The Democracy

[Izhitsa]

As this nation has only recently emerged from extreme isolation, this factbook is still a bit under construction. Please excuse any omissions or errors as our fact-finders attempt to learn more about this nation.

The Democracy (民国)

Motto:- For the People, By the People
National Anthem:- Name of Anthem

BACKGROUND

The area now ruled by The Democracy was once a patchwork of small chiefdoms and lordships surrounding the Changjiang River (长江). As the Ardian Empire began its expansion into the area, it faced stiff resistance from the bordering lords, until one, Guo Weitao (郭偉涛), sensing an opportunity, chose to form an alliance with the Ardians. He led the invaders up the Changjiang and, as their puppet, united the area under his rule. He became the first ruler of the Feng Kingdom (奉国), changing his regnal name to Feng Shiwang (奉始王, lit. “first king of the Feng”), and founding a dynasty that would last until the end of the Ardian Empire.
The Feng Kingdom was a staunchly loyal vassal of the Ardian Empire, and as a result, enjoyed a great degree of autonomy. Due to its fertile soil, it was also a popular target for colonization; at its peak, Ardians made up over 30% of the Kingdom’s population.
It was this loyalty to the Empire that sowed the seeds of the Kingdom’s downfall. During the Great War, Feng people fought side-by-side with Ardians on all fronts. The war gradually lost its popularity as more and more Feng soldiers died horrible deaths far from home. Many returning injured soldiers had also absorbed the nationalist ideas of the people they were fighting against, and by 1939 the Feng Kingdom was facing rebellions of its own.
In an attempt to save his throne, the last King of the Feng, Guo Guilong (郭贵龙), declared independence from Ardia in 1941 and crowned himself emperor of the Feng, changing his regnal name from Feng Yongxi (奉雍熙) to Feng Shihuang (奉始皇, lit. “first emperor of the Feng). However, this did not satisfy the rebels, who in 1946 shot and killed him by accident during an assault on the Imperial Palace.
The Feng Civil War (1939-1954) is typically divided into two stages. In the first stage (pre-1946), the various factions were all united against Feng Shihuang, though they disagreed on exactly what they planned to do with him after the war was over. In the second stage (post-1946), in the absence of the emperor, these factions fought with each other for control of the country.
The Civic Movement (公民运动, gōngmín yùndòng), the eventual victors, were the only one of these rebel factions that professed any sort of democratic rule. The others were largely composed of pretenders to the Feng throne and extreme nationalist movements. This is one of the things that led to its eventual success; unlike its rivals, it promised both change and peace.
The current political system in The Democracy has been established through a long period of what is called Democratization (民主化, Mínzhǔhuà). For citizens of The Democracy, Democratization is a slow, ongoing process of converting the nation into a country not bound by ethnic distinctions or loyalties to a monarch, but rather by loyalty to the cause of Democracy. After a rebuilding period, the Civic Movement held its first votes in 1969, in which the country’s name, demonym, and system of government were fully formalized.
After 1954, the Civic Movement fully shut down the Feng borders, fearing that other countries would attempt to shut down their movement before it had had a chance. In the intervening years, only limited information about the outside world has reached The Democracy, primarily in the form of important inventions. As a result, the typical citizen has a cell phone and access to the internet, but, for example, is completely ignorant of the orgy of genocide that characterized 20th- and 21st-century Mundus. These restrictions were only recently lifted by vote, and as a result the population is more vulnerable to misinformation than ever.

Government Type:- Liquid Democracy
Population:-:- 94 million people
Capital City:- While there is no official capital, the former Feng capital, Haizhou (海州), remains the largest and most important city with a population of over 8 million residents.
Demonym:- The official demonym is Citizen (公民, gōngmín); however, this is obviously awkward to use in most situations. The most common demonym in the Feng era was simply Feng (奉, Fèng) and it remains in unofficial use today.

ECONOMY

Currency:- Yuán (symbol: 元/¥)
GDP per Capita:-
Unemployment Rate:-
Main Industries:-

PEOPLE

Ethnicity:-
Feng people (奉人, Fèngrén): 86%
Ardians (迪人, Dírén): 12%
Others: 2%
Languages:-
While Feng (奉语, Fèngyǔ) has always been the most common language for everyday speech, Latin (迪语, Díyǔ) had special status throughout the Ardian period. However, since the establishment of The Democracy, Latin has fallen out of favor with the Feng public, and is seen as a backwards symbol of oppression. As The Democracy has begun opening up to the rest of the world, English (英语, Yīngyǔ) has gained popularity as a symbol of cosmopolitanism and modernity.

Religion:-
Due to Ardian influence, the popular organized religion in The Democracy is Christianity, but it is heavily mixed with folk traditions of ancestor worship and animism. While the church in The Democracy doesn’t condemn these practices, it doesn’t promote them, either.
Average Life Expectancy:-

GOVERNMENT

The Democracy lacks a head of state, head of government, or parliament. Instead, every adult citizen has the right to propose and vote on any law or treaty. Citizens also have the option to delegate their votes to another citizen who then has the ability to vote on their behalf. This citizen, called a proxy voter, may also choose to delegate their vote and any votes that have been delegated to them to another citizen. Votes on any issue can be recalled at any time, and voters can choose to delegate their votes to different people depending on the type of issue at hand.
This is facilitated using the National Legislation System (民国立法系统, Mínguó Lìfǎ Xìtǒng), a computer network that can be accessed on the web, via a mobile app, or even at an in-person voting center. In the early days of The Democracy’s history, this was handled entirely via in-person voting centers and an extensive bureaucracy, and as a result, the vast majority of votes were cast via proxy voters. However, as internet access has spread through the population, the proportion of proxy votes on new laws has decreased considerably.
A bill is passed into law two weeks after at least 30% of eligible votes have been cast on the issue and a majority of those votes are yea votes. If the bill no longer meets these conditions before the end of the two-week time period, the timer resets.
There are two ways a law can be repealed. The first way is through a bill written to specifically repeal the old law. The second, less straightforward way is for the law to no longer meet the requirements to be considered a law. Citizens can withdraw their votes from bills at any time. This also means that as citizens die and their votes are removed from the system, laws can be accidentally repealed if there aren’t enough yea votes remaining on the law. Because of this, there are a number of proxy voter services that allow citizens to automatically cast yea votes on laws that make up important parts of The Democracy’s government.
The first time this happened, laws that lost voter support were repealed instantly, and, as a result, proxy voting became technically illegal for two weeks. Because of this, laws that lose voter support must lose their support for two consecutive weeks before they are fully repealed.
Many people argue that the lack of a formal head of state and the inherent instability of diplomacy by vote is a disadvantage on the world stage, but so far, resistance to the idea of an elected head of state is extremely strong. As a result, other countries wishing to draw up a treaty with The Democracy need to establish a connection with a citizen willing to propose the treaty as a new law, and then somehow convince the nation to vote for it.

[Izhitsa]

Religion in the Democracy

The Democracy, like the Feng Kingdom before it, is a heavily Catholic nation, and has been since the Christianization of Ardia. However, what the Feng call Catholicism (or, 天主教) is extremely idiosyncratic, to the point that many Christians outside The Democracy regard it as another religion altogether.

This is the result of extremely loose oversight from outside Catholic authorities. The mission in the Feng Kingdom was organized almost entirely by native Feng, and had to incorporate many native Feng beliefs and practices in order to convert significant numbers of people. For nearly 100 years after the founding of the Diocese of Haizhou, this practice went unnoticed by higher church authorities; however, an audit of the mission by Ecclesiastical State authorities led to a decades-long conflict now known as the Feng Rites Controversy.
At the core of the Feng Rites Controversy was a dispute over whether Feng Catholics should be allowed to continue performing rites for their ancestors after burial. Rites under scrutiny included the installation of spirit tablets, the offering of incense and food, and prayer before ancestral altars.
The difficulty of reliable communication with the Feng Kingdom and the wildly differing opinions of papal envoys significantly prolonged the controversy, which involved the intervention of four popes and three Feng Kings. The final decision of the controversy was to apply the same standard to ancestor worship as to iconodulism, allowing moderate forms of adoration but banning more extreme forms, such as offering sacrifices of food and money.
Native Feng authorities were tasked with enforcing these rules, but often lacked the power or the will. At the same time, the unusual education of native Feng missionaries led to the unwitting recognition of many apocryphal works as fully canonical and the adulation of . By the time these divergences were discovered, it was far too late to correct course. In the end, the Pope formally excommunicated all followers of the Feng Church and urged true believers to join the Ardian Church instead. However, this had little effect on believers in the Feng Kingdom, who refused to believe that the missives announcing the Pope’s decision could be true. To this day, the Feng Catholic Church considers itself to be in communion with the Catholic Church at large despite all evidence to the contrary.

Since the Christianization of Ardia, the Feng Kingdom has also had an Ardian Church. The Feng-Ardian Catholic Church, being much more closely related to the church in Ardia proper, is still in full communion with the Catholic Church at large. This church, having only reinstated communication with the worldwide Catholic Church very recently, retains elements of the pre-Great War Catholic Church, particularly the use of Liturgical Latin rather than vernacular languages.

Canon

Feng Catholics recognize a far more extensive and open canon than other Christians. Not only do they recognize texts written after Revelation as part of their canon, but they also believe that canonical texts continue to be written. The most recently-written book to be recognized as Secondary Canon is The Epistle of Fugui the Wise, first promulgated in 1738.
There are three levels of canon in Feng Catholicism:

• Proper Canon (正典) - The canonical books recognized by mainstream Catholicism.
• Secondary Canon (次典) - Books universally recognized by Feng Catholics, but not by mainstream Catholicism. The difference between Proper and Secondary Canon is not seen as important by most Feng Catholics except when it is useful in debate.
• Disputed Canon (争典) - Books recognized by many Feng Catholics, but not all. Some works from outside the Feng Catholic tradition altogether, such as the Quran and the Book of Mormon, are sometimes considered in this category, especially where they agree with more canonical texts.

Leadership

Though Feng Catholics recognize the current Catholic Pope as the leader of their church, their effective leader is the Archbishop of Haizhou, whose opinions are believed to pertain particularly to the Feng people. The current Archbishop is Sikong Shan (司空山), who took the religious name Paul (保羅) when he was inaugurated in 2013.

Rites

Feng Catholics continue to practice the same rites their ancestors practiced long before Christianization. This includes paying obeisance with incense and leaving sacrifices in the form of burned paper goods or food. These rites are practiced primarily on holidays and special occasions, but they are also observed when a Feng Catholic wants their ancestor to plead for blessings in Heaven on their behalf. Feng Catholics believe that good, heart-felt sacrifices are necessary to move Heaven in their favor because they demonstrate devotion to God and family.
The scriptural justification for this is what Feng Christians recognize as the fourth of the Ten Commandments, the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother.” Feng Catholics regard this commandment as so important that they believe that the dead continue to pay obeisance to their ancestors in the afterlife. This interpretation, naturally, is rejected by the mainstream Catholic Church.
Special versions of these rites are practiced on holidays. One example is the Hungry Ghost Festival, held the day after All Saints’ Day, which offers sacrifices to relieve the pain of souls who have died and gone to Hell without descendents. Originally a somber pagan ritual for appeasing angry spirits, the Hungry Ghost Festival has become a raucous occasion for celebrating life in juxtaposition with death. Another example is Qingming, in which Feng Catholics clean the tombs of their ancestors. This is regarded as a religious duty for those who have ancestors with tombs or graves. Volunteers, particularly those who otherwise have no ancestors to serve, are also enlisted to clean the tombs and graves of those who lack descendants to perform the task.

Names of God

Feng Catholics refer to God in several different ways. The official term set out during the Rites Controversy was Tiānzhǔ (天主), meaning “Lord of Heaven”. This name remains the most common today. However, other common terms include Tiānfù (天父, “Heavenly Father”), Shàngdì (上帝, “Supreme Emperor”), and Tiān (天, “Heaven”). This last term is the most controversial, as it is a holdback from the old Feng traditional religion, which worshipped the realm of Heaven itself as a deity. This is also associated with Feng nationalist religion, which sought to incorporate more native ideas into religion. This makes the term distasteful to Ardians and other groups that suffered violence during Feng Civil War.

Other religions in The Democracy

Besides traditional rites, non-Catholic traditions have failed to make a deep impact on religion in The Democracy. The country has Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists, but these populations are small and almost all descended from immigrants.
Other Christian traditions, including several forms of Protestantism and the Latter-day Saint movement, managed to establish small communities in the years leading up to the Great War. However, the Great War and subsequent Civil War ended most foreign mission activities as most missionaries were sent home or killed. As a result, many of these fledgling religious communities were re-absorbed into Feng Catholicism. However, some remain separate from Feng Catholicism to this day, particularly those that reject the practice of traditional rites.