Daoming Sochua: the new century brought great strife to China: terrorist strikes, golden revolutions, civil war, fire, flood, and famine, pestilence both mutational and man-made, and a devastating earthquake or two made their bloody marks all under heaven. In just a few decades, the nation saw the fall of one dynasty, the rise of a new one, and the fall of that second dynasty to a revamp of the first. Even so, with its manpower, resource, and cultural continuity, Great China clawed its way up from the dustbin of history again and again, becoming a viable power once again by mid-century.
First, the Golden Dynasty tore down the decaying remnants of the old People's Republic, bringing back the extravagance and the ritual of the feudal era. The years while the Dynasty was in power saw an expansion of imperial strength. As the Golden Emperor presided in New Xi'an, the ancient capital rebuilt in a combination of neotraditionalism and hypermodernism, his forces pushed outwards in all directions, establishing vassalages over the fraying states of Central Asia and Southeast Asia. (Though as the Russian Republic grew in power and harnessed its own sense of multicultural nationalism, the Russians were able to counter Chinese imperialism with their own.) Foreign adventures aside, the Golden Emperor initiated grand cultural projects: rebuilding the Great Wall and reinforcing it with exquisitely gaudy metallic battlements, palaces for all seasons in every province, a giant marble pleasure boat the size of a small cruise ship, and the commission of countless paintings, songs, and poems imitating the styles of each dynasty from the nation's past.
The Golden Dynasty's Mandate of Heaven fell precipitously in the first Flash War. The guerrilla fighters called the Fallen launched a series of coordinated attacks on the dense teeming urban centers throughout Great China. A combination of old Maoist remnants from the previous regime, Muslim dissidents, outright cults of dubious Buddhist-Taoist or Christian origin, ethnic separatists of all stripes, and the final gasp of American intelligence networks engaged in one last hurrah even as their own homeland fell apart, the Fallen used everything- conventional weaponry, biological agents, chemical agents, cyberhacks, industrial sabotage, dirty bombs, even a small tactical nuclear device- to strike the Dynasty.
One terrorist attack might have unified the country, but such a comprehensive campaign served to paralyze the imperial administration, itself already under fire for its excesses. After all, this was a dynasty that required two golden revolutions to come into power in the first place. As Shanghai burned and Yunnan starved, the dead piling up at the gates of New Xi'an, members of the imperial military launched their own play for power with the Crimson Succession. While they were not initially aligned with the rebels, many of the officers and senior commanders had grown up, even served, the regime that the Golden Dynasty had replaced. Some still had nostalgia for that time. Their coup swept up the Fallen rabble and revolting Golden garrisons alike, creating new armies by absorbing those who surrendered. The Golden Emperor and his retinue fled. Another dynasty fell. And so they became the new rulers of Great China.
The new Crimson government attempted to combine the best elements of the post-Deng PRC with the grandeur of the Golden Dynasty. After getting rid of all the neo-imperialist trappings in a less bloody and tumultuous Second Cultural Revolution, they kept the technocratic elites that the Golden Emperor had promoted as his new neo-neo-Confucian bureaucracy. Growing up as the daughter of science professors, Daoming Sochua quickly became part of the Crimson apparatus that tried to project Chinese power throughout the region and the world. Her innate intellectual talents were quickly recognized by the mandarins of the state, and her mixed heritage was a cherry on top to represent Great China's transnational ambitions. (A softer line was taken compared to the Golden Emperor's demand for all of his neighbors to pay obeisance and personally kowtow to him at the reopened Daming Palace- instead, the new Crimson Chinese offered trade and technological agreements for these nations before politely asking them to submit or be conquered.) Sochua was held as a visible example of the union of Great China and its subject nations.
And so, she became another part of a soft power push, elevated to prominent administrative positions in the country's scientific agencies. Her background in advanced mathematics, high-tech engineering, and theoretical energy physics became a great asset in Crimson foreign policy. Sochua was put to work devising life-saving engineering solutions to prevent nuclear meltdowns in tsunami and flood-battered Japan while the government marched its crisis troops into the Diet and forced the Emperor to adorn the saffron robes of a tributary. As the Russian Republic forces amassed in the icy territories of Siberia and the Russian Far East, Sochua's sharp mathematical abilities devised an optimized production plan to ensure enough prototype power armor units would be delivered to the front. After Russia failed in landing a man on Mars, Sochua oversaw the successful Perpetual Brightness mission that brought Chinese taikonauts to the clouds of Venus, exploring the upper atmosphere in the Baochuan airship. When the Unity project began, she was already on the Central Scientific Revolution Committee's short list.
Sochua was appointed Chief Engineer with a rank of Commander on Unity. While nominally subordinate to Chief Science Officer Prokhor Zakharov, the two had an excellent working relationship. During the voyage she ensured the ship's reactor and solar sails were at peak functionality, supervising repair efforts with the respective teams of Lead Starwright Duncan Hughes and Flight Commander Vadim Kozlov. All parties involved maintained cordial, professional relationships. All found Kozlov to be somewhat too peppy and driven to quixotic heroics, even volunteering for spacewalks despite the ship traveling at high fractions of the speed of light. Sochua found Chief Botanist Deidre Skye to be good at her job but too resistant against hard data in the face of crop failures, refusing to take steps to cut her losses. She had a strained relationship with the Executive Officer Sheng-Ji Yang. Despite both parties' lack of interest in politics and vast generation gap, the fact that both stood came from different iterations of China was too hard to overcome. Sochua often regarded the X.O. as a cool and collected materialist after her own heart, but the two experienced an undeniable tension during the early voyage, with Yang often questioning findings and suggestions offered by Sochua while admitting Zakharov's submission of the same. While this seemed exceedingly petty, Sochua always had a suspicion that this was merely a test to measure her will.
During Planetfall, Sochua and Zakharov coordinated their teams effortlessly with futile repair attempts to the ship's reactor. She was able to devise a temporary solution to the Holtzman drive's malfunction while he invented a trajectory that would preserve Unity's approach to Chiron instead of missing the the Centauri system entirely. After Spartan Coalition forces under Colonel Corazon Santiago took control of several laboratories, Sochua formulated a plan to arm her engineers and Zakharov's scientists with combat training and strike back at the mutineers. Though there were initial heavy losses before this science team gained the upper hand by improvising chemical bombs and jury-rigging impromptu electrical stun prods, Sochua deemed the losses to be acceptable give the parameters. Zakharov heartily agreed. Ultimately the efforts of both were able to preserve the ship until it reached the planet, but could not save it from the saboteurs who then took control and destroyed the reactor itself.
Naturally Sochua joined the University of Planet, where she remains at present. Though she has occasionally found Zakharov's ethical blindspots to be- concerning, she regards the University's mission as naturally the most logical and well-thought ideology on Chiron. With the faction's focus on scientific and technological research and development, Sochua feels right at home, appointed chief researcher of priority University projects again and again, personally involved in multiple breakthroughs into new energy sources and experimental circuitry. In turn, the Academician counts Sochua as one of his right-hand men, leaning on her clear mathematical vision and lack of sentimentality. As one of the earliest of Trustees selected to govern the University and one of the first few to receive the Longevity Vaccine after the provost himself, she is widely popular within the faction and regarded as a shoo-in as the new Academician should Zakharov ever step down- which the elder scientist shows no sign of doing.
Note: The first Flash War and the Fallen are mentioned briefly in Centauri Dawn.
