special region, supervised by a committee formed by representatives from all parties, during a cooling off period of six months, whilst a more permanent solution was examined.
Official talks were publicly announced and the French Army withdrew from the agreed zone. Slowly France got back to what could be described as almost normal. D’Albignac declared a Special Period during which all political, associative and union activities were suspended. Protesters were quickly rounded up and dispatched to holding centres.
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The lesson to France could not have been more brutal, fifty years of continued settlement had ended in a disaster and on a scale not seen since the Commune of the 19th century, following the defeat of Napoleon III by the Prussians.
Albignac assumed power, popularly known as le Martel, after the Charles Martel, or Charles the Hammer, Duke and Prince, de facto King of the Franks, victor of the Battle of Poitiers in 732, over the army of the Umayyad Caliphate led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, Governor-general of al-Andalus, who was killed in the battle. Le Martel’s solution was the collective isolation of all traitors considered to be linked directly or indirectly with the treacherous rebellion. A form of preventive internment, the responsibility for which was confided to Alain Boublil, named as Minister having special responsibilities for national security and for determining the responsibility for the acts of treason committed by the mutineers.
The Federation in Brussels voted special budget reductions and temporary privileges for Paris. Belgium had also suffered riots from its Neo population, and declared the dissolution of their Federation. Brussels became Federal Territory, whilst Wallonia and Flanders decided for respectively independent futures.
Le Martel invited the Wallons to join what he declared would be the Greater Nation of France, doted with a new constitution and a new pride in their common heritage.
The Nation and its citizens were the bearers of shared values, a people who shared a common culture, institutions and laws, transmitted by countless generations whose sons had sacrificed themselves across the centuries defending the Nation’s soil against invaders and enemies.
The shared values were defined in the new constitution, these values included the Christian faith as the official, French as the mother language of the Nation, though regional languages such as Breton and Basque were declared as an integral part of the common cultural heritage. In the absence of these a strictly European culture or ancestry was obligatory for citizenship.
Le Martel introduced the obligatory oath of loyalty to the Nation. The oath applied to all those who fulfilled the constitutional requisites for citizenship. All persons were required to register at the office of their local town hall for the issue of new identity cards. These cards were officially entitled as Ayant Droit à la Citoyenneté de la Nation de France, commonly abbreviated to Ayant Droit. The cards in effect confirmed the privilege of citizenship on their holders.
Applicants were obliged to demonstrate, by the presentation of adequate proof, their French or European ancestry complete with certificates from parish churches or synagogues that confirmed their attachment to a constitutional faith. Certificates of education were necessary to prove their French or European culture.
The Ayant Droit armed with their new cards were Citizens of the Nation with full rights to residence in Greater France and the privilege to transmit those values to future generations as defined in the new constitution.
All others residents were issued provisional identity cards noting their ethnic group or origin, religion and linguistic family. These cards ominously omitted the right to residence in the national territory.A line had been crossed in the history of France and Europe. The unexpectedness of the insurgency, its intensity and the shockwave it produced on the Gallos had far reaching consequences for all. The Gallos realised that they could never again trust those who had settled in their midst who had nurtured in their hearts and minds a rejection for all that their host country held dear.
China Capitalism and Energy
Coal, oil and gas still provided electricity for the underdeveloped masses of the world without access to advanced fuel technologies, in countries where whose economies had never evolved or had faltered under the burden of their vast populations. Amongst them was China, where contrary to popular belief in the West, life for the majority of its inhabitants was little better than in India or Pakistan, where the poorest had no fuel other than the wood cut in the last of the country’s open forests, where life had continued unchanged for centuries resembling that of Europe during medieval times.
Capitalism had first brought previously unimagined wealth to China’s great cities and coastal regions, whilst poverty and disorder developed in the inland provinces as its government struggled maintain the economic growth necessary to restructure costly state owned industries, and at the same time tried to control the flood of peasants flowing towards the cities in search of jobs.
For thirty years the economy of China had grown at a phenomenal rate, eight, ten or twelve percent a year. Or had it? The wealth of Shanghai and Canton was undeniable, the sleek, gleaming, skyscrapers, the vast shopping centres overflowing with goods and the dense crowds of shoppers that flowed through them day and night. Deep from the hinterland the mingong were drawn towards the cities, from the land and from ruins of state factories. Beneath the surface China was as ever full of contradictions, corruption, inequality and injustice. The government had squandered the country’s wealth borrowing on the future, just as capitalist bankers and industrialists had always done.
The four principals of the regime were: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dominant role of Chinese Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought and Socialism. This vision was in contradiction with the reality of pseudo-capitalist China and the needs of the great masses of its poor peasants.
China was ravaged by pollution, the richest 10% of the population controlled more than 70% of the wealth. Over the early decades of the twenty first century, the cost of doing business went up and the hopes of the disinherited went down.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese lived on less a dollar a day and countless millions surged into the country’s seething cities, giving the birth to a new violent proletariat with the inevitable riots and demonstrations. As housing costs rose and hopes for jobs fell, riots and protests against corruption, frenetic property and stock market speculation became almost daily events.
But the question could be asked what had China to do with the Arab world? The answer to the question was not too difficult. To sustain China's growth, energy and American markets were vital. However, Washington finally realised its trade imbalance with China was unsustainable as its dollars continued to flow by countless billions into Beijing’s coffers, equally the Middle Kingdom’s vast needs and military build-up were gradually perceived as an ominous threat.
China's ambition was to establish itself as a great power with military supremacy in East Asia and the Pacific, controlling its trade lanes, and its oil supply routes from Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. This implied the modernisation of its armed forces, necessary to project its power and influence.
To accomplish this Beijing decided that Taiwan should rejoin the fold, it was unsupportable affront for the men who ruled China that Taiwan continue its provocative pretence as a sovereign state. Beijing invested vast sums to carry out a military modernisation program, developing its own weapons and aerospace research and development programmes.
China’s attempt to invade Taiwan, coinciding with the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Army, ended in an ignominious fiasco, in spite of the vast sums of money squandered on its armed forces. The consequence was the collapse of financial markets in Shanghai and Hong Kong, the secession of the rich capitalist coastal provinces and their economically powerful twin capitals of Canton and Shanghai, ruled by powerful industrialists, abandoning the north to poverty and disorder.
Taiwan resisted the invasion thanks to the supply of superior weapo
ns from the USA and its all-powerful Pacific fleet. In spite of China’s deluge of missiles on the island, there was little long term damage, however, the Mainland's fleet and air force suffered a devastating defeat, its armada limped home, humiliating political leaders in Beijing and the generals of the once proud Peoples Army, bringing economic disaster to China.
Simultaneously the financial centres of Shanghai and Hongkong suffered two disasters, the first they survived when many of their banks and institutions collapsed under a mountain of bad debt. However, it was the non-payment of the massive loans made for unproductive investments by the state’s industrial sectors and uncontrolled speculation by private investors that finally caught up with them, when the world’s economy staggered and stalled under the strain of debt and political upheaval.
China’s growth had been extraordinary with huge speculative investments in construction and infrastructure in and around their great cities. Vast programs, such as the Three Gorges Dam, the Olympics, aerospace and weapons development, had created a mountain of debt.
Over two hundred million mingong roamed the country in search of work, most from the inland provinces of Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei, Henan,