Let me start with a circumlocutory introduction: I’m a member of the 日独協会; owing to the reluctance of Japanese exchange students to do anything much, the group gradually became sinicized, first by people from the mainland, and then, especially in the last year, by people from Taiwan. As the group was decidedly not a political one and those 中国人 with an interest in Japanese culture are probably selected for a bit of heterodoxy, there were only vague apprehensions about this. Recently however, member “Manfred”, in supposed jest, asked whether with “Taiwan”, we were referring to China. This led to predictable confrontation and out from its drawer flew the containment plan for such events: that indeed it referred to “China”, but that we would decline to specify what “China” referred to and that this information would have to be researched elsewhere. Alas, this containment plan was calibrated to my own contact with Taiwanese society and reflected the political spectrum of the 90’s and early 2000’s, when the dominant positions on cross-straits relations were those of the CCP (whose party color is red) and KMT (whose party color is blue, and which is also known as the “Pan-Blue Coalition”): that there was one China and the debate was simply over which of the two was the legitimate government and which one a transitory, regional disorder within its borders.
This failed to take into account some more recent developments, represented strongly in the recent Taiwanese election: the prominence of the Democratic Progressive Party (whose party color is green, and which is also known as the “Pan-Green Coalition”), whose position on the matter is the non-identity of Taiwan with China, Taiwanese independence and the assertion of a distinct Taiwanese identity. Given especially the prominence of the DPP’s position in the student-age Taiwanese population of the group, the containment plan failed its objective.
However on this occasion, I got a whiff of a political allegory in the three Chinese factions of 『Red Alert 3: Paradox』: not only are there two factions – aptly primarily called Red China and Blue China – fighting each other for the control of China itself, there is also a “Green China”, whose intent is to leave the playing field by constructing a starship to ferry its population to a space colony where to establish a new state independent of the waste that is the bone of contention in Red vs Blue – an idea that I’ve always failed to place into any symbolic order before and found absurd within the setting of the game. There is other symbolism involved; the choice of color is a reference to radiation and to the radioactive “Jade” mineral that is the power source of the hardware of “Green China”, and while Red and Blue carry their colors in their respective names, for “Green China”, the color is only invoked in the faction’s color scheme and used informally as a name in design documents, the official name “Atomic Kingdom of China” hinting neither at DPP politics, nor the Pan-Green Coalition. There are also numerous references to 『Star Trek』 that are probably spun off from the space-travel theme of the faction and have no deeper meaning. But subtracting all these, I think there is indeed a parallel in the symbolic skeleton connecting these three factions to the ideologies involved in the cross-straits political trialectic.
между Вислой и Амуром 