The Celestial Kingdom/The Han

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Definition

When the economic transformation of Communist China under Deng Xiaopeng reached its peak in the early 21st century, Confucian culture had been turned on its head: the merchant, historically a low person in Chinese culture, was the new aristocrat under the state capitalistic economy, while the farmer, historically the aristocrat of Confucian society, was a peasant.

Eventually an agrarian backlash resulted in the overthrow of the "Communist" government of the People's Republic, who retreated to the industrialized coastal regions and formed the Chinese Coastal Republic, while the freed farming class reinstituted the ancient government of The Celestial Kingdom and became the primary mover of one of the great phyles of the world of The Diamond Age, known as The Han.

In the novel, we see Judge Fang, originally a jurist of the Coastal Republic, come to a crisis of concience between the corruption of his government and his Confucian values, presented to him by the inscrutable Dr. X in the form of a quarter million squealing abandoned Chinese baby girls. Fang quits his job and citizenship and emigrates to the Celestial Kingdom, where he can oversee the project of raising these girls with the help of a Confucian form of A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer.

The Confucian primer is a device suborned by its engineer, John Percival Hackworth, that results in them forming the Mouse Army to seek out their natural sovereign, Princess Nell during the last tumultuous days of the Coastal Republic's disembowelment at the hands of the Fists of Righteous Harmony.