National Reconstruction Front (Daxia)

National Reconstruction Front 我们这件事
General Secretary	Trang Shesh
Headquarters	Mirzak, Daxia
Newspaper	National Voice
Youth wing	Nationalist Wave Association
Membership (2027)	20,143
Ideology	Big tent Pragmatism Dirigisme Revolutionary Nationalism
Colors	Light Green, White
Assembly of the People	13 / 500
State Assembly (Daguo)	7 / 40
State Assembly (Xing)	4 / 40
State Assembly (Sanyu)	2 / 40
State Assembly (Pingu)	8 / 40
Party flag

The National Reconstruction Front is a centre-right big tent and founding political party of the Democratic Republic of Daxia. The NRF currently holds 13 out of 500 (2.6%) seats in the Assembly of the People and has legislative presence in four provinces but no governorships. Founded in 1951 by Qiu Heng by agglutinating several pro-government associations , war veterans's clubs and emerging labor organizations; the NRF maintained absolute and uninterrupted state power from 1951 to 1992 and presided over a dominant party system with no corresponding checks and balances to its authority. This system was maintained by a combination of corporatism, coercion and repression. Having being founded and led by army officers from its inception, the NRF was notably militarist, intervening in the Rusani Civil War on the side of the NCDP with the 'Little Incursion' in 1962 and helping the government of Canpei crush the democratic protests known as the Revolution of Dignity in 1984.

Established originally as a civi movement called the National Daxian Rally to support Dai Hanjian's 'Glorious Revolt' that toppled monarchical rule, it and later the rebranded NRF provided him and the military rulers after him with a wafer-thin veneer of democratic legitimacy that was renovated by elections that were never free nor fair and often without any candidates to oppose the NRF. Upon its 1992 defeat in national elections the party rapidly lost power and positions in the government bureaucracy, it was subjected to various corruption investigations (former president Tao Zexian was imprisoned for 3 years) and was eventually banned by the electoral board from 1993 to 1999. The party was greenlighted to participate in the elections of the year 2000 where it got around 2 percent of the votes cast and regained small representation in local assemblies. Ostensibly independent, the NRF has reinvented itself from being a party of power into what is now considered by political analysts to be an inconditional, submissive ally and political satellite organization of the Party of Daxian Democrats.

During its almost five decades in power the party went from favoring center-left, statist economic policies to preferring a more mixed model with some market oriented reforms that included privatization of certain state industries and abandoning import substitution programs. This ideological evolution however did not touch the economic interests of the Army which continued to have an outsized political and economic influence until the end of the regime. The NRF created many of Daxia's modern institutions such as the independent National Bank in charge of fiscal policy, a well funded public healthcare system and the bloated security organs. The current General Secretary of the party is Trang Shesh.

History

Foundation and Qiu Heng era

One of the few photos of Qiu Heng during his last term of office

Qiu Heng's rise to the leadership of the country saw for the first time the ascendance of politics over purely military leadership; Qiu Heng saw the perpetuation of the military junta system as inherently unstable, absent an electoral mandate and the legitimacy it could bring, any ambitious general in charge of a military zone could feel themselves justified in attempting to take power the same way as the junta did in the first place. Since Qiu distrusted the established but outlawed old political parties and their cadres, he decided instead on building a new party from the ground up without 'any of the old chaff'. As the base of his new party of state he chose a pro-military civic association called the National Daxian Rally-NDR that had existed since 1945 but had never reached much relevance. The NDR had been started at the behest of military intelligence and was originally led by people close to it. Qiu directed the Ministry of Social Services and the Ministry of Finance to direct significant financial resources to the NDR to support its growth into a real national party that could hold on to power.

The junta leader himself joined the NDR in the spring of 1951 and was elected its General Secretary 'by acclamation' of the party delegates during the founding congress. This was followed by a massive surge in party membership as government employees joined en masse(to curry favor, preserve their jobs or genuine agreement with its programme and ideals), trade unions and government contractors enjoined their affiliates and employees to do the same. In this early stage the biggest labor union of the country, the then All-Daxian Workers Central Union negotiated generous terms on collective bargaining and perks for its members in exchange for its unrestricted support for the new political machinery. In accordance with the Basic Law passed earlier on the year, Qiu Heng announced the first national elections for President and a new National Assembly would take place concurrently in late 1951, he also announced his candidacy at the head of the now renamed National Reconstruction Front-NRF. Qiu Heng correctly deduced that the vast masses of the Daxian people were accustomed to strongman rule and yearned for stability, and so he presented himself to the public as the one leader who could be a guarantor of stability, social peace and economic growth without disruptions. Notwhitstanding that none of the other parties had ever held political power, they were decried as 'dangers to Daxia' that would collapse the country with their radicalism and hatred of traditional values. The NRF freely used government resources in the campaign, blatantly busing its supporters in military vehicles. The election was a comprehensive stomp where Qiu Heng and his party won 73% of the vote.

During this formative period the party embraced nationalism(it did not shy away from traditional Daxian chauvinism), center-left dirigist economic policies and supported the formation of social welfare programs. The latter two aspects helped it take the wind out of the sails of the CPD's support, who the NRF saw as its most dangerous opponent. Its dirigist and strong handed economic policies served well to steer the slowing Daxian economy back to growth and deal with the entrenched plutocratic interests that had become a holdover from the Qian system of patronage. Henceforth the economic powers would be subordinated to the political authority of the center and those that resisted this process would be pushed aside, their assets taken away and cannibalized by other actors. One aspect that is very criticized of Qiu Heng's economic handling is his decision not to decisively curtail the involvement of the military on economic activity. He allowed the army and figures linked to it to handle a number of lucrative companies, one such being the construction behemoth of the North Crona Production and Construction Corporation, much corruption was derived from these activities and would grow to become an issue that would cost the party much support.

Internally the party under Qiu Heng did not show many signs of institutional maturation, its internal party laws and processes were an afterthought, there were no regular party congresses or meetings to discuss policy or ideological subjects. Qiu Heng seemed to regard it as merely an electoral tool and he was not interested in it being anything more, he ran the government by himself with input from a closed clique. This attitude began to change during his third term of office when his health began to fail him, the issue of succession began to be a topic of special consideration and the party would be needed to make the an eventual transition a smooth one. The party finally got a working structure below the General Secretary, with a Politburo created and stacked with the president's loyalists from the bureaucracy and former military men; regional committees began to meet regularly and pick up the sentiments and opinions of the membership and transmit them to the center and the president began to meet with the Politburo on a monthly basis. The president's preferrence on possible successors is not recorded, his former minister of defense Yuga Khan wrote in his memoirs that the president mentioned wanting a civilian to succeed him during casual conversation but that no names were said. What was known was that he did not have a high opinion of his eventual successor, general Chi Long Qua, the few times he mentioned him was to deride him as 'General Pencil Pusher'; clearly he thought the man unworthy of following on his footsteps. Unexpectedly Chi Long Qua proved to be a capable operator of his own who by the time of the president's illness had begun putting many of his allies in positions inside the party's nomenklatura and was building bridges to the economic and military elites to convince them to join his presidential project. Qiu Heng's untimely illness and death prevented him from imposing his own candidate and Chi Long Qua was triumphantly successful in his takeover of the party only a few months later.

Chi Long Qua era

Chi Long Qua in 1970 during his second term.

Chi Long Qua was elected as president in late 1964 after a campaign where his most prominent slogan was 'Continuity with a human touch', an empty phrase by the reckoning of most political scientists. The new president did not deviate much from his predecessors economic policies of growth based on import substitution but he did start dialing down the overwhelming presence of the state in the economy. He began the process of divesting the state from several sectors that had become unprofitable due to the corruption of state companies; he sold many of these state owned entities to government insiders and figures linked to the regime. This is the start of the phenomenon dubbed the 'musical chairs of wealth', the gist of it being that each new president disempowers and persecutes the economic elite that grew under their predecessor and grants their economic fiefs to figures closer to him; in effect creating a new economic elite that profits enormously during his term of office.

This act to assert presidential power became an important part of the NRF's internal political culture, almost a ritualistic form of imbuing the new president with supreme authority and at the same time freeing him from any ties and promises made by the former president; by reshaping the constellation of the stars around the center of power in his own image, the president underwent apotheosis and could never again be challenged. The labor section was also subject of reshufflings, with the forced retirement of Gong Zhen, the president of the All-Daxian Workers Central Union and a Qiu Heng crony who had been grumbling in private that the union's workers were due for a wide reaching renegotiation. When his comments were leaked to the president, he put in place an operation managed from the Ministry of Labor to give Zhen's internal rivals a shot in the arm; Gong Zhen was scandolously trounced in the internal election when he tried to reelect himself. Chi Long Qua moved quickly to subdue and bring in line all of the pillars of support that underpinned Qiu Heng's power, a playbook that all NRF presidents after him would follow to the letter.

Chi Long Qua's reelection to a second term saw a minor hiccup when despite all of the NRF's trickery and electoral thuggery it saw its support slip by five percentage points, a drop in support that might be explained by a particularly silver tongued Liberal party candidate who positioned himself to the right of the NRF and attacked it for its 'socialist' positions, siphoning some middle class votes with his tactic. In any event he was crushed at the polls and later disappeared without a trace but the party took it as a warning; they were not differentiated enough in their economic policies from their much maligned foes and the public could tell. Chi Long Qua's second term saw a number of new flagship policies come to the forefront, one of the most important was his 'March Inland' campaign to direct growth away from the saturated and overpopulated coastal regions towards the interior; he distributed a limited amount of state lands to the urban poor to encourage them to settle in rural localities. The program was mildly successful, an estimated 30 million people moved out of the coastal cities by 1972 and the land distribution scheme continued under various names until the fall of the NRF.

Foreign policy-wise Chi Long Qua favored a muscular foreign policy and was not very open to compromise on Daxian objectives. He lent significant political and material support to Canpei's government of national emergency on the stated condition that it follow Daxian leadership of the region. When a top Canpei official suggested an arrangement dependent on 'shared values' Chi Long Qua threatened an invasion; in the president's eyes the deal was simple: you receive our generosity and do as we say, there is no wiggle room. Relations with Rusana continued in the same track as before, Qua exerted a heavy handed pressure on its internal affairs with the connivance of minority groups and bribed tribal chiefs and supported by his military presence. He continually pushed for more rights to be enshrined for ethnic Daxians and for the implementation of a quota system for political representation and cabinet positions. The implementation of his proposed quota system was one of the last achievements in the realm of foreign policy.

List of General Secretaries

No.	General Secretary	Portrait	Took office	Left office
1	Qiu Heng (1902-1964)		1951	1964
2	Chi Long Qua (1905-1972)		1964	1972
3	Min Bib Doda (1913-1985)		1972	1980
4	Yang Qiu (1922-1999)		1980	1988
5	Tao Zexian (Born 1945)		1988	1992

Electoral History

Presidential elections(1951-1988)

Election	Party candidate	Popular vote	%	Result
President elected by popular vote
1951	Qiu Heng	210,653,846	73%	Elected Y
1956		262,595,890	91%	Elected Y
1960		274,138,566	95%	Elected Y
1964	Chi Long Qua	271,252,897	94%	Elected Y
1968		252,366,896	89%	Elected Y
1972	Min Bib Doda	335,483,645	93%	Elected Y
1976		358,654,823	97%	Elected Y
1980	Yang Qiu	295,365,655	83%	Elected Y
1984		225,651,211	69%	Elected Y
1988	Tao Zexian	278,356,983	52%	Elected Y