In early 1917, President Woodrow Wilson visited Capital Hill and addressed congress. He announced that a state of war existed between the United States and the German Empire, and that congress had only to acknowledge it. Wilson announced in glowing terms that the mission of the United States was to keep the world must be made safe for democracy. For the first time in its long history, the United States was close to going abroad in search of monster's to slay.

And then it wasn't.

A contentious faction in the US Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, voted down the war declaration by the slimmest of margins. Wilson, defeated, took to poor health and died in 1918. Thomas R. Marshall assumed the presidency. Not prepared for the office and unwilling to do anything, he served as caretaker for the federal government until Republican Warren G. Hardin was elected in 1920. The 20's were one of prosperity for the United States. As Europe suffered from war, the United States reaped the benefit of supplying the warring nations, the Allies especially, with whatever they needed at cost. The US would flirt with prohibition of alcohol in the 20's, only for it to be repealed and deemed a failure.

Harding's death in 1923 gave Calvin Coolidge the presidency, and he was elected in his own right in 1924. Coolidge stood down in 1928 and his successor, Herbert Hoover, seemed a shoe-in for the White House. And then in early 1928, it all went to hell. With the Great War's end, instability rocked the world and the US was caught in a massive economic depression that nearly bankrupted the US government. Hoover was beaten soundly in the election by New York Governor Al Smith, who would have won in a massive landslide had it not been for his Catholic background.

The Smith Administration went to work in passing legislation that would help ease the economic crises the US were facing. One of Smith's closest advisers was fellow New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a former member of the Wilson Administration who had been struck by polio in the early 20's and was wheelchair bound. Roosevelt and other advisers began to push for more and more radical legislation that Smith opposed. Eventually, there was a falling out by the two men and FDR was fired and sent back to New York.

As the 20's became the 30's, the depression worsened and cracks began to show in the once stable American Union. A highly contentious 1932 election led to the House of Representatives having to elect the president after a deadlock in the electoral college and popular vote. Smith was reelected president by a razor-thin margin of two states over Hoover. The results led to protests and division in the country. Many of these protests were ended by force thanks to the intervention of the US Army and chief of staff Douglas MacArthur. The show of force stopped the demonstrations, but the resentment began to build through the country.

Economic stagnation had become the norm in 1936 when the next presidency was decided. Franklin Roosevelt, after two terms as governor of New York, ran a strong campaign against governor Alf Landon of Kansas, in which Roosevelt unveiled a vast plan of social that would help to rebuild the country. But Landon's unlikable personality, fear of Roosevelt's radical policies, and a low turnout by disgruntled voters led to another political deadlock. The deadlock with the voters was foreshadowing of the deadlock that emerged in congress. The representatives remained undecided well into 1937.

And that was when MacArthur sprung into action. With the military at his command, the general appointed himself president on a interim basis until a successor could be found. The move led to opposition from across the country, opposition that MacArthur silenced with the army. Roosevelt and Landon were soon arrested along with most of the politicians in Washington. The union began to crumble underneath MacArthur's bootheel. First in the south, where Senator Huey Long set up a populist powerbase. One of the few politicians to escape MacArthur's grasp, Long led Louisiana and ten other southern states seceded Southern United States of America. The SUSA was followed by the west coast radicals who formed the Syndicate States of America. With the two factions seceding, MacArthur declared war on them and the Second US Civil War began.

The war drug on for four years. Poorly trained troops, in-fighting, and division among the radicals in the west led to its surrender in 1939 after a heavy defeat in the Battle of Denver. The war in the south began to grind into a stalemate, but the end was in sight. In 1939, MacArthur was deposed by his second in command, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower served as temporary president for a month, that was when Senator Burton Wheeler was appointed as president by the rump congress. Wheeler announced to the American people that war was soon to be over. He conferred with Eisenhower and other agents of the federal government to see it come to pass. Two weeks later, a Jewish dentist shot Huey Long. With long gone, the populist SUSA crumbled without his strong leadership. Gerald L.K. Smith signed a peace treaty with the US Federal government in 1940 and the south was absorbed back into the fold.

Wheeler served as a uniting figure in the aftermath of the war. He was heralded as the second coming of Lincoln. He ran for reelection in 1944 and won in a landslide. In 1948, after almost twenty years of strife and turmoil, a peaceful transition of power occurred in the United States when Thomas Dewey of New York was elected president. The 40's and 50's saw a renewed stability take hold of the United States. The economy finally rebounded and the US, though not a colossus of economic might it had been in the 20's, was able to manage unemployment and be one of the leading capitalist nations in the world.

In 1954, Colorado governor Michael Norman was elected president by a close margin. The Norman Administration hasn't been a major success in its almost four years. The country is economically flat and Norman is seen as an aloof leader who is not in touch with the everyday people. Questions of corruption inside the administration has led to a less than stellar approval rating from the people. As the summer conventions approach, there is a challenger in the form of Wisconsin senator Eric Fernandez, a leftist in the true sense and a man with a vision to help America.

Michael Norman -- 36th President of the United States
Russell Reed -- 40th Vice-President of the United States
Eric Fernandez -- Junior Senator from Wisconsin
Wilbur Helms -- Senior Senator from South Carolina
Elliot Shaw -- Private Eye/Hollywood Fixer
Jefferson Thomas -- LAPD detective
Jim Sledge -- Political operative
Roderick Marston -- Senior Senator from Arizona
Billy Carter -- Professional baseball player
Johnny Leggario -- Mobster
Lilian Mather -- Candidate for US Senate
Julio Lopez -- Cuban smuggler.
Stein -- Thief
Jessica Hyatt -- Agent Provocateur.

The later years of the 19th century were a tough time for the Qing dynasty, who after loosing its influence over Korea to the Japanese, and increasing concessions to western foreigners the ruling Manchurian Aisin Gioro dynasty. Attempts to modernize the Chinese state and army were made in the face of defeats by the Japanese who soon came to eclipse China as the dominant player in the Asian sphere. But with the setting of the old century and the dawning of the next the troubled situation had not changed all that much.

The imperial dynasty of China was forced to abdicate the throne in 1912, ending the Xinhai Revolution and ushering in a period of hopeful political reform. With the Emperor squandered away in the Forbidden City which served as the sole and only refuge of Imperial existence, the rest of the country deteriorated as the promises of the Republic and of Sun Yet Sen's idealism and Yuan Shikai's action began to fall weakly to the growing political influence of warlords, who in betraying Republican virtue acted more in their own political interests and not in those regions of the country they had power in, ultimately leading to the creation of private regional armies and airforces and further weakening the prestige and power of China.

While the situation in China was weak, the effect of the Great War was minimal as the only significant battle to take place on mainland China was the largely Japanese operation to seize the German port of Tsingtao. China's only other contribution to the war effort was for the great powers to steal away with many rural and urban laborers to work as teamsters or in other roles in the European theater. But as the Chinese laborers from the front found their way home, injured or dead there was a growing consensus among the civilian population that the war was not theirs to be a part of. Still, all the same there was little power the Provisional Government had on this front, and most egregious of the inabilities was their unwillingness or ineptitude to see the repatriation of Tsingtao from Japanese military administration to Chinese civil administration.

Either powerless or unwilling, the Republican government could not stop the process of Japan transferring the occupied German outpost into an outpost of the Japanese Empire. By December Fifth of 1919 a student protest occurred at Tiananmen demanding solidarity and strength from the government, but getting none. The inept inaction of the government seeded conciousness within the student population that spread to the merchants, and soon after the center of the movement shifted from the University of Peking to the streets of Shanghai where they organized against the provisional government.

The fruits of the movement was the emergence of the Chinese communist party, and various anarchist movements gaining traction within the Chinese left, to the criticism of the nationalist right of the acting provisional government.

The new left in China attracted the many foreign educated Chinese students, or those who had studied at the westernized schools established after the abolishing of the old Imperial Examinations system.

For a time, the inclusion of the Chinese communist movement was tolerated by the Chinese right, but as the crisis in Europe deepened and the political climate shifted it soon became necessary for the right to isolate and expel the Communists from mainstream politics. Following Chiang Kai-Shek's northern expedition in 1925 the general forcibly expelled the Communists and the left from the Provisional Government to consolidate power during the course of his northern expedition and as a result civil war quickly erupted in communist insurgency. Following soon after, a hungry Japanese Empire invaded the Chinese mainland to expand its Chinese holdings beyond ownership of Tsingtao and soon took not just the coast of northern Japan but also conquered the last European holdings in China as the end of the war left the European powers to weak to resist, and the ensuing post-war Economic crisis only weakened them further. For the Chinese, the collapse in the international stock market did not inflict heavy damages, with much of the value lost being concentrated in gold-backed currency and not the silver the Chinese monetary system was backed in.

By the late twenties the Chinese communists were driven out of Eastern China by the competing forces of Japan and the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek. By the thirties the Communists re-consolidated in western China. Through the conflict the Communists held firm the Chinese interior fortifying in the mountains and taking in survivors of the Tsarist crackdown on Russian communists who fled from their exile in Siberia for the Chinese frontier to join forces with Chinese forces.

The power and solidarity of the Communist movement was further bolstered by the actions of student revolutionaries in the east who operated in secret sedition against the Nationalists and the Japanese. Headed by students of the University of Hong Kong, the Communist movement in Hong Kong was dominated by the personalities of Hou Tsai Tang and Wen Chu Ming.

The Hong Kong Movement presented a fresh critique on not just the failures of the Nationalist government, the imperialist evils of Japan, and even of the proto-Bolshevism of the oft-forgotten old Communist Party then biding its time in the west. This critique appealed to the broader Chinese diaspora as its papers and pamphlets went out, and much more to a broader international alliance that spurred interest in the movement in the 1930's. By 1933 the Nationalist government – who had come to occupy Hong Kong at that time – concluded that it could no longer tolerate the open sedition and moved to arrest the Tsai Tang and Chu Ming, who avoided capture along with their followers and lead the Nationalist police on a wild chase through western China.

The course of the independent rebellion by the Hong Kong Movement or Society garnered much support and as the group fled from place to place, managing to elude the Nationalist and Japanese governments and attracted many followers of its own who came armed by its side from near and far. Eventually, the gang managed to make its march west towards the relative safety of the Communist frontier where they were brought in by the party. The arrival of Hou Tsai Tang and Wen Chu Ming brought a breath of fresh ideological air and new blood into the movement and through 1934 and 1935 they affected a metamorphosis in the party and the states it controlled culminating in a resurgence of the Communists into the greater Chinese conflict by 1937.

First striking south against the Nationalist forces the army made quick headway against the battle-beaten armies of Chiang Kai-Shek, long disillusioned with their fight against Japan and worn thin by mostly unconsolidated politics within Kuomintang China. The brazen strike against the Nationalist heartland brought considerable attention to the Communist's efficiency and their numbers swelled with the inclusion of the southern tribes of China and international brigades long at odds with the Nationalist government, and between 1938 and 1940 the Communist forces nearly doubled as Chiang Kai-Shek and his men were pushed clean to Nanking.

The surprise resurgence of the Communists further bolstered them, and with permission by the Politburo of the Communist Party of China Wen Chu Ming was permitted to lead an army north against the Japanese, long spread so thin across northern China they were ineffectual to take to the offensive. The multitude of guarded river crossings and valleys presented easy defensive locations Wen Chu Ming overtook as he spear-headed an assault towards Beijing, which had been taken by the Japanese for their puppet Empire of Manchukoku under the formerly deposed Puyi. The weak and ill-trained Manchukoku military and thinned out Japanese masters were quick to fold under the Communist onslaught and Wen Chu Ming swept quickly across Chinese Mongolia and into Manchuria itself in under a year before himself dying on the battlefield.

The death of Wen in the field called to the attentions of the north Hou, who distraught at his friend's death was forced to assume the now sole leadership role of the revolution. Leaving his southern command in the south he went north to consolidate and restore leadership with his own commanders and to finish the campaign.

A surprise attack against Japanese naval forces in Dailan from the streets itself resulted in the defeat of the Japanese navy in northern China in 1942 and the effective surrendering of the fleet to China, though the Communists could not effectively use the navy in the water. Later attacks on Japanese outposts in northern China as the communist forces closed in on and encircled Beijing resulted in the discovery of the Japanese weapons development and chemical and biological research projects of Unit 731 and seizure of their research by Communist forces.

Beijing fell to the Chinese Communists by the first of May, 1943 and soon after the last of the Nationalist forces were defeated in southern China by the following year. By that time the Communists had amassed their military and political strength to hold Mainland China in sole domination. Formal peace negotiations were underway later that year, and by January 2nd, 1944 the Communist Party of China was recognized as being the sole benefactor of victory in China, ending a conflict that had begun with the closing the Great War in Europe.

Tianshan, Hong Kong, and Macau were militarily annexed by the Communists in the handover of power.

In the years following, the new China consolidated its power to liquidate those of potential warlords. In 1949 it mounted an invasion of Tibet to consolidate the “lost province” and rejoin it with the Chinese family. To the north, Mongolia had avoided open conflict through Russian influence and thus became de-facto independent of China as a Russian puppet. But as the situation in Russia grew more tenuous through the 1950's the revolutionary forces in China operated covertly among the Mongolians and with the dissolution of the Russian Empire into mass civil war the Chinese swept up Mongolia and reinstated it as a Chinese province under the nose of Russian warlords.

During the mid-fifties, the government of the New China underwent reforms and Hou disappeared from public life for a brief time after several attempts were made against his life. By the end of the reforms Hou and his government had transferred the economic power of the Chinese state to the regional provinces and communal prefectures, holding many of the more significant – military, transport, electrical, health – holdings as state-run and permitting the division of the ruling single party into three independent factions with their own politburos to decentralize political interests; though his party, the New China Party retained power over the national Politburo and much of Congress.

The central government of China can be broken down into three branches, or committees. The legislative committee containing the National Congress which meets to draft and write long-term law, headed by the General Secretariat of the Congress who sets the schedule and is in charge of keeping the minutes of the large elected body. The executive functions of the government is handled through the Zhōngguó gòngchǎndǎng zhōngyāng zhèngzhì jú, or simply: The Politburo, the executive committee headed by the General Secretariat (Hou) setting the agenda of the bi-weekly meetings where consensus is the rule of the day, signing into law legislative laws, sending laws to be accepted by the Congress, or drafting and enacting politburo resolutions. And then there are the National Courts.

Parties:
The New China Party – the party of Hou and the Politburo. Because of the close relationship or even members of the National Politburo and Hou serving double on the party Politburo the difference between party and national policy is very blurred at this moment and is very much the same. As is sometimes described, the New China Party often assumes the role of “The Party of Necessity”.

Union Party – Historically rooted in the theory of Anarchism by Emma Goldman and influenced by the acts of the IWW towards Chinese immigrants in the US, it is also a synthesis of the Pure Socialist and the Guangzhou group. In the presence of the NCP the party has declined considerably and even abandoned some anarchist principles to be best described as Libertarian Communist, its biggest stance it continues to hold in regular government is the abandonment of racial and ethnic distinctions which have been so used by the old Communist Party and continued to be used by the NCP as the stance of racial and ethnic equality between all peoples in China. The party has predominant influence in Guangzhou itself and is more a factor in Guangdong than in national politics.

The January Second Movement – Effectively nonexistent in Chinese politics until Hou's later decentralizing reforms the January Second Movement represents more moderate socialist action in China, advocating for the end of autarky or semi-autarky to economically interact openly with the wider world. While sometimes accused of wanting to sponsor European “second-wave colonialism” and the return of special economic zones for the benefit of Europe, the party asserts that it would protect the labor of China in this respect, and that simply outbound economic interaction would better enrich the wealth of the Chinese laborer.