extrapolation from its Maoist period, just as its America is based on the splendor and terror of the 1950s. Now, it would be silly to try and explain each and every nuance of this history, and what its narrative relevance might be. From what I've already said, it should be clear that this was a time of continuous mass turmoil, and this is what we would have to communicate first and foremost.
Secondly, based on what's already been established by the meager amount of in-game lore, I would argue that the PRC occupies the underdog position in its global conflict with the US. The main evidence for this is their invasion of Alaska, motivated by an acute energy shortage back home. Where the US is able to compensate for its own energy crisis through the gradual deployment of fusion power, China seems unable to make the same leap. This technological gap also applies to power armor, where the Chinese models lag behind their American counterparts. The only area in which China does seem to be ahead is stealth technology, but this seems like a minor advantage compared to their overall resource troubles. Were it not for the inevitability of total nuclear war, I would expect the US to have eventually won its war with China, though it would have been a pyrrhic victory at that. One way or another, the world of Fallout was on the brink of collapse, and many countries already had collapsed by the time the bombs finally fell. This is another key aspect of the lore to keep in mind.
Moving on, we head into more speculative territory, where the author's own preferences begin to make themselves known. In my case, that means a most daring supposition: that we treat Fallout's China as the lesser of two evils. This requires some obvious elaboration, lest I be seen as apologizing for Maoism's historical atrocities. The idea here is not to treat Fallout's PRC as some kind of utopia, even when compared to the fascist depths of its American counterpart. Rather, I merely want to point out that any extrapolation or exaggeration of China's Maoist era–the years from 1949 to 1976, if that wasn't clear–would have to include both the immense repression of its mass campaigns, as well as their sporadic democratic potential.
Now, the latter of these aspects is something which most casual students of this period are probably unfamiliar with, since it is easily overshadowed by the scale of the former. It certainly doesn't help that a lot of the popular histories of the early PRC tend to focus on these atrocities to the detriment of any contextual analysis, resulting in a rather sensationalist and frankly distasteful narrative. Again, my point here is not that events like the Great Leap famine do not matter, but rather that it is all too easy to reduce its victims to being just that, victims. This would be a shame in any piece of historical writing, but it especially doesn't make sense when talking about a society which, despite its evident abuses, still legitimized itself through popular appeal and mass mobilization.
Before they turned tragic, campaigns like the Hundred Flowers Movement or the Cultural Revolution were genuinely embraced by large segments of the populace; at their most radical edges, they were more committed expressions of socialism than anything within the Chinese party-state, and that might have actually contributed to their ultimate turn for the worst. It was simply not in the interests of Chinese party bureaucrats to actually let the grassroots elements take over. That they appealed to them at all was usually either a means of shoring up their popular support, or else a way to deploy auxiliary forces to their intra-party struggle. After the initial elimination of bourgeois elements like landlords and industrialists, the interests of the party and the people would rarely be entirely aligned, no matter how much the former claimed to speak for the latter. Still, the fact that these popular movements played a significant role in this period means that we should represent them in our pulpy exaggeration thereof. This time, why not let a Thousand Flowers bloom?
Finally, we should remember that Fallout is fundamentally a post-apocalyptic setting. (Or, if you want to get technical, post-post-apocalyptic). As interesting as its pre-war society might be, it will have to be annihilated for the real setting to emerge. In keeping with our second principle, I would expect the nuclear exchange between the US and China to hit the PRC hardest, producing an even greater devastation than we tend to see in the East Coast Fallout games. Even so, China is a big country, with its own history of preparing for nuclear war, and so we should expect at least some pockets of humanity to survive.
On top of this, we know that Fallout's version of nuclear radiation acts more like it does in a pulpy sci-fi novel than anything truly scientific, and this is sure to have an effect on China's biosphere. For while the term 'yaoguai' is mostly associated with a particular species of mutated bear in the American Fallout setting, it really just means 'strange creature', and post-nuclear China is sure to have a whole menagerie of those. In keeping with the series' traditions, we can expect these creatures to consist of a mix of corrupted humanoids, mutated wildlife, and folklore made real. Since Chinese culture is hardly lacking in mythical beings, we can expect this part of the setting to almost write itself.
As for the actual societies which will rise from the ashes, I expect these to be at least as diverse as Chinese history itself. As with the games set in the former US, there would have to be a good variety of new and old, local and foreign, progressive and reactionary. We can expect some people to try and harken back to China's rich history, however little they might actually know about it. Others could be the direct descendants of pre-war factions, still acting on their grand designs in the manner of the Enclave. A third group would consist of those who reject the old world on purpose, forging new ways of life from its detritus, and drawing various different lessons from its catastrophic failure. And who is to say that there are no possibilities beyond these types? Overall, I think a good start would be to try and look at Fallout's American factions, and see how some of them would act if transplanted into a Chinese context. Not that I would copy them entirely, mind you: as a great storyteller once said, the mark of a good story is that it kind of 'rhymes' with its point of inspiration. This seems like a great point of departure.
So, with all these narrative principles set down, what are we left with? Well, let's try and sum it all up, starting with the pre-war situation:
- A Chinese Fallout setting would need to base its pre-war society on an extrapolation of the Mao era. Since this was a period of great Development, lethal Disruption, and tentative Democracy, all of these aspects will have their reflection in the series' retrofuturistic funhouse mirror.
- The notion of Development would be easiest to depict, given the preponderance of Mad Science in this setting. As seen in its war effort, China would be in a constant race to catch up with the West, and it's sure to perform the same kind of unethical experiments which enable marvelous terrors to prowl the American wasteland. That said, in a country which guarantees full employment to its people, I would expect the deployment of these technologies to be less focused on outright automation, preferring the development of "dumber" tools and machines. Less robots and AI, more exoskeletons and cybernetic call centers. Part of this difference would also be motivated by the severe energy crises which China is dealing with. The power rationing and brownouts which such a situation implies could produce all kinds of energy-saving innovations, echoing the Western oil crisis of the 1970s. Perhaps we could even see a turn towards non-nuclear renewables, with small windmills or heliostats dotting the Chinese countryside. In terms of aesthetic, though, the 'Sovietpunk' of Atomic Heart would be an obvious inspiration, as would the already existing pieces of Chinese technology in the setting.
- Disruption would be no less obvious, and a lot more tragic in the immediate term. Beyond the expected degree of corruption, persecution, and general mismanagement, there would be a constant downturn in terms of social peace and material amenities. The Resource Wars will reverberate across every part of Chinese society, from the most advanced research sites to the simplest rural villages. The Maoist 'solution' to this would be a predictable attempt at mass mobilization and social leveling. The country's urbanization might have to be partially reversed in order to make up for the food shortages, with various experts and intellectuals sent out to the countryside to spread their skills around. At the same time, great masses of people would be driven to work harder, smarter, and faster, with little reward besides the potential promise of more autonomy in their communities and workplaces (which are usually the same thing). All of this is to say nothing of the war effort which would accompany the resource crises. I imagine that its fronts would extend far beyond the ones we are familiar with, these being Alaska and the Yangtze delta. If the goal is to get at those sweet, sweet minerals and fuel oils, then we should expect China to try and expand into all its neighboring regions: Siberia to the north, Central Asia to the west, and South-East Asia to the south. All of this warfare would further harm China's manpower, considerable as it may be. Right until the bombs actually drop, all it will get for its trouble is a slightly slower form of collapse.
- Lastly, the presence of a degree of Democracy is a bit more elusive altogether. As I've already mentioned, the party might choose to soften the burden of the Resource Wars by offering its workers a degree of shop floor democracy. If this seems strangely gregarious, consider that there is historical precedent for such maneuvers, and that they are of real utility to the bureaucracy. For instance, workplace elections could be used to filter out corrupt low level managers, with their replacement by elected worker delegates injecting some fresh blood into the union and party cadres. Furthermore, if the development of new technologies produces a burgeoning interest in the field of cybernetic socialist planning, as it did in countries like Chile and the USSR, then this might provide a technocratic excuse for more autonomy in the workplace. This is because computerized economies are not necessarily more centralized; they merely offer the ability for greater networking. And since an increase in communication would only increase the stresses on the center, a degree of devolution would quickly become a necessity. In this way, the center's lack of effective control, which always already expressed itself in the form of unseen inefficiencies, could now be made explicit, and thereby adjusted for. But whether Fallout's cybernetic party-state would actually answer to that need? I suppose that's an open question. I expect that whatever they choose, it will prove dangerous and haphazard. Such is the nature of this narrative.
War. War Never Changes. Around the middle of the 21st century, things were finally looking up for the People's Republic of China. It had surpassed the Soviet Union, its estranged big brother, in all the ways that mattered to it. The peasants were fed, the factories were humming, and Beijing was filled with shiny, happy people.
It was around this time that Europe and the Middle East decided to annihilate each other in a blaze of nuclear fire.
In the aftermath, it became clear to all that the world was dying, and that of the remaining superpowers, one at most would be able to survive the storm. The Chinese communists were no stranger to this suggestion. They had always seen themselves as the agents of a final struggle, a war where all old oppressions would be cast aside in favor of universal brotherhood. And yet the coming conflict would be far greater than even they had expected. Above all, they would need resources, fuel to power their war machines and combine harvesters. And so, as their neighbors fell into chaos, the People's Liberation Army would move in, laying claim to every mine and oil well that they could get their hands on. Most audacious of all, they would invade Alaska, sparking a direct conflict with their greatest military and ideological rival.
From this point onwards, the end was inevitable, its details too trivial to relate. Whoever pushed the button was merely acting out the inexorable logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. Through thermonuclear arms, a kind of peace would be found at last, as the whole world fell into silence.
In China, this silence would last almost a century, with a blanket of perpetual fallout seeping deep into the earth. Only a miniscule percentage of the population had made it to any kind of shelter, and most shelters would prove entirely unable to last so many generations. Those who were either too desperate or too hopeful would step into the wastes early, and their fates would be tragic, especially if the radiation did not kill them immediately.
Eventually, though, the poisons of the old world would settle down enough to allow for human habitation, and small populations would begin to repopulate the Chinese wasteland. They would exist in a state of utter incohesion, each region left to its own devices. As they developed along their own idiosyncratic lines, the likelihood of their interaction would grow ever closer, and its results would be most unpredictable.
In the region formerly known as Xinjiang, an old frontier would be made new again, albeit from another direction. As the nations of the Middle East perished in their war with Europe, its peoples got a head start on the apocalypse. As a result, the Uyghur and Hui populations of northwest China would recover faster than those of many other regions, being able to tie themselves into the burgeoning trade network of the post-nuclear ummah. From this direction, caravans of roc birds and eight-legged camels are steadily making their way into China's heartland, eager to trade with whomever they might find there.
The same cannot be said for Tibet, where countless monastic redoubts are caught in a constant cycle of low-level warfare. All that keeps their mutual recriminations from burning out of control is their shared allegiance to the Bogd Khan, who has come down from Mongolia to bring some order to the Himalayan valleys. At the same time, the serfs whisper of strange emissaries from the Silent South. What news do they bring from the birthplace of the Buddha?
To the north, then, there is Mongolia, and the endless steppes which stretch out beyond it. Despite their martial reputation, the clans who dwell here today are not interested in war, even if it is often forced upon them. Some have taken their nomadic lifeways to its logical extreme, fusing with their steeds after a long ride through the region's radioactive dust storms. The centauric affliction appears to be heritable, and now affects a significant minority of the local population. Besides this curiosity, there is little to remark, other than the fact that its people will insist that you do not travel further north. That way lies true evil, they say, and they have dedicated themselves to protecting the southern regions from its influence. As for what it might be, they do not say, but one should know that great horrors were inflicted upon the late people of Siberia.
If you take heed of the nomads' warnings and head east, you will eventually enter Manchuria, an industrial center of the erstwhile People's Republic. Little remains of its infrastructure, but not just because most of it was flattened in the war. No, instead you will find that much of its industry has been rebuilt, although its function is most inscrutable. Here, great masses of robots, androids, and cyborgs perform an ever-escalating choreography, building vast factory halls filled with purposeless devices. This Manchurian Machine has displaced most local communities, choking the air with smog and embers. Attempts to reach its presumptive center have all failed, and none can tell if or when this aimless army of labor will cease its activity.
We can be brief about the city of Beijing; it no longer exists. No city on the planet was more heavily targeted by a nuclear power, and all that may be found there now is a deep, radioactive lake.
The province of Shandong has become infamous for its primary export: the living dead. More specifically, a fraternity of 'stiff corpses' (jiangshi), people who have somehow escaped the lethal effects of radiation poisoning, and now identify themselves with the mythical immortals. Dressed in ancient garb, they travel across the land, advising local communities on how best to realize the virtues of humaneness and filial piety. Their paternalistic attitude has not made them many friends, and those who remember some of the old texts have found the perfect quote for them: "it is only when the state is disordered, that Upright Ministers appear". The latter name has stuck, as many are wary of what the Ministers' intentions might be, and who the Master they claim to serve really is. Yet another wasteland mystery.
Depending on your judgment, the city of Nanjing has suffered an even worse fate than its northern counterpart. When the bombs hit, the city was still occupied by American forces; ironically, this may have helped it to avoid a great deal of devastation, as neither side was willing to bomb it all too heavily. This allowed the US troops stationed there to sit out the worst of the fallout in Nanjing's deep subway tunnels, and to remain relatively coherent upon their emergence. Without any orders from home, and stuck in the middle of enemy territory, they continued the Yangtze offensive, going so far as to rename the river to "Yankee". If this seems especially delusional, consider the immense cognitive dissonance which the "Yankee Nation" must manage daily. Their supposed Americanness belies every aspect of their environment, from the buildings that sheltered them to the people they used to propagate themselves. The only solution is to sink further into delusion, accepting all kinds of pseudo-religious ideas about manifest destiny and the westward march of civilization. As a result, theirs might be the most wretched culture of the entire wasteland.
Right until the end, the people of Shanghai fought the American invaders, and they continued this fight in its underground sections. Unfortunately, right as they were poised to win, US reinforcements swept in from Nanjing. The Chinese survivors were given a simple choice: die, or be made a citizen of the Yankee Nation. Most chose the former.
If you're in Fujian, and you tune your radio just right, you can still hear the propaganda broadcasts from across the strait. And you know, it's the strangest thing: some of the broadcasts contain accurate weather data! How could such an old signal be capable of that?
Going south into Guangzhou, you should prepare to pay homage to Catherine, Queen of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Portugal. It is she who rules the Pearl River Delta, and her colonial marines will make sure that you remember it.
Yunnan is almost as inhospitable as Manchuria, but in the exact opposite way. Its ecosystems recovered a little too well from the war, and its endless jungle is now spreading into neighboring regions. Still, if you are willing to take the risk, great treasures of the pre-war world are set to reside in its depths. Moreover, if you discover what it is that has made Yunnan bloom, then perhaps you can replicate it in a more controlled form, and so restore the whole of China.
In the years before the war, Hunan became a hotbed of Red Guard activity, threatening to grow into a full-scale insurgency. What remains of that struggle is the 108th Route Army, a quasi-military religious order which believes that the age of Maitreya Mao has come. For if the Great War signaled the end of the age of Buddha Mao, then it is up to them to revive the dharma. Their first order of business will be to tread in the Buddha Mao's footsteps and make their own Long March towards the mythical Yan'an base area. This Pure Land is said to lie somewhere to the north, and although they do not know its exact location, the bodhisattva Marx will guide them there.
Were the Route Army to arrive in Shaanxi Province, they would come across one of the strangest powers in the whole of China: the Qin Dynasty. Yes, this is the same polity as the one which originally sparked the Chinese imperial tradition, over two and a half thousand years ago. As impossible as this seems, the Qin state's claim to political continuity is even stranger, being embodied by its singular leader, the emperor Qin Shi Huang. Local opinion differs on whether this could actually be the same person as the one who died millennia ago. The first emperor was known to be obsessed with the achievement of immortality, and the appearance of the jiangshi has shown that through radiation, all things are possible. But regardless of who the Qin leader really is, their political acumen is as strong as the histories say, and their skill at ancient state-making is appropriate to the times.
Finally, we should speak of the city of Chongqing, home to a major underground nuclear facility before the war. Through some miracle of military incompetence, it avoided the mass bombardment which fell on all its siblings, including the PLA command center over in Hubei. After a century of post-nuclear attrition, this made it the last significant concentration of government officials in the entire country. As its occupants finally emerged into the ruins of Chongqing, they stood poised to revitalize the area and restore the People's Republic to prominence. Tragically, however, they would find that the war had not been won, and that a Nation of bloodthirsty Yankees was now at their doorstep. Only a single PLA soldier would survive the resulting slaughter, carrying with him the access codes for the bunker's remaining missile stockpile. Lost and alone, surrounded on all sides by foreign and suspicious powers, this Sole Survivor would be forced to decide the fate of the Chongqing Wasteland…
It was around this time that Europe and the Middle East decided to annihilate each other in a blaze of nuclear fire.
In the aftermath, it became clear to all that the world was dying, and that of the remaining superpowers, one at most would be able to survive the storm. The Chinese communists were no stranger to this suggestion. They had always seen themselves as the agents of a final struggle, a war where all old oppressions would be cast aside in favor of universal brotherhood. And yet the coming conflict would be far greater than even they had expected. Above all, they would need resources, fuel to power their war machines and combine harvesters. And so, as their neighbors fell into chaos, the People's Liberation Army would move in, laying claim to every mine and oil well that they could get their hands on. Most audacious of all, they would invade Alaska, sparking a direct conflict with their greatest military and ideological rival.
From this point onwards, the end was inevitable, its details too trivial to relate. Whoever pushed the button was merely acting out the inexorable logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. Through thermonuclear arms, a kind of peace would be found at last, as the whole world fell into silence.
In China, this silence would last almost a century, with a blanket of perpetual fallout seeping deep into the earth. Only a miniscule percentage of the population had made it to any kind of shelter, and most shelters would prove entirely unable to last so many generations. Those who were either too desperate or too hopeful would step into the wastes early, and their fates would be tragic, especially if the radiation did not kill them immediately.
Eventually, though, the poisons of the old world would settle down enough to allow for human habitation, and small populations would begin to repopulate the Chinese wasteland. They would exist in a state of utter incohesion, each region left to its own devices. As they developed along their own idiosyncratic lines, the likelihood of their interaction would grow ever closer, and its results would be most unpredictable.
In the region formerly known as Xinjiang, an old frontier would be made new again, albeit from another direction. As the nations of the Middle East perished in their war with Europe, its peoples got a head start on the apocalypse. As a result, the Uyghur and Hui populations of northwest China would recover faster than those of many other regions, being able to tie themselves into the burgeoning trade network of the post-nuclear ummah. From this direction, caravans of roc birds and eight-legged camels are steadily making their way into China's heartland, eager to trade with whomever they might find there.
The same cannot be said for Tibet, where countless monastic redoubts are caught in a constant cycle of low-level warfare. All that keeps their mutual recriminations from burning out of control is their shared allegiance to the Bogd Khan, who has come down from Mongolia to bring some order to the Himalayan valleys. At the same time, the serfs whisper of strange emissaries from the Silent South. What news do they bring from the birthplace of the Buddha?
To the north, then, there is Mongolia, and the endless steppes which stretch out beyond it. Despite their martial reputation, the clans who dwell here today are not interested in war, even if it is often forced upon them. Some have taken their nomadic lifeways to its logical extreme, fusing with their steeds after a long ride through the region's radioactive dust storms. The centauric affliction appears to be heritable, and now affects a significant minority of the local population. Besides this curiosity, there is little to remark, other than the fact that its people will insist that you do not travel further north. That way lies true evil, they say, and they have dedicated themselves to protecting the southern regions from its influence. As for what it might be, they do not say, but one should know that great horrors were inflicted upon the late people of Siberia.
If you take heed of the nomads' warnings and head east, you will eventually enter Manchuria, an industrial center of the erstwhile People's Republic. Little remains of its infrastructure, but not just because most of it was flattened in the war. No, instead you will find that much of its industry has been rebuilt, although its function is most inscrutable. Here, great masses of robots, androids, and cyborgs perform an ever-escalating choreography, building vast factory halls filled with purposeless devices. This Manchurian Machine has displaced most local communities, choking the air with smog and embers. Attempts to reach its presumptive center have all failed, and none can tell if or when this aimless army of labor will cease its activity.
We can be brief about the city of Beijing; it no longer exists. No city on the planet was more heavily targeted by a nuclear power, and all that may be found there now is a deep, radioactive lake.
The province of Shandong has become infamous for its primary export: the living dead. More specifically, a fraternity of 'stiff corpses' (jiangshi), people who have somehow escaped the lethal effects of radiation poisoning, and now identify themselves with the mythical immortals. Dressed in ancient garb, they travel across the land, advising local communities on how best to realize the virtues of humaneness and filial piety. Their paternalistic attitude has not made them many friends, and those who remember some of the old texts have found the perfect quote for them: "it is only when the state is disordered, that Upright Ministers appear". The latter name has stuck, as many are wary of what the Ministers' intentions might be, and who the Master they claim to serve really is. Yet another wasteland mystery.
Depending on your judgment, the city of Nanjing has suffered an even worse fate than its northern counterpart. When the bombs hit, the city was still occupied by American forces; ironically, this may have helped it to avoid a great deal of devastation, as neither side was willing to bomb it all too heavily. This allowed the US troops stationed there to sit out the worst of the fallout in Nanjing's deep subway tunnels, and to remain relatively coherent upon their emergence. Without any orders from home, and stuck in the middle of enemy territory, they continued the Yangtze offensive, going so far as to rename the river to "Yankee". If this seems especially delusional, consider the immense cognitive dissonance which the "Yankee Nation" must manage daily. Their supposed Americanness belies every aspect of their environment, from the buildings that sheltered them to the people they used to propagate themselves. The only solution is to sink further into delusion, accepting all kinds of pseudo-religious ideas about manifest destiny and the westward march of civilization. As a result, theirs might be the most wretched culture of the entire wasteland.
Right until the end, the people of Shanghai fought the American invaders, and they continued this fight in its underground sections. Unfortunately, right as they were poised to win, US reinforcements swept in from Nanjing. The Chinese survivors were given a simple choice: die, or be made a citizen of the Yankee Nation. Most chose the former.
If you're in Fujian, and you tune your radio just right, you can still hear the propaganda broadcasts from across the strait. And you know, it's the strangest thing: some of the broadcasts contain accurate weather data! How could such an old signal be capable of that?
Going south into Guangzhou, you should prepare to pay homage to Catherine, Queen of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Portugal. It is she who rules the Pearl River Delta, and her colonial marines will make sure that you remember it.
Yunnan is almost as inhospitable as Manchuria, but in the exact opposite way. Its ecosystems recovered a little too well from the war, and its endless jungle is now spreading into neighboring regions. Still, if you are willing to take the risk, great treasures of the pre-war world are set to reside in its depths. Moreover, if you discover what it is that has made Yunnan bloom, then perhaps you can replicate it in a more controlled form, and so restore the whole of China.
In the years before the war, Hunan became a hotbed of Red Guard activity, threatening to grow into a full-scale insurgency. What remains of that struggle is the 108th Route Army, a quasi-military religious order which believes that the age of Maitreya Mao has come. For if the Great War signaled the end of the age of Buddha Mao, then it is up to them to revive the dharma. Their first order of business will be to tread in the Buddha Mao's footsteps and make their own Long March towards the mythical Yan'an base area. This Pure Land is said to lie somewhere to the north, and although they do not know its exact location, the bodhisattva Marx will guide them there.
Were the Route Army to arrive in Shaanxi Province, they would come across one of the strangest powers in the whole of China: the Qin Dynasty. Yes, this is the same polity as the one which originally sparked the Chinese imperial tradition, over two and a half thousand years ago. As impossible as this seems, the Qin state's claim to political continuity is even stranger, being embodied by its singular leader, the emperor Qin Shi Huang. Local opinion differs on whether this could actually be the same person as the one who died millennia ago. The first emperor was known to be obsessed with the achievement of immortality, and the appearance of the jiangshi has shown that through radiation, all things are possible. But regardless of who the Qin leader really is, their political acumen is as strong as the histories say, and their skill at ancient state-making is appropriate to the times.
Finally, we should speak of the city of Chongqing, home to a major underground nuclear facility before the war. Through some miracle of military incompetence, it avoided the mass bombardment which fell on all its siblings, including the PLA command center over in Hubei. After a century of post-nuclear attrition, this made it the last significant concentration of government officials in the entire country. As its occupants finally emerged into the ruins of Chongqing, they stood poised to revitalize the area and restore the People's Republic to prominence. Tragically, however, they would find that the war had not been won, and that a Nation of bloodthirsty Yankees was now at their doorstep. Only a single PLA soldier would survive the resulting slaughter, carrying with him the access codes for the bunker's remaining missile stockpile. Lost and alone, surrounded on all sides by foreign and suspicious powers, this Sole Survivor would be forced to decide the fate of the Chongqing Wasteland…
With the general worldbuilding of a Chinese Fallout setting resolved, all that remains for me to ask is what kind of specific story one might tell with such a setting. As you can perhaps tell by what I have established here, I believe that the city of Chongqing would be a perfect location for the kind of heroic, faction-driven narratives we see in Fallouts 3, 4, and New Vegas. That said, I would personally suggest a different medium by which to realize the potential of a Chinese Fallout. This would be the sort of interactive online 'plan quest' format which is popular on a forum like Sufficient Velocity. More specifically, I would take inspiration from Eve of Destruction, a Fallout-themed plan quest which focuses on the organization of America's pre-war disaster preparation efforts. As the players attempt to ameliorate the apocalypse, the author can present them with an ever-evolving set of potential futures, each of which is quintessentially Fallout. The result is a fantastic and dynamic bit of storytelling, and one I would be eager to emulate in a Chinese context.
Thus, if I can find the time, energy, and knowledge to do this premise justice, then you should expect just such a quest from me in the near to medium future. Indeed, it is for this reason that the world details described above might seem especially bleak; the point of my story would be to try and avert such dire fates. On top of this, I also already have found the perfect framework through which to organize a simulation of China's civil defense program. You see, back in the 1960s, the PRC committed itself to a huge military-industrial development project called the Third Front Campaign, moving entire factories and their workforce into the country's interior. The goal, if it should not be obvious, was to secure the nation's production against the most likely angles of attack–these being the First and Second Front.
In my quest, then, I would focus on a similar initiative called the Final Front Campaign, aimed at exploring every viable program for the survival of the Party, the State, and the People (in that order). If such a narrative sounds interesting to you, then I look forward to your participation therein. Together, we can save the People's Republic of China from being utterly annihilated, and maybe keep it from being its own worst enemy as well. Or, just as likely, we will become the charred skeletons that some hapless wanderer will pat down for duct tape.
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