Jack of Harts

The Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere that entered space and then the stars was blessed with a ready supply of compliant lesser races they could send out to claim the wild frontiers. They moved entire populations off Earth to settle far off worlds and the true Chinese expanded into the empty lands. They built their greater Hegemony in the stars on the backs of the riffraff they didn’t want. It was an elegant way to dispose of the excess population while turning their corner of Earth into a paradise for the true Chinese people. China became the Middle Kingdom once more, masters of all the corners of Earth that mattered, and wealth flowed to Earth from the far off colonies. It was a Golden Age for China. One they planned to maintain forever.

China did not miss the opportunity that the Second Great Depression brought it. The general collapse of the Western economies gave China a chance to expand without minimal resistance, and they quickly took over many nations bordering them. Taiwan, Korea, and even Japan fell to their advance in short order. As did most other nations in South East Asia short of India itself. They even took over much of Indonesia before the Western Alliance managed to make a stand and stop them short of conquering Australia. That and India would have been the feathers in their cap, but China demurred when heavy resistance crystallized. It would take them generations to digest the nations they had already conquered. They were content to look to the future with that.

The Cybernetic Council is Not Welcome in any Russian or Chinese system. The Rogue AIs killed a lot of them in the past, and so they erased any smart AIs they caught. The only good AI is a dead AI after all. That became their motto for centuries. The cybers meanwhile seeded all Russian and Chinese systems with spybots designed to keep penetrating the systems again and again. It became a true great game between the cybers and their human foes, with information being the final prize. Centuries of this lowkey war actually resulted in a lessening of tensions. They became the “devil we know” to the Russians and Chinese. The cybers even picked off any Rogue AIs they found in those systems. Free of charge. Killing Rogue AIs is a public service after all.