China

China’s significance in the history of the First Men rests on its changing position between powerful cultural influences and rival systems of world order. It is first a society combining Eastern traditions with Russian and American influences, then a leader of resistance to the United States, and eventually the place where archaeologists uncover material evidence of a far older civilization. These roles make China both a political center in the history of global conflict and a repository of humanity’s lost past.

Society between East and West

During the period of European decline, China is described as already partly American, substantially influenced by Russia, and still fundamentally Eastern. It improves its rice lands, extends its railways, and organizes its industries while presenting itself as accommodating toward the wider world. Its political development is more complicated than either foreign influence alone would suggest. In its earlier movement toward unity and independence, China learned from militant Bolshevism; after the Russian state collapsed, Russian social ideals continued to affect it. China did not adopt communism as either a theory or a complete system of practice, but increasingly entrusted itself to a powerful, devoted, despotic party and developed a sense of society as a whole rather than as an aggregate of individuals.

That collective orientation never erased internal contradictions. China is also described as deeply penetrated by individualism, and the social order produced a submerged, desperate class of wage workers. Its modernization therefore combines planned social authority and industrial expansion with powerful private and class divisions. The account presents Chinese development not as a simple choice between Eastern tradition and imported ideology, but as an unsettled synthesis in which outside models are selectively absorbed and local conflicts remain.

China in the rivalry of world powers

As the influence of Europe recedes, political loyalties gradually gather around two great powers, the United States and China. China’s position is central to the formation of the eastern alignment: Japan, after suffering under American imperialism, becomes more Chinese in sentiment, wins an independence war, and joins an Asiatic Confederacy under Chinese leadership. In the resulting division of the world, Asia and Africa stand on one side and the wealthy American-led continental system on the other. The old distinction between East and West has become a basis for political organization, though the eastern peoples remain culturally diverse. Chinese society is characterized as practical, urbane, and attentive to appearances, in contrast with the more otherworldly tendency attributed to India; fear of the United States helps draw the two together.

China’s relationship with international institutions shifts with the balance of power. During the formation of the European Confederacy, China remains within the League of Nations and hopes to use it against its American rival. Later, after Europe’s destruction, the League is dominated by China and no longer represents cosmopolitan unity in the same way. An attempt to turn it into a universal authority over pooled armaments ends in a split: rival institutions claim the League’s inheritance while expressing, in practice, American and Chinese supernational loyalties. China is thus both a participant in international cooperation and the leading power in a bloc whose rivalry limits that cooperation.

The conflict between China and the United States is driven in part by material competition. As global civilization becomes dependent on fuel, a major oil shortage prompts international controls over existing oil and coal fields. New, enormous fuel deposits in Antarctica fall outside the World Fuel Control Board’s jurisdiction. The United States reaches them first and regards them as a means of advancing its influence; China, fearing Americanization, demands that the deposits be placed under international control. The dispute illustrates how resource governance and political allegiance reinforce one another: a question about who controls fuel becomes a test of whether the planet will be organized around American power or constrained by a shared authority.

Secret negotiations and world government

In the twenty-sixth year of the war between the two powers, representatives of the United States and China meet secretly on an island in the Pacific. Their meeting expresses the divided motives of their societies: both men combine commercial interests with concern for culture, though commercial calculation is usually dominant. They arrive by separate seaplanes at night, land at a secluded inlet, and row ashore in rubber coracles. The contrast between them is made visible in their clothing. The Chinese envoy removes his air helmet and heavy garments to reveal a sky-blue silk suit embroidered with golden dragons; the American wears the grey coat and breeches associated with business men of the period.

Their conversation proceeds amicably because they agree on practical measures. They plan to overthrow their respective national governments simultaneously, relying on finance and popular support in both countries, and replace the governments with a World Finance Directorate. The proposed body is to include leading commercial and industrial figures alongside representatives of workers’ organizations. The American representative is to become its first president and the Chinese representative its first vice-president; the Directorate will oversee the economic reorganization of the world. The meeting makes China a direct partner in the creation of global government, even as the arrangement gives the two negotiating powers unequal formal offices.

About three hundred and eighty terrestrial years after the European War, world unity is achieved through the transition from competing national governments to the Directorate’s unitary control. Concerted action in China and the United States disables the military governments through the passive resistance of cosmopolitan business interests. In China, the change is almost instantaneous and bloodless, unlike the disorder and brief violence in the United States. China’s rapid transition shows how decisive its cooperation is to the founding of the First World State, while the later deterioration of that civilization makes clear that political unification alone does not secure the future.

An archaeological archive beneath China

Much later, during the rise of Patagonia, China reappears not as the center of a contemporary political system but as the setting of an archaeological discovery. In the basement of a shattered pylon, researchers find a store of metal plates made from an extraordinarily durable artificial element. Their crowded embossed writing proves difficult to interpret, but further deposits are found, and the dead language is gradually deciphered. Within three centuries, scholars reconstruct the outline of the ancient culture; the plates are identified as printing blocks for books produced a hundred thousand years earlier.

The discovery changes the Patagonians’ account of their own history. They had regarded themselves as pioneers of the mind, partly because their homeland lacked visible remains of the ancient order and ruins in older regions had been dismissed as natural oddities. The records show that earlier peoples had already conquered and lost the world the Patagonians were struggling to master. Scientists test the recovered knowledge rather than accepting it wholesale, separating the achievements of earlier Europe and America from the later degeneration of the First World State. China’s role in this episode is therefore material and historical: its buried archive gives a later civilization access to a past that had otherwise survived only in fragments and distorted memory.