Chapter 2 (Prologue) The Hohhot Uprising and the Beginning of the Great Asian War
(Note: If I offend any Chinese readers with this update and the fact that these incidents were entirely caused by China, I apologize)
The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction and the balance of power between the worlds three great powers would succeed in keeping peace between them for over thirty years. The threat of nuclear annihilation kept the Soviets, Americans, and Chinese from seriously considering going to war during this period, despite the consistently high tensions between the three. While relations between the West and their rivals were never warm, things never were bad enough between them for a potential war to explode. The worst incident, the communist takeover of Cuba, was the closest the Soviets and the West came, but the collapse of the nascent communist regime following the successful Bay of Pigs invasion by a combination of American soldiers and trained Cuban exiles, while leading to a major political confrontation between them, ultimately resulted in the incident ending peacefully.
But while the Americans and Soviets were not hostile to the point of war, things were different on the Soviet-Chinese border. After the civil war came to its conclusion, China would evolve from an authoritarian republic to a far right wing dictatorship that many observers compared to Francisco Francos Spain. China never gave up its claims to the territory it lost to the Soviet Union, such as Mongolia and Tannu Tuva, both regions annexed by the Soviet Union during the Chinese Civil War when it became clear that the Chinese Communists were going to lose. With such a large region that the Chinese claimed as their own (essentially making most of the northernmost parts of China), tensions remained high for the entirety of the Cold War.
Things only worsened in 1961, the year that the Chinese officially wrote up a new constitution, a document that not only attempted to legitimize the Kuomintangs near fascist hold on China, but also changed what China officially recognized as its territory. China now claimed all territory claimed by Qing China in 1820, possibly the zenith of Chinese control before its decline relative to the West. The new territory claimed, while still including Tuva and Mongolia, planned to restore the Chinese northern border to that established by the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, and now included Outer Manchuria (Russian Primorye, which includes Vladivostok), and an expansion of Xinjiang to Lake Balkhash. With such a large area disputed between the Soviets and the Chinese, the only thing that eventually kept conflict from breaking out and a full scale war erupting was the concept of MAD. However, on April 29, 1983, this would change, and the world would be changed forever.
The spark was what became known as the Hohhot Uprising. For years, the ethnic Mongols were divided between the Soviet republic of Mongolia and the mixed-ethnicity provinces of northern and northeastern China. While the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship and was often brutal, the Mongols were treated the same way as most other ethnicities in it. In far right-wing China, the Mongols were often discriminated against, to the point that many Mongols in China believed that life in the Soviet Union would be preferable to life in China. However, immigration from China was difficult due to the fact that most of the border was dominated by the inhospitable Gobi desert, and the fact that the Soviet-Chinese border was covered in military bases, checkpoints, and watchtowers. Therefore, a constant, low-level insurgency continued throughout northern China. However, while said insurgency was annoying, it was rarely severe enough to force the central Chinese government to act.
This all changed on April 29, 1983. On this day, riots broke out across the city of Hohhot, the city with the largest Mongol community in China. While the specific reason for the start of the riots may never be known (one of the most commonly believed stories involve a Chinese soldier murdering an ethnic Mongol prostitute when she demanded she be paid for her services, but this was never confirmed by independent sources), the protests, largely spontaneous, quickly devolved into bloody riots when the local military forces attempted to crush the protests by force. This would backfire horribly when the various Mongol rebel groups, led by the local communists due to their ties to and support from the Soviet Union, agreed that this was the time to launch their attempt to liberate the Mongols from Chinese rule.
The resulting Hohhot Uprising would last a month, involve tens of thousands of both rebels and Chinese soldiers, and lead to the effective annihilation of central Hohhot, destroyed when the Chinese Air Force destroyed much of the city with mass airstrikes, killing thousands. Stories told by survivors of the uprising who managed to flee to the Soviet Union would lead many to draw comparisons to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. While the exact death toll will never be known, contemporary estimates would place the number of casualties anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000, mostly of ethnic Mongol civilians in China.
But while the uprising itself was a disaster, it would pale in comparison to what would occur after. A Chinese investigation into the uprising was never able to place the exact reason for the initial riots, but they quickly came to the conclusion that the riots turned into a full-scale uprising because of the intervention of rebels who were quite clearly Soviet backed. This was further confirmed by the fact that most of the armed rebels wielded Soviet weapons, or at least Soviet copies of Chinese weaponry. This revelation would lead to a scandal that would severely heighten tensions between the two. Almost immediately, the Chinese government began a major propaganda campaign aimed against the Mongols and the Soviets, even as the Soviet Union denied Chinese claims that they were responsible. All soldiers on both sides of the border were put on high alert, but most people still held out hope that the incident would not lead to war. Sadly, their hopes would be dashed.
Almost immediately, border clashes between Chinese and Soviet soldiers began, mostly in the region north of Hohhot near the Chinese border town of Erenhot. Most of the initial, pre-war bloodshed was caused by a low-ranking Chinese officer who had a personal reason for hating the Soviets most of his family lived in Hohhot, and his wife and son were killed during the uprising. His governments propaganda campaign worked too well, and he blamed their deaths on the Soviets. He would wind up ignoring his superiors demands that he not launch any attacks on Soviet positions, and ordered a series of raids on Soviet positions on the Soviet side of the border. While he was discovered quickly and was arrested (his ultimate fate is unknown), the damage was done.
The Soviet government announced that China had launched a direct attack on the Soviet Union, and took advantage of the situation by demanding that the Chinese stand down their troops on the border and that China cease their claims that the Soviet Union supported the rebels in Hohhot. The Chinese response was simple give us back all the land we claim, and well do what you ask. As the situation continued to spiral downward, one last effort was made the West, who were fearful that this situation could lead to nuclear war, set up a series of international conferences to attempt to end the crisis diplomatically. The London Conferences occurred throughout July and early August of 1983, but would ultimately lead nowhere. Border clashes continued to spiral out of control, with one such clash leading to an actual battle on the Amur River near the town of Heihe.
The Battle of Heihe, although occurring before the official beginning of the war, is commonly thought of as the tipping point, after which point war became inevitable. While many in the Chinese military were against launching an invasion of the Soviet Union, the Chinese dictator would become adamant after Heihe. With the battle there leading to over a thousand people dying, he became convinced that this was merely a prelude to a Soviet invasion of China, and thus demanded that China strike first. His rational over the militarys fear of nuclear attack was that all three major nuclear powers, while having the ability to destroy each other with nuclear weapons, had a strictly second-use policy, in which they would not use nuclear weapons unless their enemy used nukes first. He believed that as long as the Chinese did not use nuclear weapons on the Soviets, the Soviets would not use nuclear weapons on China. While Chinese ambassadors kept up a front of favoring peace throughout the Second London Conferences (lasting from August 19 to September 7), in China, the Chinese military began to mass for the long-awaited invasion, with the goal being nothing more than the re-conquest of all Chinese territory stolen by the Russians. On September 7, Chinese ambassadors walked out of the London Conferences, and the following day, Chinese soldiers marched into Mongolia and over the Amur River.
The Great Asian War had begun.
. Now let's see how you pull off the unification of Asia 
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