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===Yang Qiu era and the Slow Death=== | ===Yang Qiu era and the Slow Death=== | ||
[[File:Yang Qiu.png|thumb|Yang Qiu was the oldest president of the NRF when he took office, he was 71 years old.]] | [[File:Yang Qiu.png|thumb|Yang Qiu was the oldest president of the NRF when he took office, he was 71 years old.]] | ||
Yang Qiu's candidacy seemed to be a bit of a blunder, neither charismatic or a rousing orator the campaign struggled to excite. The NRF's saving grace was that the opposition fielded equally boring and bland candidates, and there were six of them which utterly pulverized any hopes of a unified anti government vote. The ruling party's tactic experienced a shift from trying to gather more votes to depressing voting, the NRF could always mobilize its stalwarts and count on its captive base to secure a win and undecideds would stay at home if they saw zero chance of any opposition candidate having a chance. The system worked overtime to produce dozens of daily polls and rainbow colored charts showing the impressive array of presidential candidates and their small individual percentages compared to Yang Qiu. The tactic of painting Yan Qiu's win as a foregone conclusion worked as vaticinated as the NRF core voters dutifully went to the polls as usual and millions of undecided voters decided to stay in their homes, the final turnout was around 48%. The result was a mixed bag as Yang Qiu won the election but the percentage of the vote he got was the lowest the party had gotten in a presidential election since 1951; and since the electoral authorities were suspected of fudging the numbers it is very likely the real NRF vote was much, much lower, perhaps as low as forty-five percent. | |||
This unauspicious beginning to Yang Qiu's first term was only the first sign of the times to come for the party. Pressured by party stalwarts on the Politburo, Yang Qiu began to dial back on the 'montage of democracy', as the presence of opposition parties in the electoral system was called in internal discussions and documents. As the [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]] had been banned back in the presidency of [[Qiu Heng]], the government went after the moderate socialists of the All-Daxia Socialist Party and the moribund Liberal Party. In typical fashion for a man whose career was spent in the tax offices, Qiu ordered a series of stringent audits of the finances of opposition parties, freezing their bank accounts while the audits were conducted. The audits lasted well over two years and by then the opposition parties had been starved of all financial resources and many of its cadres were arrested on bogus charges of tax fraud. Still Yang Qiu did not yet take the ultimate step of banning them, resisting calls to officialy turn the country into a one party state for fear of his public standing crashing and of people openly protesting on the streets of the capital. | |||
On March 1982 the president's standing with the population did take a big hit after a massive 7.9 magnitude earthquake devastated the city of Kaiping, killing some seventy thousand people and injuring another eighty thousand. Emergency services in Kaiping collapsed under the strain of so many casualties and help from the central government was sluggish at best. Yang Qiu's words on national television that: 'Everything is under control, there are shortages of aid anywhere, we will efficiently take care of this small quake'. The president's words seemingly minimizing the scale of the tragedy and the gripping images coming from Kaiping of corpses buried under the rubble coupled with the shocking ineffectiveness of the government's response(Yang Qiu cycled through three different ministers of national emergencies during the crisis) was a big blow to the people's trust in the party. Althought Qiu tried to walk back his comments and declared a day of national mourning, the damage was done. Victim's associations would in time morph into groups campaigning for political change at the top, one of these was formed by a political unknown named [[Linge Chen]] who would unseat the party only ten years later. The [[1982 Kaiping earthquake]] was thus a watershed moment in [[Daxia]]n history, from then on the NRF would have to resort to outright electoral fraud and heavy handed repression to maintain its grip on power, and even this would prove to be not enough by the early 90's. The era of NRF rule after the earthquake is named by historians as '''the Slow Death''', a period of inertia and decay as the economy slowed down dramatically and social unrest at the party's misrule grew exponentially. | |||
[[File:1982 Kaiping earthquake.png|thumb|A scene of [[Kaiping]] in the aftermath of the 1982 earthquake.]] | |||
During [[Min Bib Doda]]'s last year in office his government had borrowed excessively from overseas lending institutions to finance big ticket projects and speed their completion in a rare display of short term thinking and fiscal irresponsibility by Doda; he desperately wanted to give his chosen successor a boost in the polls. To start paying off the principal and accumulated interests of these onerous loans, Yang Qiu was now forced to implement measures of austerity or 'Republican Austerity' as he liked to call it. He ordered massive cutbacks in provision of health and social services, slashed education and school budgets, froze salary raises across the board (not even to keep up with inflation). All major infrastructure projects were put on hold and he even started to cut down pensions, an incredibly costly political move as the elderly were assiduous NRF voters. By turning the debts incurred by Doda on his behalf into something every [[Daxia]]n had to suffer for, Qiu destroyed any goodwill he had left with the public. People on the street started calling him the 'Old Satrap' and people said that if he slept through cabinet meetings the country was being led by an old man asleep at the wheel. There were serious doubts about the wisdom of Qiu running for a second term due to his clear and rising unpopularity. Yang Qiu silenced these 'tapeworms in the party's belly' with the intelligence services which remained fully loyal, although some of the 'tapeworms', many important of them political operators, began to quietly distance themselves. The president was duly confirmed as the NRF presidential candidate for 1984 during a televised party conference, widely mocked for the grave demeanour of the party heads sitting next to the president, the worry evident in their expressions. | |||
Yang Qiu invariably won the election of 1984 but dropped fourteen percentage points from his first victory, down to sixty nine percent of the vote. Going by the rule that the party fraudulently doubled the number of votes received, it can be said with confidence that Qiu won no more than thirty six percent in truth. Strangely for Daxian presidential elections to that date, the president was dogged throught the campaign by the candidate of a small, recently formed political formation named the [[Party of Daxian Democrats]]. Its candidate was a total unknown, some accountant who looked as if he had been plucked from a catalogue of bureaucrats, but this [[Linge Chen]] was a strident and irascible orator who shamelessly mocked his elderly rival. At one point in the campaign [[Linge Chen]] sought out the president at a campaign stop in [[Minxia City]] and confronted him about the continued spilling of industrial waste on [[Lake Zhenzhu]], at one point pointing at Qiu with his finger and poking him in the chest. The president tried to play the elder statesman but looked clearly annoyed and rattled before the cameras. [[Linge Chen]] would later be arrested and charged with disrespecting the president and be prevented from continuing to campaign by a court order but nonetheless he made an impact; his small party would get almost twenty percent of the vote. In his book 'The Wave', [[Linge Chen]] revealed that important members of the NRF both from the Politburo and regional party leaderships met with him in secret and offered their resources to his project. Chen further claims that it was his ideas that attracted them but the truth may be less flattering, scared and sidelined members of the nomenklatura hedging their bets against a Yang Qiu loss. It is this quiet transfer of cadres from one party to another that may have been the deciding factor in the shocking surprise victory of [[Linge Chen]] and the [[Party of Daxian Democrats|PDD]] in 1986, snatching the [[Mirzak|capital]] from the government. The defeat in the largest city of the country was a great humiliation to the party and to the president personally. Many NRF insiders attribute the defeat to treason by important cadres who either switched sides and funneled NRF votes to [[Linge Chen]]'s party or simply enacted a campaign of 'limp wrists', that is they basically surrendered the election without a fight. Both options are viable as the NRF local structure in the city was deepy aggrieved by the imposition of a candidate who was not well known in [[Mirzak]] and who had been put forth over the heads of more competitive options. The [[Party of Daxian Democrats|PDD]] may also have offered to overlook and paper over cases of corruption by the NRF administrations of the city if they got to power. Yang Qiu responded to the rumors of backstabbing by having the party initiate proceedings to first sanction and then expel several important party bosses of the capital. This restored party discipline on the surface but Qiu's leadership had already been near fatally damaged by the ordeal and it would only continue to weaken in the last two years of his presidency. The final stretch of his second term were spent trying to reactivate an economy saddled with large debts and a worrying trend of capital flight due to the high costs imposed on businesses by government corruption and the growing insecurity in many regions due to a renewed insurgency by the emboldened [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]]. The [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]] once more began a campaign of attacking state security forces and kidnapping wealthy individuals to fund its activities, activities that the [[National Intelligence Bureau]] increasingly failed to stop thus losing the government the support of the economic elites. | |||
The disaster of the economy and the electorial fiasco of the capital turned Yang Qiu into a paper tiger inside the party. At a meeting of the Politburo where he tried to put forward the name of one of his trusted henchmen as the next presidential candidate for 1988, he was criticized for selfishness and disregarding the wellbeing of the party. Most of the Politburo instead aligned behind the growing reformist wing of the party and its dark horse candidate, [[Tao Zexian]], who was seen as the one hope of convincing the public to maintain the NRF in power (with minimal vote rigging). [[Tao Zexian]] was an economist by trade and his time in government had been in the intelligence agencies, he was seen as a young rising profile, sleeker and oriented to modernity. Having no hope of quelling the revolt without destroying the party, Yang Qiu stepped back and accepted [[Tao Zexian]] would be the candidate. The president spent the last months of his term out of the public eye, trying to devise ways to repair his public image to no avail. | |||
===Tao Zexian era and collapse=== | ===Tao Zexian era and collapse=== | ||
[[File:Tao Zexian2.jpg|thumb|[[Tao Zexian]], last president of the NRF]] | |||
The campaign of 1988 was the most hotly contested in [[Daxia]]n history. [[Linge Chen]] took leave from running the capital to compete once more for the highest office, his experience of running the largest city of the country giving him the credentials to do so. In contrast the younger [[Tao Zexian]] was seen by many as a neophyte controlled by the same old men from the NRF. [[Linge Chen]] mercilessly attacked him as a johnny come lately, a greenhorn and an empty suit with an emptier head. The NRF tried to paint Chen as a dangerous rabble rouser and demagogue, interested only in wrecking the system rather than making it work. The campaign was intense and the polls were not favorable to [[Tao Zexian]], most showed him trailing Chen by at least five percentage points. Formed confidantes have admitted in interviews that while at first the NRF candidate refused to resort to 'electoral trickery', as the date of the election came closer and his numbers continued to sag against his opponents he changed tack; only post electoral engineering could secure him the win. | |||
In what has been acknowledged as open fraud by most historians and analysts, the NRF won the 1988 election with 52% to the PDD's 48%; the tightest margin it had ever faced in its history. Immediately after the results were announced on live television, Chen called for massive demonstrations 'against the blatant electoral theft of the presidency' and declared himself the legitimate president. Crowds of Chen supporters marched on the electoral commission, the NRF headquarters and the presidential palace. With the regime under pressure on the streets Yang Qiu wanted to send in the tanks(there are rumors that he gave the order but it was refused), but [[Tao Zexian]] chose to instead play for time by pressuring the electoral commission to admit the myriad complaints about the process, but to slow roll their resolution. He did not want to start his presidency under the dark cloud of repression and preferred instead to try to come to an arrangement with the wily Chen. The details are derived only from word of mouth of a few politicians reportedly present, Zexian and Chen met on February 8th in the house of a local judge who knew both men. As told by Tao Zexian's former chief of staff in a book written while in exile, the deal offered by the elect president to his rival was that Chen would call off the demonstrations and promise not to prosecute Tao personally after he left office, in exchange Tao would only serve a single term as president. Chen countered that he would agree but that if Tao tried to renege on the one term condition at a later time then Chen would release tapes in his possession that had unspecified compromising conversations of Tao and other NRF leaders. | |||
===Persecution of remnants=== | ===Persecution of remnants=== | ||
===Rehabilitation=== | ===Rehabilitation=== | ||
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[[Category:Daxia]] | [[Category:Daxia]] | ||
[[Category:Political parties]] | |||
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