As the Great Power on which most of the land battles were fought and a disproportionately large share of nuclear weapons used, the People's Republic of China suffered heavily from the Third World War. The loss, in the subsequent decade, of more than 90% of China's pre-War population and manufacturing capacity, not to mention the widespread destruction of agricultural infrastructure (irrigation, flood control, and so on), left China in shambles.
In the early 21st century, China is now an impoverished and fragmented land, with its territory divided between a half-dozen major competing foreign states and Chinese factions. The most significant of these competitors are listed below.
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As of February 2002, the territory of the former People's Democratic Agrarianist Republic of China is in anarchy, nominally controlled by the League-recognized Provisional Government of China. The prior Agrarianist regime was an aggressively conservative "pro-peasant" regime that originated in the province of Sichuan, an area spared by geography and targeting from the worst effects of post-War famine, plague, and anarchy. Agrarianist China was extremely xenophobic, rejecting dealings with all foreign governments -- even with the League -- as having the potential to corrupt Chinese society, and seeking to reestablish an idealized traditional Chinese society throughout rump China. However, Sichuan's isolation from the rest of China and the Agrarianist Republic's technological backwardness left the Republic unable to effective control the peripheries, as is proved by Nan'yang's existence and the eventual destruction of the Agrarianist regime by a combined force of peasants and western Chinese Muslim Hui..
Agrarianist China was a totalitarian one-party dictatorship, with the Chinese People's Agrarianist Party serving as the only legal political organization. Chinese society was split into two classes, namely, high-ranking Party members and everyone else. Members of the former group are allowed to enjoy foreign goods, technologies, and foods, while the remainder of the Chinese population is supposed to become a docile peasantry. While the capital of China under the Provisional Government remains Chongqing, the unstable coalition government is in the process of reforming Chinese society and politics in the direction of greater pluralism though the contours are vague.
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"NAN'YANG" (The Cantonese-Fujianese Republic)
Nan'yang is a new country that has only recently been recognized by the League of Nations and League member-states. Despite the destruction of the Agrarianist regime, the traditional liberal xenophilia of the Cantonese and Fujianese peoples weighs heavily against the possibility of any reintegration of Nan'yang into Agrarianist China.
Although the territorial core of Nan'yang is centered upon the pre-War Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, other territories peopled by speakers of Cantonese and Fujianese -- the province of Guangxi, the island of Hainan, and even the province of Tonkin in the north of the Mandate of Indochina -- are also claimed by the Nan'yang government.
Nan'yang has immense symbolic appeal to the huge Chinese diaspora -- the majority of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Americas trace their roots back to southeastern China, with Cantonese emigrants predominating in Indochina, Thailand, and South America, and almost 25 million Fujianese-speakers living in Japan and more than a million in New Fujian. Overseas Chinese business and community groups are extensively funding the Nan'yang government, which has adopted (in December of 2000) a constitution loosely modeled upon the Constitution of the United States that identifies Nan'yang as a "guided democracy" possessing a liberal free-market economy.
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"PARHAE TERRITORIES" (Korea)
The northeast of China was devastated in the Third World War -- only 4% of the region's pre-war population of 100 million people surviving into 1985. Since that date, Korean chaebol and independent settlers have flooded into this territory, eventually outnumbering the surviving Chinese population by two-to-one. An attempt by Agrarianist China to acquire northeastern China -- in particular, the Manchurian plain -- precipitated the Sino-Korean War of 1997, which ended with the Treaty of Néosaigon that gave Korea full sovereignty over Manchuria and the former Siberian Far East.
The three Parhae Territories are ethnically diverse, with a dominant Korean majority but including a substantial Chinese population -- both native and post-1997 immigrant -- various Tungusic groups, Mongols, and even Russians. The dominant language of government, business, and public life in the Parhae Territories is Korean, although quite a few residents are multilingual. The Korean government's development plan for the Territories involves the development of the area's forestry and agricultural potential, preferably using ethnic Chinese or offworld Koreans as immigrant labourers.
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Autonomous from the Chinese empire since the middle of the 19th century, and a British protectorate from 1904 until 1947 and an Indian protectorate thereafter until 1982, the Lamaist Buddhist theocracy of Tibet has recently been criticized by human-rights activists for its non-democratic system of government and intolerance of public dissent. The 1983 acquisition of the Tibetan-populated Chinese territories of Qinghai and western Sichuan -- part of so-called "Outer Tibet", as distinct from the "Inner Tibet" centred upon Lhasa -- has received little comment. The League of Nations maintains an extensive humanitarian presence in Tibet, still one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world.
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"UIGHURSTAN" (Mandate of Eastern Turkestan)
The Mandate of Eastern Turkestan is the only remnant of the chain of Muslim Turkestani-populated socialist republics, autonomous regions, and national districts that stretched from the Caspian Sea in the west to the headwaters of the Yellow River in the east. The impoverished Turkic Uighur population of the mandate, numbering some 600 thousand and concentrated in the extreme southwest of the mandate, is well-known as one of the most neglected populations under League administration.
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"MONGOLIA" (Mandate of Mongolia)
The relative paucity of military targets and major population centres in Mongolia circa the early 1980's saved the ethnic Mongols of east-central Asia -- living for the most part in the Siberian satellite of Outer Mongolia, but also in the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia just to the north of Beijing, and in the Siberian autonomous republics of Tuva and Buryatia -- from the utter destruction inflicted upon the Turkestani populations of Siberian Central Asia and the Yakut of northern Siberia. Although the Mandate of Mongolia, covering a total land area of some 3.9 million square kilometers and with a total population of a mere half-million people, has not experienced significant recovery to pre-War levels of development since the 1987 establishment of the Mandate, the survivors have managed to return to the traditional nomadic life of Mongolians from time immemorial with limited aid. Plans to rebuild the Trans-Siberian Railway on a route that would pass through Mongolian territory could relaunch the Mongolian economy. Relations with Korea -- a country that has made limited investments in Mongolian mines and has funded the reconstruction of Mongol Buddhist religious institutions -- are quite good; relations with China are strained by the issue of Inner Mongolia.